Well This is Misleading

OH THE HORROR hey wait a minute:

This was for a story about a bizarre (if not especially unique) landslide formation threatening to eventually block truck access to the North Slope oil fields. A mass of thawing permafrost soil is lurching towards the only road that runs through the upper interior of the state and the oil pipeline that runs parallel to it. The engineering challenges of contending with this "frozen debris lobe" are certainly significant; the thing is 60 feet tall, 300 feet wide, and over a thousand feet long.

But the sensationalism of the headline entertains. I suppose an editor can't be blamed for hoping to capitalize on the public's ongoing fascination with confounding viscous masses attacking Alaska, like the mysterious foul-smelling sea blob that made news in 2009 (which turned out to be algae) or the mysterious orange goo washing up on shores in 2011 (which was initially concluded to be as a bunch of microscopic eggs of some TBD crustacean but was later determined to be a mass of spores from a fungal parasite of spruce trees). But those were both weird smelly globs of muck adrift at sea that may or may not have been some new gross species from, like, space or something, identified by scientists only well after their initial sightings on the shores of villages. This is just a pile of dirt and ice - anticlimactically acknowledged as such in the very first sentence of the article, no less - moving less than half an inch per day, which is notable geologically but is not particularly blob-like per the traditional and more disgusting kind of definition that comes to mind.

The unnecessary drama of the headline is seemingly conceded by the alternate phrasing used for the online version of the same story:

I like to imagine a negotiation between the guy who thought it needed to be toned down and the guy who wanted to stick to his guns. ["Alright, fine, we can change from 'Mysterious blob' to 'Frozen landslide', but only if we can also change 'threatens' to 'threatens TO DEVOUR', and I know you're not going to go for it, but I really think we could throw a few exclamation points in there too. Plus we get to use 'MYSTERY CLUMP' as the subheading for the second section."] Also edited out is the clarification that it is moving, which I guess is now assumed because that is what makes a thing a landslide instead of just land. But in retrospect, it was probably never necessary, inasmuch as we are talking about something that is threatening to devour but is not currently devouring a stationary stretch of gravel, i.e. it presumably has some ground to make up before it gets to the devouring. 

But let us not overlook the second and arguably worse headline above the fold, in which a medical ailment - one of the few imaginable things than can be aptly described as literally being on a chart - has its prevalence noted by suggesting that it is instead off of the charts. Other descriptions by this guy:

• Sees right-fielder swoop in to make unexpected catch, says "that guy showed up out of left field"
• Requests cigarette, receives cigar, says "close but no cigar"
• Describes awesome fish currently being reeled in as "off the hook"

This one, by the way, looks like this online:

In conclusion, the Anchorage Daily News could probably use a headline proofreader for the print edition, preferably one averse to idioms.