A bird's-eye view of my birthplace, Québec (the city, not the province.) We flew last Saturday for about an hour in the early morning. There was a bit of a haze at first but the weather was absolutely gorgeous. We might have caught the most colorful time of the season, it was incredibly beautiful.

The flamboyant death of nature.

I took a few pictures.

  …

▲ Houston car mechanic Edgar Garfield Gibbons, 41, returned to the U.S. in March after nine months in jail in Georgetown, Guyana, to which country he had been mistakenly deported when he was confused with a New…

Another installment of completely random newsbits with which I contend that improbable stuff constantly happen.

■ Scotland Yard detectives said they overestimated the number of dead in a fiery London commuter-train crash in October because some survivors had walked away quickly and left…

Thanks to advertising, science has become the new magic.

Hair, skin, the appearance of youth and the cleanliness of every little nook and cranny of your personal space are now under the watchful guard of scientific advances. If we were to believe modern advertisers, we're already in the twenty second century...

You don't actually need to understand how dirt and grime can be eliminated from your dishwasher, how you can regenerate old body parts with lotions, how "animated"…

The Advertising Age: A Sexist Primer 

End of WW2, baby boom, the advertising age is in full swing, piggy-backing on the news media and shaping the public's burgeoning opinion of itself. A kind of quasi-magical what-would-be-best.

 …

To Spell The Truth

Sometimes only one word can make all the difference.

And then one letter can make or break a word.

● No lottering

● Diploma plus custom plagues

● Love you sweatheart

● The joy of pubic worship

● New Communist chief considered a shrew leader

● Islamic radials murder U.S. educator today

● How to make great chocolate…

• John Titman for Commissionner
• Posthumus…

• Dr. George King, an English inventor and doctor of divinity, invented a prayer battery. The minister had some two hundred people direct prayers at the device, said to resemble a box camera on a tripod. Dr. King said a commitee would decide what to do with…

How to jumble everything up in as few words as possible?

You can count on media headlines to do that for you.

And local newspapers have always been a superb source of great headlines.

Here's a vintage compilation.

A scan from National Lampoon's True Facts, 1986 edition.…

However improbable, it happens:

■A woman was convicted of arranging for her lover to get a penile implant using her estranged husband's health insurance (New York City).

■Police said two arrested drug dealers had been…

I lifted those anecdotes from a Reddit thread:

Sometimes a small victory is all it takes to uplift or satisfy our need for "justice".

►I wouldn't really say this was trolling, but it's a funny related story involving mall cops. I was at the mall with a group of my friends one day, when a couple…

●A former nun in Canada has been ordered to do 30 days community service after hacking off 'the huge boobs' on her neighbour's snowwomen with an axe.

●Two salesmen in Nebraska were taken to hospital with broken bones after hitting each other with baseball bats in a fight over rival claims to the same area. Guess what were they selling? Bibles!!.…

►1995 -- Bob Bornack's billboard marriage proposal to Teri Ungar in October in Wood Dale, Ill., was accepted. ("Teri, Please Marry Me! Love, Bob.") However, the billboard company reported that 10 other women named "Teri," who were dating men named Bob, inquired whether the message was for them including one Teri who was dating two men named Bob.…

RAND6/%fahn S+9 NEWS

• A garbage-bag-wearing convenience-store robber was easily identified later by a clerk because his bag was made of transparent plastic (St. Petersburg, Fla.).

• The Nebraska Bar Association rejected Paul Converse's application…

Richard L. Garcia, 17, filed a lawsuit in November against the city of Bradenton, Fla., because police let him go with no penalty after stopping him while he was driving drunk. (He crashed a few minutes later, suffering serious injuries.)



John Murphy, 64, was arrested in Toms River, N.J., after a May 10…

GAINED IN TRANSLATION

 …

Is your Middle name Wayne?

Are you a victim of the Wayne Curse?

For years now researchers into the odd and extraordinary have been compiling news item concerning the Wayne…

LOST LOBE

In July, a 48-year-old woman filed a lawsuit against Gold Coast Hospital in Southport, Australia, for about $450,000 (U.S.) because the hospital apparently misplaced part of her brain after aneurysm surgery in 1996. According to the lawsuit, doctors were to temporarily remove her right frontal…

RAMPANT FLATULENCE

In December, after a four-year legal battle, the Texas Supreme Court invalidated the VitaPro soybean meat substitute contract with the state prison system because of evidence that prisoners had become demoralized with their VitaPro diets, which had "led to adverse health effects, including…