Whacky Dummy Text

A couple weeks back, there was a thread that mentioned how captions and stories sometimes go to press with ``dummy text'' in them. It's usually put in to hold the space and then it's supposed to be taken out. And sometimes it's not.

I was just searching my old paper's archives for stories and came across this dummy text below. It ran instead of my game story one morning. Front page of the sports section. Weird stuff, eh?

==

WASHINGTON - ONE inch here. This ONE goes out to the ONE I love. (File under fire) This ONE goes out to the one I left behind. A simple prop to occupy my.

TWO inches here. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. A Tale of TWO Cities. It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done before. And I go to some sort of resting place.

THREE inches here. Commander, tear this ship apart until youve found those plans, and bring me the passengers; I want them alive. Apology accepted Captain Need. You can tell him yourself. Is this graf short, too, like the one before?

FOUR inches here. Happiness is a warm gun. Ive got blisters on my fingers. You say you want a revolution. The fad FOUR. In an octopus garden. Paul is dead. John. Paul. George.

FIVE inches here. Point to point point observation. Children carry reservations. Standing on the shoulders of giants . . . leaves me cold. A hundred million birds fly away. FIVE. I am the king of all I see.

SIX inches here. Spackle. Super model. Spaghetti. Syringe. Serum. Salad. Satchel. Smock. Sun-dried. Soup. Simplistic. Statistics. Sandwich. Sorry. Spider. Sinkhole. Serrated. Sample.

SEVEN inches here. Antarctica, North America, Asia, Europe, South America, Australia ( Ocean ) and Africa. SEVENTH Heaven. Greed, sloth, gluttony, lust, pride, envy and wrath. This graph is way too short.

EIGHT inches begins here. Octopus. Octagon. October. (August?) The Big EIGHT. Octave the octoroon. October Revolution. Crazy EIGHTS. How many English words are octosyllabic? Does anyone really care?

NINE inches starting right here. The square root of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the square roots of the two legs of a right triangle. Pi is equal to the circumference of a circle divided by its diameter.

TEN inches here. Northwestern. Ohio State. SEVEN inches here. Antarctica, North America, Asia, Europe, South America, Australia ( Ocean ) and Africa. SEVENTH Heaven. Greed, sloth, gluttony, lust, pride, envy and wrath. This graph is way too short.

EIGHT inches begins here. Octopus. Octagon. October. (August?) The Big EIGHT. Octave the octoroon. October Revolution. Crazy EIGHTS. How many English words are octosyllabic? Does anyone really care?

NINE inches starting right here. The square root of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the square roots of the two legs of a right triangle. Pi is equal to the circumference of a circle divided by its diameter.

TEN inches here. Northwestern. Ohio State.

 

Nice R.E.M. shoutout.

But, yes, collectively quite odd and funny.

 

In print versions of the Onion, they use filler text on the jump page when they have a spot they need to fill (oddly enough). They'll have a random jump word and the text is - repeated over and over - "Passers-by were amazed by the unusually large amounts of blood."

 

Anybody used the Jabberwocky function on newer versions of Quark? It rools out an unlimited amount of almost-comprehensible text.

 

I think that story won an APSE award.

 

XXXXs work fine, but since this text was more for measurement purposes, I can see why they did it. However, someone clearly had too much time on their hands.

 

My dummy text for the last 7 years:

All work and no play make Football_Bat a dull boy. All work and no play make Football_Bat a dull boy. All work and no play make Football_Bat a dull boy. All work and no play make Football_Bat a dull boy. All work and no play make Football_Bat a dull boy. All work and no play make Football_Bat a dull boy. All work and no play make Football_Bat a dull boy. All work and no play make Football_Bat a dull boy. All work and no play make Football_Bat a dull boy. All work and no play make Football_Bat a dull boy. All work and no play make Football_Bat a dull boy. All work and no play make Football_Bat a dull boy. All work and no play make Football_Bat a dull boy. All work and no play make Football_Bat a dull boy. All work and no play make Football_Bat a dull boy.

 

You out yourself to your readers but not us? Bastard!

 

The fun part is, I draw all kinds of geometric shapes and type it out on a Smith-Corona.



Wendy, I'm home!

 

Explains a lot.