Barack Obama, in order to soften the blow of Hillary Clinton’s probable Pennsylvania win, has released some negative ads and coupled them with fightin’ words. The story is interesting, if predictable.

What’s funny is that The Washington Post and the New York Times are essentially running the same headline for this story right now on their respective Web sites.

Post: “In Pa., Obama Sharpens His Tone”

Times: “Trailing in Pennsylvania, Obama Sharpens Tone”

Headlines often do a great job of dumbing down stories and reporters can occasionally feel like their piece’s value is demeaned by a “Hillary Demands More Doughnuts” or “Obama: Highfalutin Speech, Lowfalultin Bowling Score”-style headline.

These two newspapers, though, have literally chosen the same verb and direct object to describe Obama’s nefarious plot to bridge the polling gap. Maybe it’s not sensationalism, but it is a demonstration of how some media pigeonhole stories. If they published these headlines independent of each other, that’s just bizarre proof of verbal tunnel vision. If it’s no coincidence, then shame on some anonymous, late-shift, copycat copy editor.

I suppose the Times deserves some credit for tossing the pronoun. And, of course, you have to applaud the Post for an effective, albeit unpretty, abbreviation.

We hardly knew ye.

After catching multiple reports of a loose cougar in Chicago over the course of the last two days, I was unsurprised to see that this poor guy - unnamed and ungendered, as of now - was shot dead by police in the Roscoe Village area of Chicago early Monday evening.

The best sentence in the entire article is a paraphrase of something James Reynolds, a local yokel who caught sight of the beast, told the reporter:

He knew it was a cougar because he had seen it on the Discovery Channel, he said.

And I always said television was doing no good.

Another highlight is slightly reminiscent of an old South Park episode, where some hunters, looking to kill animals out of season, pretend to act in self-defense in order to bring home the prize. “They’re coming right for us!”, yell out-for-the-weekend hunters Jimbo and Ned.

‘It was turning on the officers,’ Ryan said, adding that no officers were hurt. ‘There was no way to take it into custody.’

As if it were a surprise that the animal was a bit hostile to gun-toting, sharpshooter policemen who “shot holes in an air conditioning unit” outside one man’s house. It’s too bad. I’ll bet Jeremiah - yeah, let’s call him Jeremiah - could have made a fine pet.

Though I hate to fan the flames of Obama’s San Francisco-gate any longer, I can’t help but notice the way the news media are interpreting McCain’s response to his comments, which, by any standard, has been benign.

The Chicago Tribune, on the front of their site right now, is running a headline that reads: “McCain on Obama’s ‘elitism’: ‘I don’t now him very well.’” (If you can look past the unfortunate misspelling of “know,” it’s a pretty empty statement. No sensationalism here, folks.)

But at the front of the Washington Post’s site - which is generally less given to overplaying minor scandal - is this headline: “McCain Calls Comments ‘Elitist.’”

Of course, the difference lies in whether the term elitist is applied to Obama or to his comments. Both the newspapers, as well as McCain himself, thoroughly understand the implications involved in each. Calling Obama himself an elitist carries much more weight than branding his silly (bone-headed, untrue) comment elitist.

The Trib downplayed the whole affair, placing it at the bottom of a list of articles related to the current back-and-forth about classism, etc. It rests under a Hillary-bashing headline that read: “Shot-and-a-beer brawl.” But the Post put McCain’s response at the top of their similar thread, printing it in bold.

Perspective, perspective, perspective.

Can’t blame the Trib for running this photo lead on their site right now. Look at those eyes.

Buffalo Grove atheist Rob Sherman, who made a brief appearance in my column today, has accepted an apology by Rep. Monique Davis of Chicago. Davis, during Sherman’s testimony before a legislative body, told him he should “get out of that seat” and said it is “dangerous for our children to even know that your philosophy exists!”

The tirade gathered national attention, but mostly negative coverage of Davis. In my column, I noted that Sherman had an insensitive and borderline racist comment on his web site that read:

Now that Negroes like Representative Monique Davis have political power, it seems that they have no problem at all with discrimination, just as long as it isn’t them who are being discriminated against

Early this morning, Sherman deleted that sentence from his web site. He called me this afternoon and told me that I had taken the comment out of context. I disagreed and suggested the possibility of his explaining the deletion on his site. So far, nothing. But I do have links to both versions of the site, thanks to a Google cache: pre-deletion and post-deletion. This is a limited time offer, because Google caches update every few days.

I emailed Tribune columnist Eric Zorn, who has been following this story extensively, and he responded that he has

interviewed Rob Sherman scores of times in the last 22 years and never heard him say anything even remotely racist or bigoted, which causes me to think this was simply a very inelegant, infelicitous attempt to make an argument

So perhaps the sentence is just a slip up. But I am a bit leery of any man who Googles his name often enough to find a column written about him at a college newspaper 150 miles away. (Update 4/12: Sherman apparently was not Googling his name in his pajamas, as I wrongly - and hyperbolically, I might add - suggested. In a phone call today, he said he found out about the column through Zorn. Which makes sense and is perfectly reasonable, though Zorn doesn’t seem to remember it that way. In an e-mail message yesterday, Zorn wrote that Sherman may “subscribe to “Google Alerts,” which is probably how he got wind of your column.” )

Sherman is also apparently more famous than I initially thought. He told me that I was probably “in diapers” when he started making appearances on television shows like Oprah and Crossfire.

In either case, Sherman, who is running for a seat in the Illinois House, did offer me a ride in the “Sherman-ator,” his mobile home campaigning vehicle, when I get home. And he lives pretty close, so maybe I’ll take him up on it.

