Author of “The Man Who Robbed a Bank With a Banana” Robs Bank With Banana

Though admitting I am “usually fair about admitting when a good headline is unusable,” one reader wrote to say he was “disappointed (albeit, with a lack of any overly strong emotion)” in the headline of my previous installment. See “Parking Company Apologizes to Formerly Dead Woman for $80 Ticket” (Aug. 20, 2026). He then delivered what he described, somewhat apologetically, as a “petty rant” about whether that woman had in fact been “dead” at any time before the company gave her the parking ticket. First of all, if there’s anyone to whom you need not apologize for delivering petty rants, or the “pedantry” for which someone else recently apologized, it’s this guy right here. In fact, I’m sure a significant percentage of the 4,023 articles currently available here involve one or the other (if not both), and for that matter you could probably describe this whole project as a “petty rant,” one that has now gone on for well over three million words. So no apology necessary. Second, the…