English: Logo of Headlines Today (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
So I get up this morning and as usual I start skimming the web. I am looking for news that I find interesting, funny, exciting, irritating or just strange. This morning I found a wealth of headlines that made my eyebrows shoot up towards my almost non-existent hairline.
Entire firework display explodes – this was a video that fit the bill of funny and irritating. Of course I would find it funny, I didn’t fight crowds of people to see it live. Nor did I have to pay for parking and then have to fight to get back to my car when the fifteen second display finished. But for the folks who attended, I think maybe irritated would be the order of the day, or in this case night. I wonder if San Diego will try to make it up to the citizens, legal and illegal, who attended the show.
Imogen Thomas shows cleavage – I don’t know who Imogen is, but, I am pleased for her I guess. This one falls straight into the irritating category. If I hadn’t seen the other “headlines” I would have thought it was a slow news day.
Man dies as road swallows car – this one is brilliant. The mental picture you get while reading this one is funny. I got an image of a road sprouting a mouth, opening wide and working it’s muscles literally swallowing the car. The reality, while nowhere near as graphic or fantasy filled, is just as strange. Two people driving in China and the road literally opens up into a five metre hole “that about thirty some odd feet for you non-metric folks out there). Funny with a touch of sad, since one of the unfortunate motorist died.
Pencil Pierces Brain of Two-Year-Old Girl - Pretty self explanatory this one. A toddler on her way to bed falls and almost gives herself a DIY Lobotomy. Luckily for her it did not result in a more fatal injury. Strange and a little interesting. It kind of feels like a ‘human interest’ story in shorthand.
Base jumper survives 120m fall – Another ‘it does what it says on the label’ type story. Guy’s jump goes wrong and he free falls 393 feet and survives. Luckily he landed in snow, so he only fractured about every bone in his body. But…he lived. Another strange and interesting one.
Okay, so admittedly, these ‘headlines’ were all about the video news. These items were all produced by ITN (aka ITV 3) and they were picked presumably because of their diverse nature. Well they certainly caught my eye.
They funny thing is, all these stories made me think of the video equivalent of The National Enquirer. The “newspaper” that used the tagline, “Because inquiring minds want to know,” has been a supermarket favourite for years. *About fifty in fact.*
A lot of people, mainly celebrities, despise the Enquirer. I’ve always found it quirky and downright weird. With is old ‘yellow journalistic’ style of writing I’ve always been drawn to it if for no other reason than to give it a quick scan while waiting in the check-out queue.
The Enquirer used to boast great eye-catching headlines like: Toddler eaten by rats while horrified mother watches, Elvis is alive and living in the back of my car, and Freakish sea monster eats entire ship. I mean just the headlines alone, made for great imaginative skim reading.
While those video ‘headlines’ I saw this morning don;t quite match the tasteless ingenuity of The National Enquirer they are, at least, the spiritual blood-brother of the paper. It is nice to see that with all the horrible, scary and depressing news that we are usually bombarded with someone has made time for the weird and the wonderful.
Related articles
- Epic Firework Fail (scrappysam.com)
- Aprils showers ‘catch out’ Imogen Thomas (mya.co.uk)
- Imogen Thomas nearly pops out of her plunging pink dress… and a bit of bending over doesn’t help matters (dailymail.co.uk)
- Lindsay Lohan Being Advised by Michael Jackson’s Spirit? (gossipcop.com)
- Throwback Thursday: Awesomely Weird. (fashiongrunge.com)
- San Diego Really Screwed Up Their Fireworks Display (buzzfeed.com)
- Hall: What we lost in fireworks, we gained in legend (utsandiego.com)
- Keep America Weird (woot.com)
- Believe It Or Not – Ripley’s Set To Open At Inner Harbor (baltimore.cbslocal.com)
- The Daily Grind: What weird things have you learned from an MMO? (massively.joystiq.com)
- Weird-Mart: Tales of the Bizarre from the Walmart Aisles (dailyfinance.com)
