Posts Tagged ‘weird’
And sometimes you do a story just for the headline
An 18-year-old Florida woman was only slightly injured when she was shot by her friend’s oven, police said.
Yes. An oven. She was trying to cook waffles and didn’t know her friend was storing ammunition in the oven. So we got to write this totally straightforward headline:
Woman shot by oven while trying to cook waffles
Life on general assignment
In the new world at NBC News, I’m now doing general assignment after many years covering various beats. That yields a certain variety to one’s work week.
At 1 o’clock this morning, I was hunched over a spreadsheet calculating word-frequency counts for President Obama’s State of the Union address. Ten hours later, I was writing this:
One of the busiest interstates in the U.S. remained closed Wednesday, hours after a semi-trailer transporting French vanilla coffee creamer overturned in Phoenix, coating more than 150 feet of the highway with a white slick of delicious-smelling traffic hazard.
You never know what life on GA will bring next.
Grab your coffee mug: French vanilla creamer closes busy Arizona interstate (NBC News)
Sometimes, you do a story just for the picture
(Jody Taylor/Sixty5 Media via NBC San Diego)
Driver stuck in midair after car rams California clinic (NBC News)
Police Blotter of the Day: Kaboom! Oddly named man’s walking stick leads to evacuation
An aluminum pipe with the word “Kaboom” written on it led to the evacuation of Akron City Hall on Wednesday. Turns out it was a walking stick, and “Kaboom” was the owner’s name. Really.
Full story (NBC News)
Police Blotter of the Day: Assault with a deadly sausage
The victim told police he was riding his bike about 8 a.m. Sunday when Michael A. Baker, whom he does not know, came up to him “and started swinging sausage links at him,” Lt. David Dickinson said Sunday.
“He said he was trying to hit him with that. The victim had no idea why,” Dickinson said.
Full story (Brockton, Mass., Enterprise)
Police Blotter of the Day: Darth Vader. Robbing a bank. On a bike.
Really, there’s nothing else you need to know, other than that it was in Toledo, Ohio:
Full story (WNWO-TV of Toledo, Ohio)
Police Blotter of the Day: So drunk he didn’t know he’d been run over by a train
That’s some Night Train hangover.
Thomas J. Boersma apparently passed out on the Canadian Pacific railroad tracks just east of Forest Grove Drive. The conductor of the 76 car freight train said he saw a person laying on the gravel and resting his back on a rail. As the eastbound train approached the conductor said the man did not turn around. The train hit Boersma about three-tenths of a mile east of Forest Grove Drive. …
Police were contacted at about 3:30 a.m. and eventually found Boersma, who was wearing camouflage. Boersma was conscious but was not aware he had just been hit by a train, the police report said. Though Boersma suffered severe injuries to his buttocks and left arm he refused medical treatment, was agitated and combative, the report said.
Full story (Lake Country Reporter of Hartland, Wis.)
Human editors matter, or: Pat Buchanan, call your lawyers!
Google likes to generate a “quote of the day” atop some of its news searches. It doesn’t always work out well.
Because I was doing a story that involved Adolf Hitler, I of course did a news search for “hitler” to see who else might be reporting the story. This is what I got:
Police Blotter of the Day: Pet store allegedly cuts off dog’s ear, then glues it back on
KHNL-TV
Gladys Kapuwai of Honolulu says in a lawsuit that she took Dodo, a Gilzale and Pomeranian-Maltese mix, for grooming last year July and realized a couple of days later that one of Dodo’s ears had been cut.
“When I took her to the vet, the doctor had told me it looked like they tried to glue it back,” Kapuwi said.
“I couldn’t believe what they did. I started crying, because this is our baby, too, you know.”
Video (KHNL-TV of Honolulu)
Police Blotter of the Century: For suspect, gun is a .38-caliber pain in the …
Authorities believe Michael Ward concealed this .38-caliber revolver by hiding it where the sun don't shine. (WITN-TV)
A man pulled who was pulled over for a traffic violation in North Carolina was found this week with a gun in his jail cell — a big gun that authorities believe he hid in his rectum.
Deputies said the man — who claimed he was disabled and couldn’t walk — was searched and strip-searched both at a hosital and at the Onslow County, N.C., jail before he was placed into a holding cell. Jailers even made him perform what they call a “squat and cough” procedure.
No gun.
Only later did the .38-caliber revolver — 10 inches long, with a 4½-inch barrel — turn up.
Ward was taken back to the hospital Friday for examination of “possible injuries that may have occurred” to his rectum.
Full story (M. Alex Johnson/msnbc.com with WITN-TV and WNCN-TV)
