Headlines

In the news media system, there are two separate yet equally unimportant groups of headlines: the inane, whose comedy is entirely superficial, and the slightly more interesting, which are simply not compelling enough for me to endlessly blather on about. These are their stories. DUN-DUN!

In Tallahassee, Florida, it was the duck who got the last laugh, surviving a gun shot wound and two days in a refrigerator. When the hunter's wife opened her refrigerator door, the duck popped its head up and smugly suggested that she ask about Aflac at work. Veterinarian David Hale explained the initial confusion, quipping, “This duck is very passive. It’s not like trying to pick up a Muscovy at Lake Ella, where you put your life in your hands.” Ornithologists everywhere expressed their amusement with raucous laughter and tomfoolery.

Despite falling from the seventeenth floor of the Minneapolis Hyatt Regency, a 29-year-old man walked away survived with only a broken leg. Wisconsin native Joshua Hanson was in town for a dart tournament but instead crashed through a seventeenth floor window and fell all the way down to the awning below. Minneapolis police Lt. Dale Barsness called Hanson "a lucky guy" after failing to realize that despite surviving a fall from the seventeenth floor, the man had fallen out of a building from the seventeenth floor. The general manager of the hotel, Tom "Captain Obvious" Mason, noted that "this has never happened before." No word on if Hanson was credited with a bullseye.

Testing the "no such thing as bad publicity" theory, Julie Winnifred Bertrand, the world's oldest woman, died Thursday in Montreal at the tender age of 115. Bertrand held the title for only a month following the death of 116-year-old Elizabeth Bolden of Tennessee, continuing the curious string of bad luck for all those inheriting the moniker. Here's hoping 114-year-old Emma Faust Tillman can break the curse.