Friday Poetry Challenge: Dog Bites Doohickey

In my previous incarnation as a journalist, I was known for creating inventive and effective headlines, and I like to display a lovely blown-glass trophy declaring that I produced the Best Newspaper Headline submitted to the Press Club of Toledo's newspaper contest in 1996. However, in a long career of headline-writing that started in the eighth grade, I never found a good reason to write anything quite like this:

What, pray tell, is a "muffin-crystal-thingie assault"? It's exactly what it sounds like, as you will see if you click here. Vandals "assaulted" a Native American effigy mound by burying thingies--"small muffinlike resin objects"--in order to "realign the energy" of the mound. Orgonites is what they're called, but put "orgonites" in a headline and your readership will expect something about aliens, origami, or orgies.

The originators of the orgonites have irked the curators of the effigy mound, who will now have to devote all kinds of time and energy to finding and digging up perhaps as many as 100 muffin-crystal-thingies. When you're trying to cope with an outbreak of orgonites, who ya gonna call? 

Muffin-Crystal-Thingie Busters! 

Raiders of the Lost Muffin-Crystal-Thingies!

Moby Muffin-Crystal-Thingie!

What if every headline writer followed the example of the Columbus Dispatch? Here's what today's news would look like in Thingie-ese:

Doohickeys Still Down following Sandy's Something-or-Other

What's-His-Face Appeals to Voters to--Like, Whatever

Weird-Hair Guy Walloped by Falling Whatchamacallit

Bars-and-Numbers Thingie Offers Hope for Seekers of Earning-A-Living Opportunities

This is fun! You should try some: submit your best thingies, doo-dads, widgets, and whatchamacallits to the clicky-commenty-thingie below.