Sometimes you really have to work to understand the news of the day.

Headline Washington Times: NAAC Pasks Fox to speak amid rift

A Google search reveals that NAAC is the North American Anarchist Conference. This conference took place August 11-17, 2000, and the web site was setup to organize the anarchists for the Democratic Convention in Los Angeles.

I don’t know how well they did organizing the anarchists. The More Info page doesn’t help much, but it does contains this interesting statement:

This web site contains as much information about the conference as we have. Please be patient and more will be added as it comes available.

Seeing as it has been almost five years since the event and they are still trying to update the site as soon as information becomes available, perhaps they are actually a procrastinators conference instead of an anarchists conference, but I digress.

It is clear that the Anarchists are fighting among themselves, hence the headline reference to the rift. Naturally, we wouldn’t expect anything else from anarchists.

We now know what NAAC is. But what is NAAC doing when it “Pasks”?

Dictionary.com explains that “pask” is a an alternate spelling for pasch [Passover or Easter] or pasque [a type of purple flower that blooms around Easter].

So the meaning of the headline now becomes clear: A group of anarchists has been fighting among themselves. But for some reason that is not immediately clear, they have given purple flowers to a fox in order to persuade the fox to speak to the fighting anarchists.

Either that or there is some punctuation error somewhere.