Yesterday we asked for your best sleazy tabloid headlines for the story about the gay British cannibal chef who is now cooking for his fellow inmates in prison. There were many brilliant lines, but in the end only one could win and that was Carol Gardens' lovely and simple "Irony Chef." Yay! Thanks to Steve Dressler for the mock-up. Click the thumb to view it in full.
Entrepreneur and longtime entertainment executive Neil McGinness bought the deadpan supermarket tabloid Weekly World News from American Media, according to the Times, 14 months after the last issue was printed amid anemic circulation. McGinness has "revived" the website, which AMI had promised to keep open (as publishers tend to do), and might even bring back the print edition. The idea is that online advertising, licensing and movie deals can succeed where the prior incarnation failed. Plus, it's something of a golden age of satire, what with the Onion and Daily Show and so forth. The new site already has old staples Bat Boy and Ed Anger, but the headlines aren't quite up to snuff yet. Perhaps the site's distinguished editors can take some inspiration from this list of headlines from the past (add your own in the comments!):
Remember our good friend Anthony Morley? You know Anthony, he's the Mr. Gay UK winner who slit his lover's throat and then fried him up with olive oil and various spices and ate him. He's a nice young chap, and ha ha!, he was a chef by trade. So that's creepy and funny in a really terrible way. Well he was just sent to prison and, wouldn't you know it, he'll be working as a prison chef! The good news is that they're not letting him use knives. Since this is such a salacious, baroque bit of scandal, we figured we needed a splashy tabloid headline to commemorate the occasion. We came up with the awful one above, and we bet you can beat it. Leave your best gay cannibal headlines in the comments and we'll pick our favorite. Winner gets fame and glory in Photoshopped newspaper form.
"COPS IN NUDE TASER SLAY", right? That is the headline of the day! Until you, you know, read the story. And it's about the NYPD killing a mentally ill dude with some tasers. He was armed with a fluorescent light and his nakedness, so he was tasered, and he fell from the second-floor awning he was standing on and landed, face-first, on the street, and was sent to a hospital, where he died. "'This is very out of character,' said the building's superintendent, Charlene Gayle, 31." He meant out of character for the dead, naked guy. Not for the NYPD! There is a video of some of this attached because we're ghouls.
So the press was entirely shut out of Sarah Palin's magical journey through the UN today. They are making up for it by being quietly bitchy. The headlines: "Palin meets her first world leaders in New York." (You know, from first world countries like Afghanistan!) And here is the most sarcastic Associated Press lead sentence ever:
CERN's Large Hadron Collider, "the biggest physics experiment in history," fired its proton beam down its 17-mile tunnel this morning. No miniature black holes resulted. (So far.) To learn everything you need to know about the news today, just click to see how Matt Drudge put it, in what is perhaps the single finest one-two-punch headline combination he's ever crafted. [Drudge, all posts tagged 'Science With Drudge']
We were told Ted Kennedy, who's battling advanced brain cancer, had mere weeks to live. We were told there'd be a macabre video salute to the man in lieu of an actual appearance in Denver. So when he actually showed up on stage at the DNC to deliver a genuinely rousing speech, well, it was an emotional moment. So emotional that the major tabloids of both New York and Boston could not come up with original headlines. The Post raves!
People are outraged that Rush Limbaugh just said something offensive! This is him talking about Barack Obama somehow: "I think it really goes back to the fact that nobody had the guts to stand up and say no to a black guy." Except Rush, obv! Racist! But, you know, who cares? This is probably a sign that the terrorists have WON but it is actually impossible to be outraged by this man anymore. Did you even notice that he said two even more offensive things about Barack Obama this week? No you did not, unless you are Media Matters! On Monday, Rush said that Obama "believes it is proper to kill a baby that has survived an abortion," which is a lie they say but who cares. And, uh, yesterday Rush said this:
Bernann McKinney mortgaged her home to travel to South Korea to have her pit bull cloned. Turns out, 30 years ago she kidnapped a Mormon missionary, chained him to a bed, and allegedly forced him to have sex with her. The Times of London further reports: "To add further mystery and zing to the whole story, Mr Anderson was said to have been wearing a Mormon chastity belt at the time." [The Australian, The Times]
OK, not really, but hah! "I thought it was a stick," the befrosted American Idol host said. "I wasn't sure what had happened." Motorcycles are attacking Lindsay! Alcohol is sneaking its way into Shia LaBeouf's bloodstream and forcing his hand to turn the ignition key! And now Seacrest is being eaten by wild animals. I take it back! News is not slow! [Us]
CNN.com's business of selling t-shirts is starting to gain some traction and go viral, even after the network closed a security hole that let you write whatever headline you wanted. Obama supporters flocked to buy the "Obama Makes History" headline on a shirt last week, breaking sales records. Another boost came when Anderson Cooper said he wanted Donna Brazile to be his "boo," and people flocked to buy a shirt reading, "Anderson Cooper, ‘you're not my boo.'" It's now the number-three all-time bestseller. But, in true mainstream media fashion, CNN is doing its best to thwart its own online success. The network selectively blocks some of the best headlines, like "Grizzly Victim: 'He's eating my brain!'" There's now a whole website dedicated just to non-shirt-eligible headlines, like these:
Barack Obama is the Democratic nominee for President! It's so exciting and historic! Finally, newspapers across the nation get to run all those "what does it mean that we have a black candidate" pieces they've been sitting on for months. In the interest of having something new to say about this campaign of a thousand cuts, we've compiled a gallery of newspaper front pages from around the nation (but mostly New York and DC). Check them out, along with our commentary and exclusive analysis, below.
