Best of offbeat news on Twitter

The tag line of NotSoHeadlineNews (NSHN) is "News that flies under the radar" . The archive of news stories at the web site for NSHN is only six months old and is approaching seven thousand stories.

These tweets are just a sampling of the fun you could have at the NSHN site.

Samuel Clemens (a.k.a Mark Twain) was a newspaper man first and foremost. He made a splash early in his career by writing news accounts that doubled as satire on Americans and the Western Cultures in general.

One of his first published pieces was an obituary that filled an entire page. According to Clemons, the poor soul who's death he wrote about, was not a very well liked man in town and met his demise through a bizarre series of mishaps, such as accidentally cutting his throat while shaving and ending up stumbling out of a second story window to his eventual bloody death on the dusty street below.

Clemens' first real spotlight came in a story that was written as a letter, which was an often used vehicle for editorialists of the time, and was printed in newspapers across America. The sarcastic wit and charm of the story The Celebrated Jumping Frog Of Calaveras County gained the attention of not only Americans, but also citizens worldwide.

Not very old in the Twitterdom and with just over 200 updates, this upstart offbeat news service that brings us "odd news from around the net", draws upon all the major newswires to tweet the news of the weird.

When it comes to satire on the news, no one does it better than The Onion. The Onion started out as a Wisconsin college campus newspaper that published satires of popular news stories from around the world. The publication was largely a coupon source for students at a handful of campuses around the country until it was moved online in 1996. The Onion now "broadcasts" news through podcasts.

The popularity of the "news" organization exploded in 2002 when the most popular Beijing newspaper, Evening News, reported that the U. S. Government was seeking a new home for it's capitol. The Chinese paper reported that the U.S. lawmakers were seeking a city that would build a new home for them that included a "retractable" dome. Evening News based its information on information gathered from this story published in The Onion.

When it comes to heavy hitters in offbeat news stories in the Twitterdom, newslite is one of the heaviest of hitters.

The site employs five staff members and is currently over 1500 odd news story updates on Twitter.

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While you're at it, you can check out some funny as heck lens reviews at Joker Squid. Put plastic up, you'll be spewing coffee!
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