When a headline worms its way into your brain, you have to take a second look

I confess, it was a headline my eyes bounced right over the first time around. It just wasn’t weird enough.

Mainstream news has become so astonishingly tabloid-like that it takes a lot to move the needle. Every other headline is like the National Enquirer parody: “Boy Locked in Refrigerator; Eats Own Foot.”

Even the Enquirer itself was in the news, a central player in the trial against a former president of the United States for campaign-finance fraud.

This tells you something about the laws that govern our elections. Donald Trump called together oil executives at Mar-a-Lago and offered to gut America’s pollution laws in exchange for a $1 billion campaign contribution. And that’s all fine and legal.

But diddle a porn star and fail to report it as a campaign expense when you pay to shut her up and you could be looking at 40 years.

So yes, now we have tawdry headlines that are riveting the country — but not the defendant himself, who can’t even stay awake (he says he’s not sleeping, he’s just checking his eyelids for cracks) during the testimony.

But that’s far from the only bizarre headline. Quick, is this real or fake: “Cruise ship drags dead giant whale into New York.” That would be real. Then we have Rep. Nancy Mace drawing fire for failing to reimburse a staff member for cupcakes purchased in celebration of her ex-fiancé’s birthday. That was real too.

Then The New York Times gave us, “Why Are We Obsessed With Breasts?” It’s a brave new world, I understand, but somewhere Peter Jennings is planting his face in his palm.

And of course there’s the governor of South Dakota bragging about how she killed her family’s pet dog Cricket in a gravel pit. Forget the press coverage, how do you explain that at the family reunion:

“Hey, where’s Cricket?”

“Oh, she got so bad I had to shoot her.”

“Was she mad?”

“Well, she wasn’t too happy about it.”

But seriously. Anyway, this is to explain why, when I saw the headline “JFK Jr. Says Doctors Found Dead Worm in His Brain,” it just seemed like another day at the office. It wasn’t until later that night I thought, “Wait, a dead what? Where?"

Sure enough, a dark spot that showed up in a brain scan “was caused by a worm that got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died,” Kennedy, a presidential candidate, said in a court deposition. He blamed the worm for “memory loss” and “mental fogginess,” the story said.

Well I should think so. If you have a worm munching through your brain like Pac Man, a little fogginess would be a best-case scenario. I’m surprised he can even remember who his running mate is. Not that anyone else can either, but still.

Kennedy also told the court in 2012 that he was diagnosed with mercury poisoning from eating too much fish. And he’s been hospitalized four times with a heart condition — all told it’s a bad look for a guy who says we should vote for him because he can bench press more than Biden or Trump.

Still, the whole story sounds, well, fishy. Doctors say you would have to eat on the order of 70 tons of tuna for mercury to be an issue. And since this came during a divorce proceeding, I’m wondering exactly what he was having trouble remembering. Like, where he stashed all his mutual funds? Oh yeah, I forgot all about that Greek archipelago that I inherited from pop.

Can’t help it, must have been the worm.

Unlike the women in his life, Kennedy’s poor worm was unable to obtain a divorce, and after munching on the Kennedy brain for a while the poor creature died. Choked, perhaps. Or maybe it was all that mercury.

So our presidential choices remain Old Brain, Worm Brain and No Brain.

Good luck with that.

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Tim Rowland is a Herald-Mail columnist.

This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: That brain worm story proves news can be stranger than fiction