Fortunately, news headlines are quite formulaic. It's now possible to rip them in twain and recombine them to form the real news. So offbeat, it never happened.

Dog Bites Dog

Dog Bites Dog has been retired. The site it took its headlines from changed long ago, and it stopped finding any news to recombine.

About

The original headlines were taken every hour from azcentral.com, and the shuffled headlines were updated every five minutes.

Dog Bites Dog was powered by a couple of Python scripts: one that used Beautiful Soup to scrape headlines, and one that used FRELI to figure out where to chop up the headlines.

Several problems can lead to malformed headlines (as oppose to merely nonsensical headlines, which are good clean fun). The most egregious (and easy to fix) is the disagreement between a singular object and a plural predicate, or vice versa. Other headlines prove intractable due to the vagaries of English syntax or words that have multiple meanings; the script usually knows to ignore a headline it can't understand, but sometimes it oversteps the bounds of its circumscribed knowledge without realizing it.

Thanks to Sumana Harihareswara for naming this feature.