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.

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“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.

Ghoti Hook – "Sumo Surprise" (1996)

I'm a full-fledged Sumo wrestler wannabe

Even if you keep on making fun of me

The host of a talk-radio show that I listen to regularly was talking the other day about headlines that are so intriguing that you just have to read the underlying stories.

Here's one such headline:

Woman in Sumo Wrestler Suit Assaults Ex-Girlfriend in Gay Pub After She Waved at Man Dressed as a Snickers Bar

Believe it or not, that turns to be an actual headline from an Irish newspaper about an incident that took place in 2008 in Dublin.  (A story about a drunken bar fight in Ireland is not exactly man bites dog, is it?)

On, I almost forgot – the incident took place on Halloween night.  That explains the sumo wrestler outfit and Snickers bar costume.  (Sort of.)

Here’s the headline that was in Gawker:

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

Which headline do you think is more compelling?  

The original mentions the kind of candy bar the dude was dressed up as – a Snickers – while the Gawker headline didn’t.

But the Gawker headline used a superior verb – “bludgeoned” is clearly better than “assaulted.”

Plus Gawker identified the weapon used by the woman in the sumo outfit: a Smirnoff Ice bottle.  That’s an important detail.

From the Gawker story:

It was a crime of infinite ridiculousness: dressed in a sumo wrestling suit, Sandra Talbot assaulted her ex-girlfriend with her own girth and a bottle of Smirnoff Ice, vengeance for flirting with a man dressed as a giant Snickers bar.

A Dublin court convicted Talbot yesterday [of committing] the assault . . . on Halloween night, 2008.  Talbot was dressed as a sumo wrestler, and she ran into ex-girlfriend Adrienne Martin at a gay bar.

During the evening Talbot, who was wearing an inflatable sumo suit, bumped into Martin.  When she turned around, the accused said to her: “Keep smiling, c**t.”

(Oh my!)

Later, a man dressed as a Snickers bar began waving at her and when she went to wave back, Talbot pushed her arm from behind. . . . 

The confrontation escalated.  Talbot reached into the folds of her inflatable flesh, where she had hidden a bottle of Smirnoff Ice.

Inflatable sumo wrestler costume
 ($57.99 from halloweenexpress.com)

“The next thing, I got a blow to the left side of my head beside the temple," Ms. Martin said.  "My knees went from under me and I went down.  She walked away, laughing and sneering at me.  I had a massive lump on the side of my head.”

It’s hard to escape the scene of the crime when you’re wearing an inflatable sumo-wrestling costume.

Talbot, an aspiring tattoo artist, "was escorted out and had to be asked to partially deflate her costume so she could get out the door."

Talbot’s lawyer offered an imaginative defense, but it failed to persuade the judge:

But how did she carry the [bottle of] Smirnoff in her suit?  This mystery was at the center of Talbot's defense: . . . that she could not have fit the weapon in her sleeve due to the suit's “air-tight seal.”  But her protestations were not enough: Talbot was found guilty and fined 400 pounds.

* * * * *

“Super Sumo” was released on Ghoti Hook’s 1996 album, Sumo Surprise. 

That album has been described as “a pop punk CD, with a tendency toward both humor and evangelical Christianity.”  (As my mother would say, “It’s different.”)

Here’s “Super Sumo,” which sounds a little like the way Green Day would sound if they had a sense of humor:

Click below to buy the song from Amazon: