Fake AP Style Book

As a teenager I subscribed to Model Railroader magazine. While I first got it to affirm my new-found interest in tiny trains, I soon discovered the otherwise hidden world of magazine style guides. Once in a while the editor would explain magazine conventions, such as why MODEL RAILROADER was printed in lower caps, while the names of other magazines were not.*

(The most amazing style in "MR": figure captions were usually paragraph-long, written so that the last line was fully justified. Perfect rectangles of text.)

To this day I find magazine mastheads** as interesting as the editorial content. The masthead tells you a lot about a magazine, more than just the names of the people involved.

As a self-taught journalist, I never knew about writing aids like the AP Style Book, the Associated Press' ultimate reference guide for American journalists on how to word sentences. 

Its antithesis, The Fake AP Style Book, is sometimes funny, sometimes corny. (Caution: its contributors are also sometimes crude). Here's a sampling:

The passive voice should be avoided by you.

Time Zones should be capitalized: Eastern Standard Time, Greenwich Mean Time, Venusian Xzy%b¨ørg Time.

Your newsroom is allotted one usage of "Trial of the Century" every ten years. Please choose carefully.

When covering a flood always include a photo of a dog stranded on a roof. Throw your own dog up there if needed.

To make foreign interview subjects seem exotic and wise, alter their quotes so they speak like Yoda.

Stories about people who claim to have psychic abilities must always be written as though they aren't liars, for some reason.

To describe more than one octopus, use sixteentopus, twentyfourtopus, thirtytwotopus, and so on.

Correct spellings are: Sanford & Son, Five & Dime, ham s&wich, &y Gibb, ampers&, etc.

When writing front-page headlines, make sure they are clear, can be read while spinning, and move the movie's plot forward.

Use the suffix "-ista" to describe someone famous who doesn't really do anything.

can't hardly -- Implies a double negative. Better to use "cain't might could."

Use parentheses for parenthetical asides, brackets for bracketological b-sides.

The seemingly odd usage of "ironic" in Ms. Morissette's song is due to errors during translation from the original Canadian.

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Notes:
*) The magazine's self-references were in small caps to distinquish the name from other publications. 
**) The masthead lists the names and positions of the magazine's staff.