What’s more strange these days, the news or the weather?
Are you tired of people complaining about the strange weather that we’ve had so far this summer? I have the solution: read the newspaper. Why? You’ll find stories that rival the weather in their oddity. I’ve collected a few beauties for your consideration, in order to improve your water-cooler conversation.
QMI Agency recently reported that a Michigan boy found a pipe filled with marijuana in his kids’ meal box. The boy was unharmed and the employee who had stashed the pipe faces citations for drug paraphernalia, but I can’t imagine the police’s reaction when they showed up on the scene. How can you not giggle a little at the idea of Burger King combining a pipe with the fast-food. Finally a one-stop shop to get your weed and munchies taken care of! That sure was a “Happy Meal.”
In British Columbia, QMI reported two underground grow-ops had been discovered. In one bust, police seized 430 marijuana plants and 1.5 pounds of dried marijuana. I’ve heard people in calling drug dealers low-down, dirty individuals, but until now I never realized they were being literal.
In Ottawa, the Humane Society staff laid charges against a cat owner because the cat got too fat. The person was charged with neglect after the 25-pound cat had to be euthanized. Our family had four Siamese cats, and one of them got to be quite large, though we didn’t treat her any differently than the other three. I wonder how, as a pet owner I could leaned out that one cat had the vet recommended it. Images of a mini treadmill and a fishing line with a fish dangled in front of my snow bank of a cat puffing and panting come to mind. This QMI article inadvertently explains why the Senators are under investigation for their outrageous expenses on Parliament Hill: Fat Cats have been deemed a problem in Ottawa. Perhaps their “owner” should be charged; too bad euthanizing the “cats” isn’t an option.
Reuters recently reported that a blackmailer had threatened to bomb IKEA stores. Come on people; hasn’t anyone who has put together their furniture thought of sending such letters when they were one piece short of finishing their project? Clearly this individual was one screw short for actually sending the letters to IKEAs in France and Germany, but at least he had a conscience about it. In his demands he asked for higher wages for workers and that donations be made to charities.
Back to QMI, staff at a high school in Saint-Jerome, Quebec are under investigation for making students strip during a final math test. One unknown student didn’t put their cell phone up on the teacher’s desk, so this prompted teachers to order the strip search. Thankfully, the students were allowed to rewrite the math test… I suppose they were granted the rewrite because after being “divided” into smaller rooms, the “subtraction” of their clothing “multiplied” their stress levels?
In a Reuters file photo, there is a man helping a young girl (probably not even ten years-old) hold a rifle that was probably taller than her. The NRA want people to know that women are increasing in their membership and as such their website also features “armed and fabulous” women. While I’d like to think women are less likely to perpetrate terrible crimes with these guns “loaded with style,” I can’t see how putting a rifle in a child’s hands is going to help their cause. Perhaps their next campaign can be “Tots with triggers.”
Ironically enough, none of the aforementioned stories made it to the “Oddity” column that runs now and again.
Perhaps my favourite in that column was the town in Spain sending irresponsible dog owners back the dog’s doo that they failed to scoop. The residents of the town of Brunete can no longer be called exaggerators for saying that they get “crap” in the mail.
A close second for me in the oddity column from QMI was about Canadian nudists attempting to set a record for the world’s largest skinny-dip. The slogan was “wearing zip, let’s skinny dip” but that seems to marginalize a “large” group of naturalists, perhaps next year they’ll add: “wearing no trunks, let’s chunky dunk.”
Of course, if none of these news oddities strikes your fancy, you always have the option to go back to discussing the weather.