Though admitting I am “usually fair about admitting when a good headline is unusable,” one reader wrote to say he was “disappointed (albeit, with a lack of any overly strong emotion)” in the headline of my previous installment. See “Parking Company Apologizes to Formerly Dead Woman for $80 Ticket” (Aug. 20, 2026). He then delivered what he described, somewhat apologetically, as a “petty rant” about whether that woman had in fact been “dead” at any time before the company gave her the parking ticket.

First of all, if there’s anyone to whom you need not apologize for delivering petty rants, or the “pedantry” for which someone else recently apologized, it’s this guy right here. In fact, I’m sure a significant percentage of the 4,023 articles currently available here involve one or the other (if not both), and for that matter you could probably describe this whole project as a “petty rant,” one that has now gone on for well over three million words. So no apology necessary.

Second, the reader is correct that the woman was never “technically dead,” as I described her. She had a heart attack, and according to her father, paramedics told him her heart had stopped and so “momentarily, she was technically dead.” But, as the reader points out, “cessation of heartbeat” alone has not been the definition of technical deadness “since around the end of the 19th century.” Cessation of heartbeat is now referred to as “clinical death,” which, he explained, is technically not “death.” Technical death is also not reversible, he noted, so by definition she could not have been “formerly dead” because she was later alive.

These are all excellent points. The explanation, of course, is that I assumed it would go without saying that when I wrote “formerly dead,” I meant “formerly clinically dead,” so the adverb would be unnecessary. (Space is tight in headlines, you see.) My only use of “technically dead” was in quoting her father, who I think can be excused for this error under the circumstances. And because the reader concedes both that “clinically dead” is (1) a kind of dead and (2) the kind that’s reversible, I feel safe in saying my headline was accurate. Or at least technically accurate. Cf.“Felon Who Died in Tragic Fall Found Alive in Closet” (Aug. 24, 2020) (similarly using “died” in a way that was accurate by implication).

Well, all that pedantry was in advance of me clarifying that today‘s headline, while also accurate, isn’t accurate in precisely the same way as previous similar headlines. See, e.g., “Author of ‘How to Murder Your Husband’ Accused of Murdering Husband” (Sept. 12, 2018); and its unsurprising follow-up, “Author of ‘How to Murder Your Husband’ Convicted of Murdering Husband” (May 27, 2022); see also “Author of ‘Why We Get Duped’ Admits He Got Duped” (Feb. 10, 2009). In those cases, a person did something illegal and/or embarrassing despite having previously written and published a book describing that thing, thus publicizing evidence that they had been thinking about doing it. (See also pretty much everything in my “Social Media” category, e.g., “Facebook: Bad News for Bigamists” (Mar. 29, 2011)).

This case is different because the book had not yet been published. [Update: see below.]

But it was still potential evidence against a 51-year-old British man who was accused of doing what the headline says. As the BBC reported last week, the man put on a balaclava before entering a bank in January, pulling “an item wrapped with a white cloth” from his pocket, and pointing it at cashiers while saying “I’m robbing the bank.” Sadly the report doesn’t provide the security-camera footage, but it says at least some witnesses were able to see that the item was only a banana. Some of those people “immediately ushered [the man] out of the bank,” the report states.

Police detained the man and later searched his home, where, according to the BBC, they “found his laptop which contained a plan of the robbery, three bananas and five copies of a book he had written called The Man Who Robbed a Bank With a Banana.” While that sentence needs an Oxford comma, that is by no means its biggest problem. I would suggest “found three bananas, a laptop that contained a plan of the robbery, and five copies of a book he had written called The Man Who Robbed a Bank With a Banana.” Unless the laptop in fact contained three bananas, in which case I will apologize to the BBC.

It really should apologize to us for not being clear about the charges levied against this man for pointing a banana at people. (The report says “[s]ome people shouted ‘it’s a gun,'” but it doesn’t seem to have been very well concealed.) The man “was originally charged with attempted robbery but admitted being a public nuisance,” so that might reflect a plea deal. According to the judge, while the banana was harmless, disguising it to look like a weapon was “more than capable of causing psychological harm,” which I suppose is true. In any event, though the man had an existing criminal record, evidence showed he also had a “long history of mental illness” for which he is now being treated. Ultimately the court sentenced him to three years in prison, most of it suspended. Presumably he has also been ordered to stay at least 100 meters away from fruit.

Update: Well, I assumed it had not been published, but I thought “why not check Amazon” and lo and behold, there it was. According to the description of “The Man Who Robbed a Bank With a Banana,” published in some sense in January 2024, the 74-page book tells the story of a mental-health patient who writes a book called “The Man Who Robbed a Bank With a Banana[,] which is about an author who can’t sell his books because” he’s not well-known. To solve this problem, the protagonist “decides to cover a banana with handkerchiefs and rob a bank to get known.” He will then be better able to sell the book he wrote about a fictional man who robbed a bank with a banana—which that character presumably did in order to get publicity for his book about a similar man, and so on, and so on, forever. Now that the real-life author of “The Man Who Robbed a Bank With a Banana” has done what his protagonist did, I’m starting to think this is both an impressive post-modern literary achievement and also the flaw that will destroy the Matrix, as it has been destroyed so many times before. I still wouldn’t pay 20 bucks for it, though.