supercaleygoballistic

The fascinating Republican primary campaign was bound to yield some great headlines around the world, and sure enough I spotted a tweet this week from the BBC’s Mark Simpson crediting the Irish Times with: ROMNEY WINNING IN MATHS, FAILING IN CHEMISTRY.

And not unreasonably, since it was the headline on their article. Reading the piece we find that this is a line taken from Julie Hirschfeld Davis of Bloomberg News and only slightly tweaked, but that doesn’t greatly lessen it as a piece of work: sometimes the sub-editor is wisest simply to take the best line from an article and use it as the headline. Spotting these occasions is itself a skill.

That is of course the sort of thing that this blog is meant to highlight – but I knew I wasn’t going to be able to stop myself for long from writing about bad headlines. Not bad like today’s Sunday Sun headline is bad: LAMPARD’S PAEDO UNCLE AND GIRL, 13. I take it all back from last week – this issue’s weak, although it did set me off on a pleasant train of thought that went something like “Everyone has a paedo uncle… for this to be a good story it would need to be Lamps himself… LAMPAEDO… Not quite… If only Ian Thorpe liked 13-year-old girls and I worked at The Sun“.

I mean, they know their business, and presumably paedo and football references of any kind are like catnip to Sun readers. We’re talking indisputably, mind-numbingly bad, like: TIME TO TAKE AN INTEGRATED APPROACH TO CULTURAL DIVERSITY. That’s just one of my colleague’s collection of Irish Times comment headlines. He’s had all these for at least five years, taking them out of a drawer every now and then to giggle over them. Apparently we used to subscribe but then some goddamned bean-counter decided that utterly ludicrous headlines weren’t a good enough reason to spend company’s money. Talk about stifling creativity.

Still, there are some gems in his collection so having seen in the Romney line my opportunity to praise the IT before damning it, I took a moment to scan them. Still not sure I’m not just being evil? Witness exhibit A.

AIR ACCESS POLICIES MUST CATER FOR REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT NEEDS. I’ll say. That one’s just a no-brainer, isn’t it. An air access policy without regional development-need catering is like, well, I don’t know, cultural diversity without an integrated approach.

We have, in fact, a little bit of an approach theme. ASPECTS OF MEDVEDEV’S RISE POINT TO FRESH APPROACH, says another. (These are quite old, sorry. But then again with the benefit of hindsight we can see that this headline is not only catatonically inane but tragically misguided.)

Then there was a story about cancer. Did the sub consider that this disease is diagnosed in some 10,000 Irishmen and women each year? Did he or she imagine that the wider families of those tragically affected people will also have an emotional connection with this issue, and think about how to engage them? No doubt – before hitting them with the A-bomb again: HARNEY COMES OUT FIGHTING WITH CALL FOR BIPARTISAN APPROACH TO CANCER. “Read me!” it screams. “If you want to die of boredom before the melanoma gets you!”

The great mystery is this. Did the APPROACH approach belong to a single sub? Or perhaps an unimaginative section editor? Who is this dullard? Or could it be that somebody went rogue? Looking at them all set out in front of me, cut from just a few months in the summer of 2007, I think to myself: is this a disgruntled union member, working to rule? I certainly hope so, not least because it would mean that this post was, like all the others, about truly great headlines.

Seriously. I’ve saved the best till last. Just try to write something more boring than the below. You can’t, can you?

Respect to the Irish joker. Respect.