EVERY now and then I get the chance to write a head­line or label and have some fun. In this case, Yoda’s chance of appear­ing in a Dor­i­tos com­mer­cial sent me to a page of Yoda quotes as I wanted to get some­thing Star Wars in the paper. I thought it would be pretty easy but it wasn’t; noth­ing I could see on the page gave me a tip until I thought, “Hey, Dor­i­tos starts with ‘d’. Let me give it a go…”

I’ve always been a bit iffy about puns, espe­cially after my “pizza the action” dis­aster. Some­times I come up […]

AND so it ends. Thursday night was my final time in the Glend­ale office on Brand Boulevard before our move to the LA Times build­ing in down­town LA. Above is my desk, freshly cleared of crap with my PC ready to be moved to our new office, wherever that is. The Mac is either going back to Apple or being donated to someone else in the com­pany and I’ll have a shiny new 27″ model wait­ing for me when I start down­town on Tues­day.

It’s kind of depress­ing when your entire eight years at a job fit into one box. After going […]

DUDLEY STEPHENS, one of my col­leagues from my days at Celtic News­pa­pers, died today. He was 76. I’m not ashamed to say I had a tear in my eye when I heard the news.

© Media Wales.

Dud, as he was uni­ver­sally known, was a journ­al­ist of the old school. He’d worked on Fleet Street, which raised him to near-god status in my eyes, and I think he was even Par­lia­ment­ary cor­res­pond­ent for one of the big Lon­don papers. When I met him in 1996 he was editor of the Pontyp­ridd Observer, a job I believe he took as he was bored […]

YOU win some, you lose some. I’ve never been that good at pun head­lines but this column was cry­ing out for a touch of LOLcat. It was nixed on the grounds that the aver­age news­pa­per reader wouldn’t get it because the aver­age news­pa­per reader is about 98, or some­thing. One bright note: it’s going to be used when the column goes online as the website’s demo­graphic is younger.

The back­ground: the Pas­adena Sun ran a story claim­ing the cheese­bur­ger was inven­ted in the city because appar­ently Amer­ic­ans care about that sort of thing. Thanks to the magic of the inter­webs, the story […]

Pic by @jamiecraven. In case you’re won­der­ing, the designer’s put “herey herey” as it con­tains an ascender (the h) and a des­cender (the y) and so shows the lead­ing, the gaps between the lines of type. Back in my QuarkX­press days I used “dedy dedy”. Oh, memor­ies…

OOPS. Looks like there’s one Guard­ian sub or designer who’ll be called in for a meet­ing. As a pro­duc­tion journ­al­ist I’ve got every sym­pathy with him/her; errors like this are easy to make, espe­cially when you’re rushed. I’ve been respons­ible for send­ing a page with “Stick a cap­tion in here please” under a sports […]