I stumbled across this test a few days ago and finally had a chance to give it a whirl. Fun stuff, it is. A sample from the Trib's 1A, using first graphs only:
* Hillsborough County officials want voters countywide to send a strong message against nude dancers.
* The family of a 13-year-old boy found dead at a county park struggled Friday to make sense of the slaying.
* We hear the most egregions cases: restaurants making black customers pre-pay for their meals; stores accusing black customers of shoplifting the very clothes they're wearing; most recently, local businessman Reginald Pitts being interrogated and detained while trying to buy $13,000 in Wal-Mart gift cards on behalf of his employer.
* Armwood High School football coach Sean Callahan does not have time to think about his team's chance to make history.
I'll let you draw your own conclusions about the ledes above. But I love this test, and it has me thinking hard about how to better begin, how to make folks choke on their Lucky Charms.
Thus, this timely attempt at assembling some of the best of the best ledes from Gangrey readers.
What's your favorite? Please give it some thought and let the posting begin.
I'll start.
This, of course, is good:
* OKLAHOMA CITY -- After the explosion, people learned to write left-handed, to tie just one shoe. They learned to endure the pieces of metal and glass embedded in their flesh, to smile with faces that made them want to cry, to cry with glass eyes. They learned, in homes where children had played, to stand the quiet. They learned to sleep with pills, to sleep alone.
Today, with the conviction of Timothy J. McVeigh in a Denver Federal court, with cheers and sobs of relief at the lot where a building once stood in downtown Oklahoma City, the survivors and families of the victims of the most deadly attack of domestic terrorism in United States history learned what they had suspected all along: That justice in a far-away courtroom is not satisfaction. That healing might come only at Mr. McVeigh's grave. (Rick Bragg)
And this is too:
* TARPON SPRINGS -- When they heard the screams, no one suspected the rooster.
Dechardonae Gaines, 2, was toddling down the sidewalk Monday lugging her Easy Bake Oven when she became the victim in one of the weirder animal attack cases police can recall.
In the cluster of beige houses at Lime Street and Safford Avenue where Dechardonae lives, man and chicken have coexisted peacefully for years in quiet defiance of city ordinance.
That ended Monday afternoon, when authorities apprehended the offending rooster, named Rockadoodle Two, and its sister, named Hen. Hen was not involved in the attack, police said. (Kelley Benham)
Ramsey dug this one from a recent Brick story:
* Ever since the kung fu judge started showing signs of dementia, people have been trying to take his property. At a court hearing yesterday, a woman in a pink sweater and a ponytail was accused of succeeding.
I agree. But my drop-dead favorite comes from one of Kate Boo's Pulitzer winners:
* Elroy lives here. Tiny, half-blind, mentally retarded, 39-year-old Elroy. To find him, go past the counselor flirting on the phone. Past the broken chairs, the roach-dappled kitchen and the housemates whose neglect in this group home has been chronicled for a decade in the files of city agencies. Head upstairs to Elroy's single bed.
"You're in good hands," reads the Allstate Insurance poster tacked above his mattress -- the mattress where the sexual predator would catch him sleeping. Catch him easily: The door between their rooms had fallen from its hinges. Catch him relentlessly -- so relentlessly that Elroy tried to commit suicide by running blindly into a busy Southeast Washington street.
These days, reconciled to living, Elroy has fashioned ways to cope. He keeps private amulets against a misery he doesn't fully grasp. There's the leatherette Bible he can't read; the Norman Rockwell calendar of family scenes he hasn't known.
And there's his strategy of groping his way down to the bare-bulbed basement again and again to wash the sheets from his violated bed, as if Tide could cleanse defilement. "God is a friend of mine," he says. But absent divine intervention, "you just gotta do what they say." Just got to add soap powder, and more soap powder, turn the dial to hot. "Gotta not let the worries pluck your nerves."
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