One thing I’ll miss about the Tonight Show With Jay Leno is the Monday night “Headlines” section that featured poorly worded headlines, sentences, or advertisements from various publications. Often the strangeness came in the juxtaposition of a headline for a story that followed with an unrelated photo to one side. Something like “Hot Wind Blows Across Plains,” next to the picture of a politician in a totally unrelated context.

Long before Leno, there were paperback books of newspaper bloopers that included at least one quote from a paper I was working on at the time. The reporter wrote, “The driver swerved to avoid missing the pedestrian,” and the copy editor managed to miss the mistake.

Ever since then, I am always looking for bloopers and juxtapositions. An example of the latter surfaced recently at a softball/baseball field where I noticed a sign saying ‘Foul Ball Area/Park At Your Own Risk” right next to a sign noting that particular spot was also for handicapped parking.

I suspect Leno would have had more than a few comments wondering why a person allowed to park in such a spot should be allowed to assume a higher risk of foul balls.

I know many HVACR technicians would love to be able to park vans closer to job sites only to have to deal with no-parking zones or handicapped restrictions. But in the case of this particular field, at least they would avoid a possible broken windshield by parking a bit further away.