AXED ED DEAD
June 9, 2015 5:20 PM   Subscribe

Former NY Post editor and film critic Vincent Musetto has met his own deadline. Vincent, aged 74, was generally acknowledged as the author of the famous tag HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR. You can watch an interview with him here.
posted by Joe in Australia (15 comments total) 9 users marked this as a favorite
 

posted by Joe in Australia at 5:20 PM on June 9, 2015


Joe, you beat me to it. The N.Y. Times' obit is also a good read.

And in other headline news, this howler:
posted by key_of_z at 5:39 PM on June 9, 2015 [4 favorites]


Beyond being the greatest headline ever, it probably represents the apogee of what can be written in English.
posted by Renoroc at 6:16 PM on June 9, 2015 [2 favorites]


.
posted by lalochezia at 6:24 PM on June 9, 2015


I am old enough and lucky enough to have first seen that headline on the paper as I picked it up at the store, for my dad.
RIP, Vinnie.
posted by bashos_frog at 6:33 PM on June 9, 2015 [2 favorites]


;
posted by eriko at 6:39 PM on June 9, 2015


My favorite recent headline: Saudis Drop Bid to Behead of UN Rights Council
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 6:58 PM on June 9, 2015 [1 favorite]


Beyond being the greatest headline ever...

Not even close.
posted by The Big Foist at 7:00 PM on June 9, 2015 [3 favorites]


- 30 -
posted by matildaben at 7:05 PM on June 9, 2015 [14 favorites]


I have always wanted to live in a city that has a tabloid with lurid headlines like that. There's something very, I dunno, weirdly cool about your city being chronicled by a seedy, tasteless, sensationalistic newspaper. It represents an interesting kind of reveling in misfortune and mayhem that says something about the nature of the city. These papers almost have a kind of blunt, crude writing and mocking tone that is throwback to early days of newspapering. These headlines seem to shout at residents of the city in a way that is a darkly comic reminder of the ruthlessness of their environment.
posted by jayder at 7:23 PM on June 9, 2015 [9 favorites]


No, it just gives idiots something to rally around.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 9:43 PM on June 9, 2015


If you had three competitions in "crime", "politics", and "entertainment", you'd be hard-pressed [...] to beat this one, Ford, and STICKS NIX HICK PIX, the infamous Varietyspeak headline about how rural filmgoers preferred to watch pictures about wealthy city-dwellers.

There are some other nifty headlines, but few are so full of win.
posted by dhartung at 12:08 AM on June 10, 2015 [1 favorite]


key_of_z: And in other headline news, this howler

That's not a howler, but a Yogi Berra reference: "He hits from both sides of the plate, he's amphibious."
posted by Kattullus at 12:19 AM on June 10, 2015


MAN BITES DUST

.
posted by Gelatin at 5:54 AM on June 10, 2015 [1 favorite]


I think I've posted this on MetaFilter before, but I once saw a tabloid headline that was so perfectly evil it took my breath away. It was the epitome of the supermarket checkout line attention grabber's dark art:

ANGELINA: TOO SKINNY TO CONCEIVE?

1. It has a celebrity, Angelina Jolie, who appeared on the cover looking distraught.
2. It references babies and plays on the fears of the female audience that they, too, might be infertile.
3. It references weight, thus triggering all the reader's body image issues. Angelina Jolie is skinnier than you, and you should feel bad.
4. It allows the reader to briefly feel superior to the celebrity. "I'll bet I'M not too skinny to conceive."
5. But then, the reader is back to feeling INFERIOR to the celebrity. "I could get pregnant. I'm so fat."

I admired it like you admire a fine sword: It's a perfectly designed device to do horrible things.
posted by vibrotronica at 10:59 AM on June 10, 2015 [3 favorites]


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