TfL are sitting on fifty three million pounds of our money? What are they doing with it all? Certainly not making this bloody Tube carriage any less crowded, that’s for sure. That’s about the cost of a Zones 1–6 Travelcard isn’t it?! TfL? Transport for London? Train’s full and Late, more like. I could make dad jokes like this all day about bloody City Hall bureaucrats.

But wait…

TfL said 19,790,130 cards which have not been used for a year or more represent a value of £52,914,424.

Hang on. £50m on twenty million Oyster cards is only just over £2.50 each. Er. I’m less angry now. Good job that context-setting statistic is prominently displ…oh. It’s actually on this well-hidden news satire blog I just clicked through to.

If the world isn’t my oyster, it’s not because of crippling credit card debt from the unspent e-shrapnel on the five forgotten Oyster cards loitering around my home. It’s because everything makes me so mad! Especially big numbers in headlines! Rargh!

Thanks for the clarification, Beeb. If only they’d identified that substance as something other than oil substance, that headline might have had some substance. Oh, wait:

Plymouth University said it was a form of polyisobutene (PIB), which was used as a lubricating additive in oils to improve performance.

No words in that sentence are more descriptive than ‘substance’ nor of similar length. Apart from ‘additive’. And ‘lubricant’.

It’s a shame that this event wasn’t live-blogged, so that we could have watched the development of this headline in real time:

1. Seabird deaths caused by seabird death causer
2. Seabird deaths caused by unidentified seabird deaths substance
3. Seabird deaths substance ‘identified’ as ‘substance’
4. Seabird deaths substance ‘identified as oil substance’
5. Seabird deaths substance identified as oil substance ‘identified as oil additive’
6. Seabird deaths substance identified as oil additive identified as polyisobutene
7. Seabird deaths oil additive lubricant substance ‘identified’ as Richard III

A Super Star Destroyer in Central London

Sleek, spiky Barad-dûr look-a-like The Shard opened its viewing decks for a look around on February 1^st, and the Independent rushed to the top to investigate the effects of being high on a number of individuals.

First up is architect Renzo Piano, whom we have to hope is better at designing buildings than he is at describing them. Piano dubbed the enormous shiny thing ‘magic for a number of reasons’:

First, because it’s in London, second, because it’s so tall, and third, because this building is a part of London. It’s a sense of London. It’s sad when London is sad, it’s joyful when London is brilliant and joyful.

So, to recap: it’s in London, it’s part of London, and it’s tall. That would be deep, if it weren’t so tall, the two other reasons weren’t the same, and if the emotional state of the capital were a) existent, and b) able to be reflected in a massive glass pyramid. But well done all the same.

Piano’s quiet madness was only surpassed by London Mayor Boris Johnson—also magic, being as he is in London, part of London, and adept at spinning tall tales—who had a range of remarks, from the anodyne to the pointless:

I don’t think there’s anything in London like this.

This is the sound of Boris realising that the tallest building in London is, amongst other things, the tallest building in London, quite unlike any of the other, shorter things in London. What further rhetorical flourishes could he have in store for us? Quick, Bozza! Say more things!

It’s the closest thing to being in an airplane and looking down on London. But you can walk around, you’ve got complete stability.

Were you previously baffled by the idea of looking down on a city from a tall building? Fear not; Boris can paint a picture: it’s like being in a plane, except you can walk around, just like you can’t in a plane.

You can see all the bends in the river, you can see my office, you can see Buckingham Palace, you can see the whole thing for 40 miles around.

‘I can see my house from here!’ exclaimed an excited Mr Johnson, dancing a bit like he needed a wee, ‘Wow! I’m Mayor of London! I’m in charge of the whole thing, for 40 miles around! Can you believe that?

‘Well, I am. And I can remind people of my stature by listing my office alongside the Queen’s residence and all the bends in the river. Woo! It’s the river! Look at it, all bending all over the place! This is like the EastEnders title sequence, except I can walk around, and there’s no drum machine. There’s complete stability, and no chance of a shrieking cockney marital breakdown.’

Quite the opposite, in fact; schmaltzy cliché-lover and clichéd lover James Episcopou chose to propose on the 72^nd floor of this magical building, because it’s magic, in London, part of London, and yet there isn’t anything in London like it:

Laura means everything to me and I wanted to make her feel on top of the world.

‘I couldn’t propose to her in an airplane because you can’t walk around,’ he told assembled reporters, ‘but I heard that this is the closest thing.’

London was said to be joyful at the news.

The Gospel of John tells us that [Jesus] was life, and that his life was the light of all mankind, and that he came with grace, truth and love. Indeed, God’s word reminds us that Jesus was the Prince of Peace. With that in mind, I would like to pay particular tribute to our brave servicemen and women who are overseas helping bring safety and security to all of us at home.

