The second-best headline of all time

boing
21

Super Caley Go Ballistic Celtic Are Atrocious

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22

Man Bites Dog.

23

I suspect that the Daily Mail still thinks that “Hurrah for the Blackshirts” is its best headline of all time.

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24

“Win free Sex” turns out to a story about the worst possible Sex.

For “Mr Jackson, of 3A Milton Avenue, Hounslow Middlesex”, this particular sexual encounter turned out to be so deeply unsatisfying that in his words “I lost at Sex. I was humiliated. My genitalia went missing, and I did not enjoy it at all. It wasn’t a win win situation. It was win-free, for all concerned, especially the emergency workers.”

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25

That’s a funny story, but not a real headline.

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The Guardian disagrees

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27

“Fog in Channel - Continent Isolated”

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28

Boy Trapped in Refrigerator Eats Own Foot

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In the “Top N”

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30

I saw that tweet, and assumed that DailyMailUS was an Onion ripoff. True story.

31

Fog in Channel. Continent Cut Off.

32

I can imagine that being written without a hint of irony, too.

33

If that headline had run in the Times any time between 1785 and 2007, it would appear in the Times Digital Archive. And it doesn’t.

It’s possible that some paper other than The Times ran that headline. But the Guardian is quite specific that it’s The Times. So the Guardian is wrong.

I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news. I’d love to be wrong. Go ahead and cite the paper that ran that headline. I’ll wait here.

34

I’ll admit defeat as I dont have access to a legal deposit library.

35

Do we count The Onion? How about Gay Teen Worried He Might Be Christian?

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36

Nut Screws Washer and Bolts.

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37

Haven’t you heard? ‘Complaining about the Mail is a tired meme and we’ve previously declared it over and done with’ (2009).

My vote is for ‘Banana on trial for sodomy’.

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38

If I were Gordon Ramsay, I´d have this headline framed and hung in the hallway.

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39

I did a fair bit of legwork looking for that headline, requesting bound annual indexes from the storage facility of a local library and eventually figuring out how to get access to The Times’ online database. I also spent quite a while trying to get Google to cough it up. I really wanted it to be true; it’s a great headline.

If Rob Beschizza were to publish an article saying that his father had been briefly famous in the 50s as Marilyn Monroe’s acupuncturist, you could go to Google and search for something like “Marilyn Monroe acupuncture” or “Marilyn Monroe acupuncure Beschizza”. If you found links to old magazine articles that told the story, you’d know that Rob was telling the truth. If all the links went to the modern-day claim, then the claim is probably false. And the more the story gets told in the present, the more suspicious it is if no original source shows up. Sadly, this is the story of “Foot Heads Arms Body”: there are a ton of Web pages that say, “This really happened years ago. Really”. But there aren’t any pages that say, “Daily Telegraph, 4 August 1982: Foot Heads Arms Body”.

So yeah, great headline. But not a real headline, in the sense of having actually been printed in a newspaper.

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40

Oh my fucking God.

I came here to mention The Onion’s “Other Guy Defeats What’s-His-Face”. But when I got here, I found that the thread was over.

1 Like