Lighter Side: World’s largest rodents favored to win gold in golf

Let’s participate in the Headlines Olympics.

Rio’s Olympic golf course is overrun with sloths, crocodiles and the world’s largest rodents”: Oh, my! (Are sloths the ones who use golf carts?)

“’Amazon One’ to do flyover at Seattle’s Seafair festival”: Cool. Is that the main delivery drone?

Mariners’ rookie closer Diaz makes history”: It’s fair to say that the M’s new exciting closer is “Diaz-zling.” And it’s fun to say that his strike-out victims have been “Diaz-zled.”

The sultrier snarl of the Turbo Porsche Boxster”: Sultrier? Snarl? The concept of “cool” cars is easy to understand. The whole “sexy” thing less so. Especially when it comes to the sound of the engine.

Comcast wants to sell your Web history to advertisers”: Well, they’re a little late to the party, but what the heck. At some point it’s simply going to be the same handful of megacorporations selling each other the same information over and over again.

USA Basketball will live on a cruise ship instead of staying at Olympic Village”: That makes sense. You can’t expect highly paid, professional athletes to live in the amateur athletes’ village, can you?

No proof flossing helps, studies find”: This odd conclusion is bound to raise some eyebrows, coming as it does during the middle of fresh corn-on-the-cob season. No only does flossing help, it’s mandatory.

The most undervalued women in America are childless aunts”: Hahahaha excuse me while I have a laughing fit. The author specifies that she is a PANK — Professional Aunt No Kids. Sorry, auntie, but professional women, childless or not, are not the most undervalued women in America. They don’t even come close.

Disney theme parks could harness foot recognition technology”: The technology, according to the article, could be used to “improve the guest experience at the entertainment giant’s theme parks.” Sure, of course it’s to improve the guest experience. A couple of paragraphs later, however, it says: “The technology could provide an alternative to ‘rather invasive methods’ for acquiring guest information, such as retinal and fingerprint identification, according to the patent filing.”

(Quote: “These methods are obtrusive and some guests may not feel comfortable providing this type of biometric information to a third party,” according to the the patent filing.) You think?

So, they are “improving” the experience by not fingerprinting everyone, but instead using a sensor to capture your foot shape (or shoe shape, to be precise. Surely they are not asking people to take off their shoes?) If only everyone’s foot/shoe were as recognizable as Mickey Mouse’s.

Today’s challenge: Write a sentence only using words from the headlines. For example: “Sultrier sloths want proof flossing helps harness foot recognition technology.”

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