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Google the headline and, after you get links to a hip-hop artist, you get links to posts about the hit movie American Gangster, which stars Denzel Washington as the Harlem drug kingpin. The movie refers several times to his hometown as Greensboro.

Why would the scriptwriter falsify this factual detail?

Lucas was born in La Grange, N.C., and lived in Knoxville, Tenn., Lexington, Ky., and Wilson, N.C. before he was out of his teens. He says so himself in an interview with New York magazine. No evidence of a Greensboro connection that I can find. (If you liked the movie, you'll like the New York article.)

Still, it's unfortunate that Greensboro is mentioned so prominently in the movie. Because there are so many people who believe that the entertainment they see on television and at the movies is factually accurate, the last thing Greensboro needs to be known for is the birthplace of an American Gangster.

(Allen referred to the birthplace earlier, but I just saw the movie last night and needed to add my two cents.)

About using newspapers. Ignore that last one.

And about attracting visitors in the blogosphere.

I'm reading Eric Clapton's autobiography and came across Jamie Oldaker's name. Oldaker is a drummer who played with Clapton for 10 years or so (post-Layla).

He was a year ahead of me in high school in Tulsa. I knew he had played as a session man with Leon Russell there, but hadn't known he toured with Clapton. Then I read that Carl Radle, bass player on Layla, graduated from the same school -- Edison -- albeit many years before I was there. Impressive enough.

Drawn to the computer, I discovered a Wikipedia entry on the Tulsa Sound. It reminded me of Dwight Twilley, who we knew as an artist; he drew the cover of the student phone book at Edison. I think I knew he was in a band, but wouldn't have predicted he would become a Top 20 artist. (His bandmate Phil Seymour was at Edison, too, a year younger than me.)

That then led me to Tuck Andress, Scott Musick and David Tanner, all of whom were in my class.

Unfortunately, I played the clarinet, which did nothing wonders for my cool factor. (Thanks, Sue.) The rest is history.

This is one of the things I worry about: mock story written for a departing staff member's going away party gets into print or pixels. In this case, a satirical farewell speech from a copy editor at the Santa Barbara News-Press was published on the paper's Web site.

Eventually someone got fired over it. (Thanks to Pam at Words at Work for the tip.)

It's a widespread newsroom tradition: departing employees get a mock front page that makes fun of them and some of the stories they've written and people they've covered. We have the same tradition.

Because newsrooms tend to attract some outsized, creative and occasionally dysfunctional personalities, we've had some pretty wild, creative and occasionally inappropriate pages. Some have been inappropriate enough that I have seen the need to tell the person in charge of our copy desk -- the people who are the ultimate safety net in a newsroom -- to make sure that the wrong photo or wrong batch of copy doesn't find its way into print. They look at me as if I'm an idiot, which is the correct response. (I'm pretty confident one of the eagle-eyed pressmen would catch if it slipped through to the press.)

Would I fire someone over it? It depends what happened, but I wouldn't be inclined to go that far.

Would I stop the tradition? No way. I still have mine from the day I left the News & Observer 20+ years ago. (It features a photo of me and Pope John Paul II. You had to be there.)

For all of us old newspaper wretches, this will drive you to the liquor cabinet.

During the afternoon budget meeting, the photo chief mentions a story about George Dickel distillery trying to reduce its inventory.

Faces around the room went blank. Finally, someone asked "Who's George Dickel?"

More than half the people in the room hadn't heard of the Tennessee whisky, forcing me to pull a bottle out of my desk drawer to show them.*

The daily news about the digital revolution doesn't signal a new media world the way that story does.

For some reason it reminded me of this George Thorogood lyric:

Now, the other night I lay sleeping,
And I woke from a terrible dream.
So I called up my pal, Jack Daniels,
And his partner Jimmy Beam.

And we drank alone, yeah, with nobody else.
We drank alone, yeah, with nobody else.
Yeah, you know when I drink alone, I prefer to be by myself.

* For my friends in Human Resources, that actually didn't happen.

Sometimes discovering that what you thought was legitimate is actually bogus doesn't lessen the enjoyment. Pam at Words at Work provides a list of purported "actual analogies and metaphors found in high school essays" except that they probably aren't. Still, I can see myself reading them in a story and laughing outloud. A few of my favorites:

4. She grew on him like she was a colony of E. coli, and he was room-temperature Canadian beef.

17. He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant and she was the East River.

I had not heard of the "curse of knowledge" until I read this nifty post by Maurreen Skowran, a copy editor at the News & Observer and host of News Atoms.

It's a curse, indeed.

Andy Bechtel at The Editor's Desk on the continuing power of newspapers. (I'm sure the player's covering of the word Picayune was inadvertent.)