‘With that in mind’..? Sorry, what? Which exact argument has ‘Jesus’ as a premise, and ‘war in Aghanistan’ as its conclusion?

Clearly Dave was channeling one of Jesus’s most famous sayings: ‘when you are slapped on the cheek, you will realise that you’re an arse.’

A belated Merry Christmas, dear Headline Superheroes readers.

Lord Justice Leveson spent over a year compiling a report into the culture, practices and ethics of the press, and it was finally released as the Leveson Report on 29^th November. It exposed over-cosy relationships, slapped the back of phone hackers’ hands, and generally highlighted flagrant abuses in the media. However, the report failed to consider some of the structural problems with ‘news’ as a concept. Allow us to demonstrate how it has inadvertently proved them.

One of the chief problems is the perceived need for ‘timeliness’. This has been elevated to a ludicrous parody of itself by rolling 24-hour news networks and websites; indeed, the very newspaper whose searchlight on tabloid reporting practices kicked off Lord Leveson’s quest recently started live-blogging children’s funerals.

That news must be new might seem harmless, sensible or even tautological, but this narrow-minded definition precludes in-depth analysis of anything which takes more than two minutes to understand (ie most things), and denies front-page publicity to any problem which is chronic rather than acute.

To take the example of the Leveson Inquiry itself, this is a graph showing the number of articles on Google News containing the words ‘Leveson Inquiry’, sorted by date.

Grab a nearby physicist, get them to do a simple bit of curve-fitting, and they’ll tell you the ‘half-life’ of this news story: 0.67 days. After just 16 hours, the number of news stories about Leveson halved; after another 16 hours, that number halved again, and so on.*

So, naturally, one might estimate how long it would take to read the Leveson Report: clocking in at 2000 pages, four volumes, and over 1,000,000 words (a snip at just £250 to buy from The Stationery Office), it would take someone reading at 200 words per minute for twelve hours a day seven days to digest the lot.

Whilst it’s a bit facile to suggest that you have to read every word of something before you can comment on its conclusions, Leveson’s document might be worth revisiting after some more thorough reading. Few, it seems, have bothered to do so. Similarly, the problems detailed by the report are chronic: the tug-o’-war between press freedom and freedom not to read made-up shit in newspapers whilst having one’s private information filched is ongoing, but ‘the media’ can barely be bothered to report on it except in the immediate aftermath of some ‘newsworthy’ event.

If ‘news’ seeks to better inform us about the world we live in, then this obsession with novelty needs to wither: we need ‘intelligent, contemplative write-up of the Leveson Inquiry’, rather than ‘Prime Minister in theatrical coalition punch-up over statutory press regulation, analysis of which we shall not deign to provide’; we want ‘the complex economic and environmental cases for wind and nuclear’ instead of ‘Tories in theatrical coalition punch-up over minister’s stupid comments about wind farms’; and, more broadly, ‘civil war and famine still going on’ rather than ‘man claims to have heard other man insult policeman’.

Roughly one hundred times more people die from malaria globally than shootings in the US, and yet Google News returns 39,000 results for ‘malaria’, and six million results for the words ‘gun control’, in spite of the latter being quite a specific turn of phrase which probably doesn’t make it into every article about guns. So, in some sense, that ratio is over fifteen thousand times out of proportion. Sadly for malaria victims, their several thousand deaths a day are geographically dispersed, symptomatically similar, and boring.

Such is the allure of current affairs that even we chose to base this article about an endemic and ongoing issue on a hook from the recent past, albeit one which the rest of the press hasn’t written about in so long that this article will form a spike on our own damned graph, completing the circle of self-awareness. If only the media had one of those.

* Note that this analysis actually underestimates the capriciousness of the news, because many of those early articles were top stories, trumpeting Leveson’s launch from front pages, whilst those published later are tucked away on page nineteen of the print copy, or obscure news blogs.

Now, last time I checked, the nation of Japan wasn’t dead at the hands of Captain America’s lesser-known Himalayan counterpart. And, more appositely, there was definitely space in that headline for two ‘-ese’ suffixes.

If the accusations levelled against the cuddly national treasure, entertainer and knight Sir Jim had been faintly unbelievable thus far, then this was surely proof. The thin-lipped grimace; the wild eyes; the mottled skin, unflattered by direct flash; all classic signs that the BBC had chosen this, amongst thousands of photos of the eponymous star of Jim’ll Fix It, in a bid to fulfil their tabloid duty to the British public to painstakingly not quite totally piss all over due process. The Beeb has been slow on the uptake with that internal investigation (with delays of over 30 years)…they could probably afford to wait a little while before dropping that JPEG-bomb.

