Sounds like a pure Fahrenheit to Celsius problem, 100 being the boiling point in C.

Wow, I thought the AnonTrolls had reached a low before… actually arguing that such an article put out by a supposedly reputable news agency, that allegedly employs standard fact checkers and editors, let alone writers who can actually write beyond a 6th grade level, might somehow be a metaphor and fence with any other rational person who read this story… just wow. It’s even more lulzy than the original AP gaffe.

It’s certainly related to Mike’s work, in that a lot of “press coverage” is about as factual and well-researched as the opinion of Pastor Blowhard and calls into question the entire “factual” basis of these “news items.”

It’s also about a news organization putting out a story through multiple layers of editorial handling and review that would get you an D or F on an 8th grade writing assignment. That this type of mistake is made my “professional reporters” is exactly the type of thing Mike points out and documents in the articles he chooses to deal with.

Is that helpful, Anonymous Trolls? I hope so. Because you finally crossed the line from crabby provocateurs into ludicrious self-mockery. Or maybe that was your plan?

The most probable explanation is that AP, in its relentless pursuit of profits, has jobbed some work out to India, or maybe somewhere else. In newspaper practice, writing headlines is a separate business from writing articles, along with “unburying the lede,” etc. If you look at the way the thing is put together, it looks as though one of the minor New York papers, either the New York Post or the New York Daily News, sent a photographer out to the neighborhoods to take pictures of kids playing in front of fire hydrants. It’s an annual ritual at the end of July, the same as photographing Christmas decorations. They put those pictures on file, on the computer system, waiting for a story to hang them on. And when the weather advisory from the Weather Bureau came in, someone hastily grabbed that, and the pictures, and said, in effect, “turn it into a story of X inches,” and the request, together with the materials, was automatically e-mailed to India, and the copy was cut-and-pasted together by someone who thought in terms of Centigrade. Furthermore, this anonymous employee did all of this real fast, in thirty seconds or so, doing hundreds of similar items per day, for many different American newspapers.

There is a genre of jokes about people trying to operate in a language not their own. One of my favorites, in Maria Von Trapp’s autobiography, concerns a German immigrant who told a New York grocer (in the 1940’s): “Behold your asparagus! For twenty-five cents, I can become asparagus around the corner.” (German: Behalten = Keep, Bekammen = Get, Obtain).