Are we there yet?
February 13-19, 2017
By Jay Edwards
Randomly walking stuff -
In a chilly South African morgue, attendants were frightened when they heard screams coming from the area where the bodies are kept. That would be the non-living bodies; in theory anyway. The scared workers, thinking they had a ghost nearby, reacted in much the same that I think I would, they took off.
Actually, it was someone who wasn’t a ghost, not yet anyway. BBC News reported that the non-corpse was a 50-year old man, whose family had presumed he was dead when they could not wake him, and called the morgue. The morgue driver came and got the man and he spent almost 24 hours inside the cooler. The man - whose identity has been withheld - was treated in hospital for dehydration.
“You begin to ask yourself how many other people have died like that in a morgue,” said Sizwe Kupelo, an Eastern Cape health spokesperson.
* From The Week, a Cambridge study has concluded that if you curse more, or cuss as we say around these parts, you are less likely to lie. “People who filter out curses, also tend to filter the truth,” researcher David Stillwell said.
* Bethany Howell of Maumelle was reportedly catching a quick nap on her couch when her daughter, Ashlynd, took her smartphone and used mom’s thumb to gain access. The six-year-old then proceeded to go on a shopping spree inside the Amazon app, racking up a $250 bill with orders for various Pokemon-themed items.
Howell assumed her account had been hacked after noticing the 13 different order confirmations, but eventually realized her daughter was the culprit. Howell says that Ashlynd was “really proud of herself,” and that she promised her mom that all the items were coming straight to the house.
* The owner of a weekly upstate New York newspaper says a man bought hundreds of copies of the publication in an unsuccessful effort to keep others from reading about his drunk driving arrest.
Channel 4 New York reported state police arrested 43-year-old Joseph Talbot last Thursday in Wayne County and charged him with driving while intoxicated. Police also charged him with refusing to be fingerprinted or photographed after he told troopers he didn’t want his mugshot in the paper.
Ron Holdraker, editor and owner of the 12,000-circulation Times of Wayne County, says the paper obtained a mugshot from the county jail and printed it along with a story on Saturday. Both were posted on its website.
Holdraker says Talbot bought nearly 1,000 copies at $1.25 each.
* And from Today.com, In the terrifying moments after the Boston Marathon bombing that changed Roseann Sdoia’s life forever, firefighter Mike Materia was right by her side holding her hand.
He helped comfort her as she was rushed to the hospital that day in 2013 after she suffered serious injuries that ultimately resulted in her right leg being amputated above the knee. Materia, 37, would then routinely come check on her progress during her recovery.
Sdoia’s mother was pretty impressed with Materia.
“She was like, ‘He’s so cute,’” Sdoia said. “And I was like, ‘Mom, I just got blown up.’”
But their friendship soon blossomed to the point where Matiera proposed on December 4, during a trip to Nantucket, Massachusetts.
“I’ve said from the beginning for me, (the bombing) was a lot of bad at one time for a lot of good for the future,” Sdoia, 48, told Adam Reiss of NBC News before participating in Wednesday’s Empire State Building Run-Up in New York City.
* “The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.” – Bertrand Russell
Jay Edwards is publisher of the Daily Record. Contact him at jedwards@dailydata.com.
