Olympic Curling Team Found Stoned
Earthquake Victims’ Faith is Shaken
Man Shot, Home Rifled
Out of Sight Donations for the Blind
If it wasn’t real, I bet it was surreal.
9/11 Charity Collapses
Officials Identify Underground Movement of Subway Commuters
“Jurisprudence Fetishist Gets Off On Technicality.”
I assume most of you have heard of FARK? Their shtick is to re-write headlines.
[COLOR=black][FONT=Trebuchet MS]Here is their 2011 headlines of the year contest. [/FONT][/COLOR]
Farrier Injured in Workplace Shoeing
Here’s an actual one from the July 15, 2012 Washington Post sports section: “Like U-Conn on Steroids”–a quote from Geno Auriemma, coach of the U.S. women’s basketball team. Now, he’s referring to the “talent and expectations” of his team, but still.
Just inches below is another article: “A Shadow of a Doubt: Olympians are scrutinized as much as celebrated thanks to drug suspicions.”
Sports Headline:
Air Force Shoots Down Virginia Tech
Two most-common sources of punny headlines, in genres that seem to have made an art-form of it:
– Sports Writers
– Wall Street Journal. (and other financial writers too?)
I once saw a prep school sports headline that read like the ultimate Japanese monster movie:
Christ the King Destroys Gonzaga
In my fathers time, Chapel Hill had a star basketball player named Peters. FYI, in the south, Peter is slang for penis. So when the guy got injured, the school paper headline read, “Team plays without Peters.” Someone must have told them to change it because the next day it said, “Team plays with Peters out.”
Angry St. Louis man rams house with bulldozer.
St. Louis Rams, haha.
Actual top-of-page headline in our local paper, one week after 9/11:
“Muslims Prey on Friday”
(they later confessed to the typo)
The same guy who gave the BBC iPlayer a volume control that went up to 11 must write some of their article headlines. Before it was updated, this article went with the more alarming “Cancer in over 65s predicted to explode”.
And this is apparently from a Huffington Post article on the death of Tony Scott.