49 thoughts on “Best headline in the history of the world”

  4. That’s a good one, but I think the best headline ever is still:

    “Gordon Ramsay’s Dwarf Porn Double Found Dead in a Badger Den”

    1. That’s brilliant. A shout out for ‘Cork Man Drowns’ too, and ‘Super Caley Go Ballistic; Celtic Are Atrocious'(the deathless headline after Caledonian Thistle FC thrashed Celtic in the Scottish Premier League), but yours is ace.

      1. Allegedly (“allegedy”) it was Aberdeen’s “P&J” newspaper, who published the corresponding headline for the Titanic disaster.
        I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find there were as many local variants around the world as there are variants of “[town just up the coast from US] hung a monkey who was washed ashore after the [Spanish Armada or other enemy fleet] went past, thinking the monkey was a [foreign sailor / spy]”.
        I’ve heard at least three local variants of the story in the UK.

        1. The hanging the monkey as a spy story is generally attributed to Hartlepool in NE England where the version goes that the monkey was the only survivor from a wrecked French ship. It is supposed to be an invention but it would be lovely for it to be true!
          I believe visiting football fans taunt supporters of Hartlepool Town Football Club as ‘monkey hangers’. However, the insult has been taken on as a badge of pride as the club mascot is a monkey with the appallingly bad pun of H’Angus the Monkey for a name. This took an even more surreal twist when H’Angus the Monkey stood for election as Mayor of Hartlepool and was duly elected!

          A very similar story is associated with Boddam in Aberdeenshire.

          1. I was specifically referring to Boddam (well, Peterhead, which Boddam is a couple of miles outside of) and Hartlepool. The same story has been told of one of the Clydeside town from before Glasgow “brought them all together / and in the darkness bound them” (I’ve been injecting Tolkein quotes into conversation today because … it freaks some people and amuses others.) And I’m fairly sure I’ve heard the story in other respects too.
            At the end of the day, it’s a good, almost credible story for insulting the people just close enough to be a potential threat, but far enough away to be “other”.

  5. Best headline ever? Well, I suppose it beats the apocryphal one The Times (London) declared the most boring ever: “Small Earthquake in Chile, Not Many Dead.”

    1. I do remember hearing about a headline in a local paper: ‘Hounslow Man Dies Of Natural Causes’. That surely runs it close.

    4. Probably apocryphal but the wartime headline
      “German Push Bottles up British Rear”
      is quite a good one.

  8. No-hopers Inverness Caledonian Thistles in shock football…er, soccer…anyway, footie win over Scottish royalty Glasgow Celtic.

    Sun headline: Super Caley go ballistic, Celtic are atrocious. x

        1. On the subject of plagiarism, Saul, did you know that the Sun genius headline was nicked, according to 4-2-4, the footie mag?

          They say that in 1970, when Liverpool massacred Queens Park Rangers and Ian Callaghan, the winger had a belter, the headline was:

          Super Cally goes ballistic, QPR atrocious. x

          1. Okay, this is just weird – I spent about ten minutes yesterday looking for exactly the headline you mention. It’s so much more elegant and it’s the one I was thinking of, but that gauche Sun knockoff kept coming up. I just assumed I’d imagined the original, much more aesthetically pleasing headline.

            It’s a work of art, that headline.

          3. I was a left-wing firebrand in my teen years – I had a beautiful left foot and modelled myself on Giggsy.

          4. Snap! Sunday morning League with massive hang-overs, entire out-field donating the half-time oranges to the goalie who could barely see. Skipping, late adolescently, over some lunging 36 year-old pot-bellied Chopper Harris as he tried to acquaint my knee with his 12 studs. George Best in my head, but never as beautiful or talented. x

  9. I want to know what the frogs did to scare his cattle.

    Maybe the sight of some frogs glopping down a flannel shirt would do it, but no doubt there are many others on a site like this who are better qualified than me to weigh in on this topic.

    1. Since we are talking about Minnesota, the cows are likely dairy cows. The farmer saying his cows were scared would likely mean they were not giving milk, at least as normal.

      When the cow’s milk production goes down at all, it has to be caused by something and frogs will do.

  13. My own favourite also relates to English football. Brazilian footballer Emerson was playing for provincial club Middlesbrough and was late back for pre season training, apparrently because he was being wooed by Italian club Parma. Anyways, the headline in the local paper read ‘Emerson late and Parma’. Ok so you’ve got to know your 70s prog rock, but still……

  14. There was a recent news item about a man calling the cops for help because his car wouldn’t start. So they went to his aid and promptly cuffed him for being way over the legal alcohol limit.

  16. The Age Newspaper, Melbourne, Australia, today:-
    “Movie Studio Denies Leonardo di Caprio was Raped by a Bear”

  17. A frog eating flannel…hmmm…now that’s a hard mental image to reproduce. Even my most destructive d*g has a hard time with flannel or other tough fabrics.

  18. One of my all-time favorite headlines, from an online forum (maybe Slashdot?), announced the death of the creator of cartoon dog Scooby-Doo. The headline read simply:

    “Ruh-Roh!”

    (Not surprisingly, despite pretty obvious sadness and affection behind both the headline and the article, a number of commenters complained that the headline was offensive…)

  20. The baseball pitcher Bartolo Colón inspired a number of interesting headlines during his career. When he pitched for the Angels in Southern California, my co-workers and I would keep an eye on the L.A. Times Sports section every fourth game to see what the headline might be.

    Of course, the name “Colón” should have the accent over the second ‘o’, but American newspapers often dispense with such niceties. Thus, such headlines as “Colon Absorbs Another Pounding” took on an entirely different, and probably intentional, meaning. Several of these headlines can be found if you search Google Images for “Bartolo Colon Headlines.”

    Of course, we would try to come up with appropriately inappropriate headlines ourselves. During the height of the steroid scandal, we came up with the fake headline “Steroid Probe Fingers Colon.” Nuff said.

  21. If it’s plagues of frogs you want, then there used to be a poster in a.b.p.a (alt.binaries.pictures.animals ; USENET) answering to “Rod Outback”, because his name is Rod and he lived in the Outback. And when the rains came, shortly came the frogs. In abundance. In superabundance.
    Roddy has moved his photos to PhotoBucket now, and reduced the amount considerably. http://s1035.photobucket.com/user/Rod_Outback/library/Wildlife/The%20Frog%20Guild?sort=3&page=1

      1. Roddy was a very popular poster. IIRC, his threads would attract cross-posting spam from another Australian, who was going on about the “Expanding Earth Theory” (unmitigated bullshit, but I really need to get back to my rocks. Don’t waste your time following it up.), to which Rod would respond with another couple of dozen frog photos. Quite impressive for someone who ran a farm and had to maintain his own satellite link.

  22. This puts me in mind of the notes in the Harry Smith Anthology. “Zoologic Miscegeny Achieved in Mouse Frog Nuptials, Relatives Approve.”

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