By Jim Hagarty
2005
The news, they say, is so depressing. Maybe it is.
Or maybe you’re reading the wrong kind of news. After all, if a certain soup didn’t agree with you, would you condemn all soup, or switch to another kind? You’d switch, of course.
So put yourself on an alternative news diet, one that contains only the most tasty, easily digestible bits, which are guaranteed not to give you nightmares.
Witness one week’s worth of this better variety of news.
Police in Montclair, California, recently shot and wounded a man who allegedly took over a freight train with a bow and arrow. The man boarded the train Sunday night as it was stopped for a signal and threatened the engineer and conductor, who escaped with no arrows sticking out of them. The archer’s error, however, came when he cocked his bow and pointed the arrow at police. He was shot but not seriously hurt.
In this day of the suicide bomber, there’s something kind of Robin Hoodishly noble about a guy holding up a train with a bow and arrow.
Had the archer been in Lincoln, Nebraska that day, he wouldn’t have needed any weapons to get a good deal on gas at a station there. A manager’s mistake had customers filling up at 1955 prices. One guy filled his truck for $4; it usually costs him $72.
Meanwhile, a court in Amsterdam has banned a woman from any contact with her daughter’s school or teachers after she complained too much. The woman overloaded the school with an incessant stream of questions, comments and complaints and for causing an illegal hindrance, she will be barred from approaching the school or the school area for a year.
The woman’s complaints ranged from treatment of her daughter, to disagreements about curriculum, method of teaching and the safety of the school. Last year, she sent 50 e-mails and 20 letters to the school, and came nine times to visit. She also wrote 29 letters to the school board and others to the National Complaint Commission, the Labour Inspection Service, the Educational Inspection Service, the Queen’s representative and the media. In the future, she will be allowed to submit complaints to the school on a single page of paper once a month.
Maybe the city I live in could talk a judge into silencing some of its non-stop complainers (just drop the court order in my mailbox, your honour).
Meanwhile, a man in Boston has invented – and is mass producing – prosthetic testicles for neutered dogs. He first experimented 10 years ago on an unwitting Rottweiler (now that takes balls) and now has a thriving mail-order business, having sold more than 150,000 of his Neuticles. The silicone implants come in different sizes, shapes, weights and degrees of firmness. For his work, he’s won a tongue-in-cheek Ig Nobel award.
“Considering my parents thought I was an idiot when I was a kid, this is a great honour,” he said, showing hardly any sign of the idiocy with which he was diagnosed by his parents. Dog balls designers everywhere take heart.
And in Stockholm, a Swedish hunter spent two days in bed after being knocked unconscious by a Canada goose that landed on his head moments after his son shot it dead. The goose had been flying about 66 feet up in the air when it was shot by Carl Johan Ilback, who was hunting with his father, Ulf, along a stream in eastern Sweden in August. When the goose dropped from the sky, it hit Ulf Ilback in the head and knocked him out, he said.
“It wanted to extract its revenge, I assume,” the injured man said. “If it had gotten a better hit, it could have broken my neck.”
Sweden has temporarily closed its embassy in Canada in protest of the vengeful goose.
See? Things really aren’t that bad.
Except, of course, for that karma-loving goose in Sweden.