Special sympathy for Robbie Perkins. He's reliving a moment -- and soon surgery -- that I had back in September. Both bicycle falls. Both less than spectacular. Both landed wrong. Both undergoing surgery to insert plate. I'm hoping his goes better than mine. I'm still in physical therapy.

Do you know the difference between God and an editor?

God doesn't think he's an editor.

How about this one:

An editor should have a pimp for a brother, so he'd have someone to look up to.

Courtesy of Steve Smith's blog.

This morning, picking up the N&R and the New York Times off my driveway, I noticed that the papers felt different. That is, it felt as if the News & Record were bigger in size and weight. So I weighed them. The N&R was nearly 3 pounds to 2 pounds for the Times.

Practical and philosophical explanations abound, but what does it mean? Nothing.

Slate raises the question, based on this week's episode of The Wire, whether anyone has seriously been dressed down for cussing in the newsroom. And it was promptly answered. (Via Romenesko.)

Umm, OK. I'll say it: I've asked a reporters to tone down their language in the newsroom.

Before I'm drummed out of the two-fisted-drinkers, "Front-Page" journalism clubhouse, let me explain. Two reasons:

* Loud cursing in the newsroom does offend some employees who weren't brought up that way. It's a matter of respect for others. While it seems daintier than some journalists prefer, managers have to worry about everyone. I put the emphasis on loud because my experience is that newsroom staffers are more tolerant of language than most places this side of construction sites. Cursing among friends around the water cooler or in the cubicle hasn't elicited any complaint here.

* We have school groups tour the newspaper a couple times a week. Teachers and parents don't want their children to hear that. If memory serves, a middle school kid's vocabulary can shame the most hardened reporter, but that's almost irrelevant when the word gets home what they heard at the newspaper.

Because I've been known to curse as part of daily conversation, it's really not all that hard to ask others to tone it down a bit. Now, when I got a call from our human resources department several years ago that someone had complained about a female worker not wearing a bra, that was a conversation that was uncomfortable.

By the way, we don't allow smoking or drinking in the newsroom, either, although we drew the line at an IT demand we not place our cups of coffee near computer keyboards.

Ok, let my beating begin. But keep the language clean.

Howard Weaver at Etaoin Shrdlu points to this fun widget that will become an addictive game if you start.

He's interactive director with McClatchy so he connects it vaguely to online media company possibilities. Not me. It's just a fun brainteaser keeping me from doing real work.

A longtime reader sent me a copy of a Greensboro Daily News bill from 1922. At her request, I blocked out the name and address.

Six months for $3.50. Not bad. She wrote: "This is addressed to my father, who was a subscriber then and throughout his life. He saw newspapers as 'continuing education' and a necessary part of life."

I like the way he thought.

Are there specific words you just hate?

I remember a discussion in high school English about examples of onomatopoeia. A girl offered "ugly." The teacher asked how that was an example, and the girl said, "Well, I think the word 'ugly' is ugly."

Anyway, some participants in the American Copy Editors Society forum have some they hate. How about utilize, spearhead, fruition, brandish and imprimatur?

Yeah, they don't bother me either. Do you have any?

Thanks, Pam, for the pointer.

Another one of those lists. In this case, all 25 are true. Here are three:
2. Sources always call back well after the story has run.

4. Somebody somewhere will always be upset about any given story I've written.

I have had people tell me that the newspaper stinks, but it was always metaphorical.

Until I got this e-mail: I don't know if it is the ink or the paper but the newspaper smells awful ! It about takes your breath when it is taken out of the plastic bag. If you can stand to read it, washing your hands must be next!

After a bit of inquiry, I discovered that the plastic bags occasionally develop an odor if they are particularly old.

Hmmm. If we can develop the right smell -- ocean breeze? pine forest? -- maybe that will help sell the paper.

I got a frantic voice-mail Saturday from someone at the New York Post asking to speak to the entertainment reporter covering the Jay-Z's "Heart of the City" tour with Mary J. Blige at the Coliseum that night. I wasn't there and got the message too late. We didn't staff the concert, either, darn it.

Turns out we missed a big story.

Here's the report from TMZ: Mary J. Blige basically just blabbed to a sold-out crowd of thousands in North Carolina that Jay-Z and Beyonce Knowles got married, by congratulating "my man Jay-Z" and "my girl B" and dedicating a song to them. The couple haven't officially acknowledged their nups.

Jigga teased the masses with a couple notes from "Crazy in Love," his duet with B, but didn't say anything about the wedding.

This is a better version, but whenever I can refer to Jay-Z as "Jigga" without sounding like an idiot, I want to do it.