In all its glory.

I’ll bet the weekend internet poster at The New York Times is laughing pretty hard right now. He or she managed to stack a story about the Clintons’ enormous post-presidential wealth ($109 million) on top of one where Hillary is looking to create a cabinet post for poverty.

Although a poverty secretary is somewhat ludicrous - isn’t that the job of, say, the secretary of health and human affairs or the secretary of labor? - it certainly looks good as a selling point for Clinton’s campaign. Too bad it has to be overshadowed (literally) by the Clintons’ embarrassingly positive account balance.

Perhaps the Times thought it would be funny to juxtapose the two stories, but I think they’re funny enough by themselves. Here’s a screenshot of the web page, in case you missed it - because of the low quality of the image, you have to click on it to see the details.

I did a little half-time-style circling in the Paint file. So sue me.

Its hard to believe.

A missing apostrophe on a tribute statue for Ernie Banks, famed Cubs ballplayer, sounds about right for Wrigleyville. Although I’m no grammar freak (read: I am a grammar freak), it’s still bizarre to me how sculptor Lou Cella could have missed that kind of error.

Then again, I remembered a Chicago story from a few years ago where a man with some local pride sued a tattoo artist for accidentally writing “Chi-tonw” on his chest. It was an honest mistake, the artist claimed. And in protest of the suit, which they deemed ludicrous, several of the artist’s “professional colleagues” got their own “Chi-tonw” tattoos.

Sometimes, we miss the details when we’re looking for the big picture. In the tattoo situation, the man inspected the sketch that had been made on his own chest before the needle ever touched him. How many other people looked at this statue before it went on display without saying a thing?

A testament to human oversight and human error is occasion more for laughter than reprimand. So if the relentlessly optimistic short-stop/first-baseman isn’t that concerned - and it’s safe to assume that Banks is probably not in tears plotting his revenge - perhaps we shouldn’t be either.

Researchers have found a snippet of sound recorded into a piece of tinfoil from 1860, about 20 years before Thomas Edison first found a way to capture and play recorded sound. The sound is of a woman (probably) singing a song called “Au Claire de Lune.”

The catch is that the inventor responsible - a French typesetter named Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville - never found a way to actually play the sound. He was more interested in preserving a record of the human voice and figured that, someday, someone would come up with a way to play those scribbly lines he etched into his Reynolds Wrap.

Turns out he was right. The link below plays the song along and also shows the phonautograph, the machine that would have been used to record the sound. This song, which clocks in at a very brief 11 seconds, is sure to open up a whole new realm of nightmares for you.

When I saw this link pop up on my Gmail browser, I decided initially to treat it the same way I treat all the Gmail links: that is, pretend it isn’t there and continue to press refresh until someone actually e-mails me. But, when I saw it twice, I just couldn’t help but check it out. Nestled safely between links to “Sean Combs settles punching lawsuit” and “Amazing black bean brownies” sat the subject of this blog: “Squirrels Network like Facebook Friends.”

Although I am perpetually fascinated with squirrels, the idea of exploring their social networks in more depth was simply too intriguing an opportunity to pass up. So, I did the unthinkable. I clicked. And off I went to Discovery News, where I learned the following factoids.

1. Squirrels belong to social networks

2. Certain squirrels are more important to these networks than others. These are the “Kevin Bacons,” the ones who serve as central connecting points between other squirrels.

3. The head honcho squirrel in this study was named Mercedes. Other squirrel monikers - 65 Colombian ground squirrels in Alberta, Canada were studied and named - include, but are not limited to, 7-Up, Eighth Notes and Princess Pea.

Unfortunately, the study does not look to have extremely profound implications.

“What I like about this paper is that it shows individuals have different relationships with others,” said Daniel Blumstein, an associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California at Los Angeles.

Not exactly rocket science, Mr. Blumstein. But I’ll be you had a great time naming the little fellas.

Squirrel kissing, defined in the study as “oral contact that does not lead to bickering,” is at least somewhat similar to human kissing in that respect.

Speaking of John McCain, who is currently reading up on his Middle East history - having blown the cover on his ignorance on the difference between Sunnis and Shi’ites - I have a friend who runs a Web site devoted to the exploration of the idea that Mac is, in fact, a robot.

While the idea is a bit far-fetched, the site does quite a job bringing an oft-criticized (read: false) ideology to the forefront of national discussion. It’s worth checking out here.

Queen anticipated the McCain robot by about 31 years on their album cover for “News of the World.”

No doubt McCain’s current journey to the heart of the war is unrelated to his bid for the presidency. Surely, he just wants to do another quick check-up on the Iraqi people.

Unfortunately, he brought two cronies and major supporters along for the ride.

Sens. Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham inject a shot of politics to a trip that should be a solemn commemoration of one of Iraq’s worst tragedies, Saddam’s use of chemical weapons against the Kurds.

No reasonable person would dispute that the senator cares deeply about Iraqi citizens and about U.S. troops - this is his eighth trip to the country since August 2003. But those trips did not involve meetings with multiple leaders of the free world. McCain is planning to get friendly with Gordon Brown, Nicolas Sarkozy and Ehud Olmert (leaders, respectively, of Britain, France and Israel) over the next week. So what if he has sand in his boots when he shows up at 10 Downing Street; are we still to believe he didn’t have any ulterior motives?

Even if McCain’s people say he’s not there for the photo-op, it’s hard to believe that wasn’t one of the motivating factors.