Besides, we’ve got the horrible reports of victims, the pervading memory of a creepy and eccentric bloke, and now this photograph. The profile of Jimmy Sa-vile is just about complete. Since you can’t libel the dead: let it be known that he did it, the disgusting kiddy-fiddling shit.

Whilst condoning assault on burglars, Grayling also appears to be committing an assault against the English language. Disproportionate force is, by definition, unacceptable; redefining what’s legal simply changes what we consider ‘proportionate’. If we let it, this issue could spiral out of control (not to mention proportion), with Grayling sitting in the middle of a vortex of vocabulary, first beating and, soon, beheading anyone challenging his dominion over this legal singularity. But I suppose you can’t get people out of your house by using logical reasoning. Especially if you’re incapable of logical reasoning.

And there are no worries about Grayling having any of that. Like an exam board desperately trying to differentiate high-flying students with top grades of A-double-star-plus, the law would award overachieving home-defending psychos the adverb-laden accolade of ‘grossly disproportionate’. Grayling explains:

But if you act in a grossly disproportionate way?… I think if the burglar is out cold on the floor and you then stick a knife into him, that, in my judgment would be grossly disproportionate.

Well, it’s good to know that his judgment is reasonable.

Hang on…what? Is stabbing a defenceless person in cold blood really the first example of a disproportionately disproportionate response which would cross his presumably-briefed mind? It would be most enlightening to know what he could come up with in the heat of a burglary. Probably a first-draft screenplay for Saw VII.

So, is the punishment of disproportionately violent self-defence really an issue? Well, no. According to the BBC, just 0.47 people a year are prosecuted for this kind of burglar-bashing. This gives you an approximately 0.0000007% chance of being afflicted by such a prosecution this year. The good news is that you’re ten times more likely to win the lottery this weekend with a single ticket; the bad news is that there’s a 99.9999993% chance that this might just be whipping up a grossly disproportionate level of media attention for an issue that would have been better left out cold at the foot of the stairs.

Continuing economic crisis? Cutting of cancer, heart disease and stroke doctors? Hilariously mishandled privatised transport auction procedure? Look, over here, someone in 2008, jailed after using a cricket bat on intruders, was later released! Important political issue of the day: identified.

Do let us know if you find any of your own: tweet @headheroes, hashtag ’em #headlinesuperhero, Facebook ’em, or leave a comment below!

Yesterday, The Sun led with the ‘furore’ around the topless Kate Middleton photos published in French magazine Closer. The grumpy paper, usually no stranger to famous people’s boobs, speaks out to support pressing charges against the photographer who snapped her sunbathing topless on a balcony.

Thankfully, Sun editors are smart enough to realise that at least one of their readers might recall August 24^th, when they published nudey pics of Prince Harry ‘in the public interest’ (a day after publishing naked pictures of a Sun intern and their picture editor reenacting the scene, also in the public interest). Hypocrisy? Don’t worry, the red-top defends its no-top double standards in a blistering editorial:

Harry had no realistic expectation of privacy. He invited large numbers of strangers to his hotel suite for alcohol-fuelled high jinks involving stripping naked without any checks on who was present. No attempt was made to remove mobile camera phones.

Another semi-clad celebrity who could also presumably have had no reasonable expectation of privacy from the Sun was Kate Moss, photographed shortly before the Harry furore, topless on a yacht in St Tropez. In this case, there seems to have been no missed opportunity to frisk everyone in a several-mile radius for image-recording apparatus, and thus it appears that The Sun is trying to both have its Kate, and eat it.

One area where The Sun’s standards are at least universal is between the living and the deceased. In this best of beach babes’ boobs digest, most recently updated on July 25^th this year, two of the included breasts belong to troubled, and now dead, pop star Amy Winehouse. There’s even a Kate-controversy connection, with Ms Winehouse having got naked on a balcony whilst on holiday. (Let’s just check whether that was included in the Sun’s glowing photobituary ‘life in pictures’… Oh, no. Fancy that.)

But, remember, kids…back to The Sun’s defensive editorial:

The final irony is that it is France—smug, privacy-obsessed France—that published grossly intrusive pictures no decent British paper would touch with a bargepole.

If The Sun’s staff took some time out from peddling selected smut, they could buy a dictionary—or hire a pap to snap a celeb reading a dictionary with her boobs out, like a decent paper would—and learn what ‘irony’ means. (We think there’s a picture of Britain’s breast newspaper making a big deal about not revelling in outdoor boobies.) Oh, and check out ‘smug’ while you’re at it: I haven’t heard France making self-satisfied, sweeping statements about heterogeneous groups lately. Which makes the accusation, in itself, ironic. Oh, stop it with the long words and turn to Page 3 for the things that really interest the public’s bargepole.