As many of you know, my brain is often spinning. There’s always something coming out of it, often something that gets me in trouble. The other day, I came up with what I thought would be a great headline for The Babylon Bee. If you don’t know what Babylon Bee is, it’s basically the Christian Conservative version of The Onion, a satirical newspaper.
The guys at Babylon Bee have been producing content that is both biting and funny for years, but the last couple of months they have just been on fire. It’s the type of thing that makes you want to play in their sandbox. So, when a thought hit my head, I thought I needed to figure out how to submit a headline idea to them.
I looked around and actually found one. Sorta. Babylon Bee DOES accept headline submissions, but they do it through an online forum on their website. That you have to subscribe to. Yes, I’ll say it another way: in order to give the Babylon Bee your work for free, you have to pay them.
Needless to say, I signed up right away!
It’s been fun. There are a number of people who are active in the forum and they post a lot of fun headlines. However, there’s a less than 1% acceptance rate. You can actually look at people’s profiles and see how many headlines they’ve had accepted by the Bee, and it’s a staggeringly low number. In going through profiles, I found a guy who had a 2% publication rate. He’s wayyyy ahead of the curve. Most people have nothing published.
The forum limits you to four headline proposals per day, and I try to submit all four each day, because I feel like it keeps my creative juices flowing. Though the brain isn’t technically a muscle, I’ve always felt like certain muscular principles apply, namely use it or lose it. I feel like I’ve come up with some pretty good stuff, and I’d hate to think they’ll all go to waste. But since there’s almost no chance they’ll publish any of it, I thought I’d share some of my rejected Babylon Bee headlines with you.
These are only headlines I’ve written, though not all of the ones I’ve written. I don’t have the right to steal someone else’s work, so there’s some good stuff out there you’ll just have to join the forum to read:
-Disney+ Adds ‘Offensive Content’ Warning to ‘The Last Jedi’
-Coke Zero Unveils New Slogan: Be Less Diet
-Medical Miracle: Republicans Recover from Deficit Blindness
-Doctor Giving Presentation on New ED Med Made Possible By a Sizable Endowment from Johnson & Johnson Wonders Why Audience Keeps Giggling
-Jen Psaki Buys New Parakeet; Insists She’s Keeping it in “Detention Facility”
-Dan Rather Announces Via Twitter That He Has Documents Proving All Anti_Maskers Skipped National Guard Duty
-Rian Johnson Announces He Will Develop Trilogy of New Vaccines for Bristol Myers Squib. Drug Company Has No Comment
-Research Shows 93% of BLM Protests Were Peaceful; Also 93% of Hindenberg Voyage Was Safe
-All Pronouns Decide to Retire. He: “If Everyone Has Their Own Unique Pronoun Why Should We Even Exist?”
-Maytag Replaces Washing Machine “Color” Setting with “Load of Color,” “White” Setting with “Oppressive”
-Ted Cruz Wows CPAC Audience, Acting Out Lightsaber Battle Between Himself and Socialism
-Sen. Blumenthal Objects to “Stolen Valor” Accusation; Insists He Only Borrowed It.
-German Shepherd Announces He Identifies as Neutered
-Nashville Predators Give Up Name, Donate it to Lincoln Project
-Some Aides Questioning Biden’s Decision to Take Out a Reverse Mortgage on White House
-City Forms Citizen’s Committee to Decide Fate of Confederate Statue as Long as Committee Votes to Tear it Down
-Golden Globes: When We Said There Was Systemic Racism, We Meant OUR System
-Swamp Draining: In CPAC Stemwinder, Trump Vows, if Elected in 2024, to Name Himself to Every Cabinet Post, “Maybe Supreme Court, Too.”
-Erik, Who Lives in Opera House, Protests Lifting of Mask Mandates