Who can doubt that transgenic grass skirts are in dire need of regulation? Certainly not Nature, which published "Transgenic grass skirts regulators" in its issue of 7/20/2011:

When the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced this month that it did not have the authority to oversee a new variety of genetically modified (GM) Kentucky bluegrass, it exposed a serious weakness in the regulations governing GM crops. These are based not on a plant's GM nature but on the techniques used for its genetic modification. With changing technologies, the department says that it lacks the authority to regulate newly created transgenic crops.

According to yesterday's Sunday (Irish) Business Post, "Bishops agree sex abuse rules":

Several readers have sent me links to a recent headline: Anthony Shadid, "Qaddafi Forces Bear Down on Strategic Town as Rebels Flee", NYT 3/10/2011.

From Jesse Sheidlower, this headline:

Hooker Overcomes Illness, Slaps Beaver

It's a puzzler. Jesse says:

It's not about what you think it's about. Really. No matter what you think it's about, that's not it.

And then there's something about body scanners:

The crash blossom of the day comes to us from Rebekah Macdonald via Twitter. This headline appeared on the New Zealand news site Stuff.co.nz:

Police chase driver in hospital

Of course, the police didn't chase a driver in a hospital, like some wacky action movie sequence. The subject of the headline is "police chase driver," a compound noun pileup typical of headlinese in the UK and other countries.  The driver had "led police in a 150 kmh chase in Lower Hutt" and landed in the hospital after crashing (!) into a power pole. We await the inevitable followup headline, "Police chase driver out of hospital."

The new Musselburgh health center, quite close to where I live in Edinburgh, is not complete; the construction process is at a standstill. The problem? According to the Scotsman newspaper's rather startling headline, it seems to be the workforce:

Man shoots dead robber, says a South African headline today. And for an instant one's confused mind asks, "It's hardly necessary to shoot the dead ones, is it?"

Geoff Nunberg sent around a link to C.W. Nevius, "Coit Tower attacks a catalyst for park crackdown",  San Francisco Chronicle 9/4/2010. The Landmark's Revenge?

Here's one sent in by Jeffrey Kallberg:

Unless you're familiar with Australian English and Australian politics, this one is going to baffle you.

In fact, I'm still somewhat baffled, even after reading (what I think is) the associated story. It may help you to know that Shorten is "federal Labor powerbroker Bill Shorten", Brumby is John Brumby, the premier of Victoria,  cops is a verb form  meaning (I think) "receives" and beating is a reference to the political defeat of an MP named Craig Langdon and/or the consequences of his resignation. Or something like that.

[Hat tip to Dave Ripley]

From Bruce Webster a few weeks ago, a report of this paper title from the journal Nature Materials early this month:

Designer spoof surface plasmon structures collimate terahertz laser beams

Not exactly an ordinary crash blossom, since it's thick with technical terminology, especially plasmon and collimate, but also spoof, which looks suspiciously like an ordinary-language word used as a technical term (since otherwise it looks totally out of place in a severely technical article).

Professor Simon Kirby (the world's only Professor of Language Evolution) regards himself as pretty good at parsing headlines on the whole, but saw one recently that completely stumped him. I agree with him; it's worse than a crash blossom, it's positively a train wreck, a scattered mess of uninterpretable short words almost all capable of more than one interpretation, the whole apparently signifying nothing. See if you can recover any reasonable meaning for this headline without reading the story:

Council hires ban bid taxi firm