And Now, The News.
Hello.
In times of great fear and uncertainty, such as this depressing era of the reign of the Idiot King, people tend to fall back on the familiar for comfort. Comfort food, for example — macaroni and cheese is a popular example, even though, to me, it is like eating lightly spiced bathtub grout. But the point of comfort food is not that it tastes good, it is that it reminds you of presumably happier times, when you remember your ma singing you lullabies, and your dad spinning homey nostrums, and you forget about, you know, the spankings with belts.
Comfort foods, in particular, vary by region. West Africans like peanut butter soup, the internet tells me, and Icelanders enjoy Brúnaðar Kartöflur, which is lavishly caramelized potatoes.
Me, I like tabloid headlines. They are not technically food, but they feed my soul.
It delivers me to those halcyon days in the Bronx, when I wandered the subways — my parents, otherwise given to overprotectiveness, evidently had no idea how scary that was — and read lurid headlines on newspaper kiosks. (Newspaper kiosks are things that used to exist.) The headlines were often from the The New York Daily News, and they were so impressively brilliantly crafted that 35 years later when I published a book of my collected feature stories, the acknowledgement pages were an extended encomium to people who had taught me how to write, such as Dave Barry and Agatha Christie and Franz Kafka and Tom Lehrer, but also included “The New York Daily News headline writers.”
The good news in these lousy days is that The Daily News is still interested in snaring your attention; if you are like me, you can subscribe for free get their top headlines fed into your inbox daily. The remainder of this column will simply be a bunch of Daily News headlines from the last three months.
These are all real, except for two, which I made up. I will give you an opportunity, in the Gene Pool Gene Poll below, to guess which ones are invented.