Scribe pride

Now and then I read something that makes me proud to have anything to do with writing and newspapers.

The work of United Kingdom reporter Lester Haines is a case in point. His stuff appears on the hugely enjoyable and hard-to-pigeonhole tech-ish site called The Register. (The site carries the motto: “Biting the hand that feeds IT.”)

A recent Haines lede:

“Two Swansea yobs who decided, after a night on the sauce, that they’d give a couple of transvestites some stick, came off the worse for the encounter since their targets were in fact cage fighters on a stag night.

The humiliation of Jason Fender, 22, and Dean Gardener, 19, was captured on CCTV as they “singled out the two men walking along a street in wigs, short skirts and high heels”, as the Daily Mail explains.

A shirtless Gardner is seen taking a pop at one of the men, who’s dressed in a fetching “pink wig, black skirt and boob tube” ensemble. A bad move, since the intended targets then summarily lay out both ne’er-do-wells.

The cage fighters are shown “teetering away in their high heels, stopping only to pick up a clutch bag they dropped during the melee.”

Haines (who I found thanks to Portland blogger Bojack) is also the go-to guy if you want to read about the North Face clothing company suing the young man who invented the “South Butt” brand — complete with a logo that the humorless NF folks think is too much like their own. See “The North Face Trips Over South Butt” here.