Who – "Miracle Cure" (1969)

Extra, extra

Read all about it

Extra! 

The last 2 or 3 lines discussed the true story behind this Gawker.com headline:

Lady in Sumo Suit Bludgeoned Ex with Smirnoff Ice for Flirting with Man Dressed as a Candy Bar

If you’re not familiar with Gawker, it was recently described in a magazine article as “a spiteful, bile-fueled gossip rag whose decisions of questionable newsworthiness included posting a video of a heavily intoxicated woman having sex in a public bathroom.”  

Typical Gawker headline

That may be true, but more traditional news outlets could learn a thing or two about writing headlines from Gawker.

Big media companies are struggling to make money these days.  TV viewers refuse to sit through commercials, and TMZ is eating the old-school networks’ lunch when it comes to breaking the kind of stories that the hoi polloi care about – which is to say stories about celebrities, stories about sex scandals, and stories about celebrity sex scandals.  

No one under the age of 50 reads newspapers any more, so even snooty publications like the Washington Post are relying on sensational National Enquirer-style headlines to get attention.  

Best headline of all time?

I get a daily e-mail called The Post Most that highlights the most popular stories in that paper that day.  Here are the subject lines from four recent The Post Most e-mails:

May 11:  Why a South Carolina man got bail after he shot, buried and ‘slow-cooked’ two people.

May 17:  “They cut my son’s head off, and they took my son’s head. Who would do that?”

May 19:  Teen killed his girlfriend’s parents and celebrated with sex. He’s being released after 5 years.

June 1:  “Her blood was drained”: Graphic novelist charged with killing girlfriend in Hollywood.

It’s hard to say which one of these is the most appalling.

I might write a post about each of those four stories, or I might write about only one of them.  It will depend largely on whether the stories live up to the headlines, and how quickly I get bored or distracted.

* * * * *

“Miracle Cure,” which is only 13 seconds long, is the shortest song ever featured on 2 or 3 lines.  It’s one of five tracks on Tommy that’s less than one minute long.

“Extra” is short for “extra edition,” which newspapers used to publish when war was declared, or a President was assassinated, or there was some other news event that was so extraordinary that it couldn’t wait for the regular edition of the paper to be published.  Newspaper street vendors would shout “Extra! Extra! Read all about it!” to get the attention of potential newspaper buyers.

Here’s “Miracle Cure”:

I can’t imagine anyone in his or her right mind would spend $1.29 to buy a 13-second song, so I’m skipping the usual link to Amazon.