JULY'S ODD NEWS STORIES

In an effort to prove to myself that I’m still mostly sane I like to look at how screwed up the rest of the world is. To that end the World Wide Web is an amazing source of information to use as a tool to prove my point.
Take this following story for example: Three girls from Midway, GA., were trying to raise money to go to a waterpark and they thought that a lemonade stand would do the trick. But then they met the long arm of the law — their local police chief.
The Police Chief told the girls to “shut it down” citing the city requires business and food permits ($50 per day), even though the stand was at the home of one of the girls. The Police Chief said, “We understand you guys are young, but still, you’re breaking the law.” He also cited HEALTH issues because, “We (THE AUTHORITIES) were not aware of how the lemonade was made, who made the lemonade, of what the lemonade was made with, so we acted accordingly by city ordinance.”
Seriously!? Tsk, tsk, tsk. Slow crime day boys, or what? Did your own kids have a stand set up down the block or something? Some people should not be put in a position of authority I guess.
Then in the category of “Huh?” there’s the story of New York scent artist Christopher Brosius who has made his name with fragrances recalling childhood (such as Clean Baby Butt??, Green Bean and Baseball Glove-{now that one I can understand}), but felt it was time to approach the next frontier -- to make a perfume so exclusive that no one could smell it. By Brosius' reasoning, the scent's chemicals would provoke whatever reactions scents provoke in those exposed to it, but the actual scent would be undetectable to the nose; hence, no one would know why they were reacting as they were. By trial and error, he combined jasmine, sandalwood and natural amber, and scaled them down in power, yielding what he calls “Where We Are There Is No Here”. Perfume with no scent? Hmmm. I could sell you a truckload of that stuff, I’ll tell ya, and I think I’ll call it…”Water”.
This next story reminded me of a scene from the movie “Monty Python and the Search for the Holy Grail” when some characters were pulling a cart through the medieval town yelling, “Bring out your dead!”, and one old guy kept protesting that he wasn’t dead but they threw him on the cart anyway.
There’s a Florida woman who says she’s having numerous financial troubles because a bank error declared her dead last November. The woman and her husband built their home in 2007 and the couple took out two mortgages through the Chase Bank USA but the bank notified credit-reporting agencies that the woman had died. The bank even sent a letter of condolence to the family, saying someone from the bank would be in touch about the mortgage. The woman says she notified the bank officials that she was alive and also went to a local branch to correct the mistake. A month later, a lawsuit she filed against the bank alleges, credit agencies were still reporting her dead.
You know what? The really, really scary thing is that a new report states that by 2050 we’ll have 9.3 billion residents on this planet which, by virtue of basic math, will increase the number of stupid people and crazy events. Yikes! “Be afwaid, be vewy, vewy afwaid.”
“The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated”-Mark Twain (1835-1910).