She turned me into a newt!

Several things have caught my eye media-wise today:

Check out this sentence from a story about a guy named Samuel Clemens doing a painting on the side of a hill.

Artist Samuel Clemens, not to be confused with the author of the same name, is at it again.

Man, I'm glad they cleared that up. Because if i saw that there was something going on in Newport, Oregon, written in the present tense about Samuel Clemens, i would have immediately assumed they were talking about the guy who's been dead for nearly 100 years.

And you all know how much zombie painters freak me out. I probably would've had a panic attack or something.

Nothing in my life has prepared me for the possibility that sometimes people have the same name...

...i got a chuckle this morning watching ESPN and seeing this appear at the bottom of the screen. "Adam 'Pacman' Jones to turn himself into authorities"

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, i will now asexually reproduce exact replicas of myself, each of whom will attend and graduate from the police academy...

...And, finally (i hope), this story tells of a girl who had a cable lop off both her feet when a ride at Six Flags broke. Check out two of the quotes from witnesses.

"When I got up there, the lady she was just sitting there, and she didn't have no legs."

"I seen the car go up. Then, like, the cable broke, I heard -- pwchh -- and I heard a lot of people screaming," Chris Stinnett, who was at a ride next to the Superman Tower of Power, told WDRB/WMYO.
"The cable went under the car -- and I seen it pull up and hit a lot of people -- and I seen them bring their legs up," Stinnett said.

For any current/potential journalists out there, i want to use these as an example. (disclaimer: i think there's a better than average chance the story was transcribed from a television story, so there may have been nothing to be done about the quotes.)

But if you should find yourself writing a story and you have very helpful sources, don't make them look stupid. I know, technically, you're supposed to quote people exactly. But would it have really done any harm to say "the cable went under the car -- and i saw it pull up and hit a lot of people -- and i saw them bring their legs up."

again, this is merely an example. i'm not faulting the writer here - unless it isn't a story transcript. in which case, i am faulting him or her.