Beyonce's photo at the airport here.

I actually knew Jay-Z was here; I just hadn't tuned into the reports that he might have secretly gotten married to Beyonce the day before so I didn't put the two together. In retrospect, I'd have rather been at the concert than doing what I was doing.

Wednesday update: The AP posts this video report raising a question about the nuptials, but the only support is a comment from alleged wedding guest Gwyneth Paltrow saying she doesn't know what anyone is talking about in that way that you might deny knowing anything, wink, wink.

I know that spammers don't care who gets their spew so long as a fraction of losers people respond. Some professional PR folks seem to feel the same way.

I get a fair collection of both run-of-the-mill spam and PR spam every day. I distinguish between the two this way:

* ROM Spam -- The same junk everyone gets. Subject line: Can you make these commercial closings? and Insurance agent closers needed!! Two exclamation points!! It's important!! (Our spam filters apparently weed out the mail about Russian brides, although I do get the occasional Nigerian money transfer scam.)
* PR spam -- Please publish me in the paper or the Web site. Subject line: News from Pitt -- Dan Marino commencement speaker and Reminder: Start planning your Earth Day coverage now! and Creative Hong Kong in London.

They both take me about the same amount of time to hit delete.

Do news organizations exist that actually use the releases? Even the University of Pittsburgh item had no relevance to anyone around here except, perhaps, parents of Pitt seniors and I doubt there are many of those.

I know it doesn't cost the PR spammers anything to include me on their list, but it's so ineffective. I hope they're doing something else to earn their money.

Our team in the Reading Connections Scrabble Challenge faced off against a team of WFMY folk. Our group was nervously confident. They were veterans of the challenge; Dawn Kane, Romy McGinnis and Marie Inkenbrandt had been there before.

We won the first game, but lost the second when the FMY team bought a lifeline, a roaming expert who looked at their tiles and made a suggestion using all the letters. Paliest.

Paliest? Means most pale, at least to the 17 people in the world who know the word. Normal people would say palest.

The FMYers got 80-some points on that one, which pushed them over the top. Congratulations to both teams.

Remember, it was a fundraiser.

I never read much Arthur C. Clarke that I can recall. Heinlein and Dick were more my style when it came to science fiction. That said, Adrian Monck snags a great piece of the past with his salvaging of this from Liz Donovan.

From 2001: A Space Odyssey: An astronaut reads the news:

...he would hold the front page while he quickly searched the headlines and noted the items that interested him.

...Each (headline) had its own two-digit reference; when he punched that, the postage-stamp-sized rectangle would expand until it neatly filled the screen and he could read it with comfort.

That was published 40 years ago. Happy Birthday!

These are the sorts of references -- and there are plenty of them -- that make me think we need to hire a science fiction writer to help us understand and plan for the future. I know that Orson Scott Card doesn't think much of us, but that's probably a good thing in this case. It would help us think broadly and grandly. I wonder if he's available....

Which media bigshot would you least like to be this week?

Katie Couric -- facing low ratings, a vote of confidence, and calls for her to move along
Mort Zuckerman of the NY Daily News -- hemmed in by Rupert Murdoch's latest newspaper gambit
Gary Pruitt of McClatchy -- saying his company isn't going bankrupt
Wall Street Journal editor -- facing a change in the paper. Oops, he's already gone

Editor's note: Last week was swept by George Stephanopoulos and Charlie Gibson.

Joe Killian posts a couple photos on Decision 2008 of the extent to which some Hillary fans will go. (And Joe has a nice little riff about the music played for the candidates.)

I have been critical in the past of celebrity news coverage in the paper, explaining that we didn't spend any time and little space on the antics of Britney and Brangelina. Leave that to the Peoples and the Us magazines of the world.

Oh, how wrong I was. Little did I know that we have had nothing but celebrity-dominated front pages for much of the past month

From The New York Times:

Some of the most celebrity-centric, entertainment-obsessed news media outlets have added a heavy dose of political news to their lineups, taking space normally devoted to Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie and handing it to articles on people known more for wonkiness than sexiness....

Driving all of it, editors and campaign aides say, is the appetite for news on presidential candidates and their families -- people who have transcended politics to become bona fide celebrities. As the campaign stretches into its second year, in some corners it is simply seen as entertainment.

Entertaining, it is.

A survey in England reports: One in three employees admits they have been to work with a hangover and more than one in 10 has been drunk at their desk, a study suggests.

I'm shocked!

Some occupations are worse than others with regard to drinking and the workplace.

Forty-one per cent of people working in media and creative jobs said they had been to work while still drunk -- four times the average.

Oh. Well, that's more like it.