On the Offensive.

 I might have this wrong, but it looks like 'misgender' is to address someone with the wrong gender.  I can understand how one can quite easily make a misgender mistake give what appears to be quite a range nowadays of different genders.  What makes the headline of course is when someone takes offence to being misgendered, Sam Smith in this particular case that brought my attention to an otherwise part of life that I was not aware of. Taking offence is quite easy, and in fact it seems to me that people don't have to try very hard to do this, but luckily, we have the press to take offence for us, particularly if you are a celebrity.  They can make up the 'Sam Smith takes offence' story without any evidence whatsoever, assuming that they (I'm being careful with the pronoun here) are likely to be distressed with someone's inability to know what gender they have identified with an therefore make a misgender cock-up unwittingly.  Fortunately, most of us couldn't give 2 hoots.    

Security Tags.

 Yahoo's homepage tags articles such as 'News',  'Entertainment', or 'Ad'.  All very useful for filtering out the celebrity rubbish, but a 'news' article today was about a man picking up some dog poo and doing something with it.  It was accompanied by a video (thank goodness for doorbell cameras, eh?) to entice us in but I wasn't inclined to click, preferring another item directly below it about a potential SNP leader who holds strong religious beliefs (which is almost real news).  I guess Yahoo only have a limited dropdown list of tags when the reporters post a story, by which I mean - when an intern  copies something from another website they have found.  

I was 'Livid' when I wrote this.

 There seems to be a marked increase in the use of speech marks in headlines. e.g. person X was 'upset'; or Megan 'fuming' over remarks etc.  They are usually associated with the celebrity type of person, where the headline is designed to get us to click to find out a little bit more gossip. I wonder if it is response to the continuous complaints about the press making things up, so the speech marks represent a sort of 'the impression is that...' (apologies for the speech marks) to avoid the accusation that they are fabricating stories ...but now get away with the same fabricated story (and subsequent clickbait = revenue).

 

A Bit Clicky.

 US Faces New Threat from Intelligent Pig.  That is one of today's headlines.  As it turns out, the pigs are not an armed insurgence force but wild hogs that threaten to cause a lot of damage to crops and wildlife by being a 'super pig' from Canada that can survive harsh winters.  Still, it got me clicking on the article, so the sub-editors can chalk that one up as a success.

In other 'news', Price Harry and his woman are allegedly attending Charlie's coronation 'on one condition'.  I refuse to click on that one, so that's 1 - 1 at the moment.