“What started as an exchange of words,” said the Times , “snowballed into a fistfight. At issue was a poster urging students not to fight on campus. The fight was over who would put up the poster.”
• Inside the Erie County (New York) Correctional Facility, James Conlin and Lawrence Mule began arguing over a bag of potato chips. Before long, fists were flying...until a man standing nearby stepped in to break up the fight. What’s ironic about that? Conlin and Mule are veteran prison guards; the man who broke up the fight was an inmate. (Both guards were suspended.)
HIS ©UNNING PLAN FAILED
A Taiwanese artist named Wu was awarded 50,000 Taiwan dollars ($1,600 in the U.S.) for submitting the winning entry in a contest to create a poster that discouraged people from violating copyright laws. He was ordered to return the prize money after it was discovered that he’d copied the design of another artist.
SEEKING CLOSURE
Warren and Maureen Nyerges paid $165,000 in cash for a home in Naples, Florida, in 2011. A few months later, Bank of America wrongly filed a foreclosure claim against them. The Nyergeses took the bank to court and won. The judge ordered the bank to pay their court costs (about $2,500), but the bank refused...until the Nyerges showed up at a Naples Bank of America branch with a court-approved “foreclosure of assets” notice and a moving-company crew. The workers began to seize furniture from the lobby. Less than an hour later, the bank paid up.
Gramatically speaking, the first 8 lines of “The Star-Spangled Banner” are two sentences.
YIELD TO ONCOMING IRONY
A 200-foot-long fence was erected on an overpass of I-70 in St. Louis, Missouri, to prevent people from throwing things onto the highway, which could injure people and damage vehicles. In 2010 a motorist driving on the overpass lost control of his car and ran into the fence, sending the entire thing hurtling onto the highway. Several people were injured and several vehicles were damaged.
DEATH AND IRONY
• Elizabeth Taylor outlived Mel Gussow by six years. Mel who? He was The New York Times writer who penned Taylor’s obituary.
• Michael Anderson Godwin was sentenced to death in the early 1980s for murder. After six years and numerous appeals, the South Carolina death-row inmate got his sentence reduced to life in prison. Not long after, Godwin was sitting on the metal toilet in his cell, watching TV. He was wearing nothing except a pair of headphones, which started to crackle. Trying to fix them, Godwin bit into the wire. He was electrocuted and died.
DETROIT ROCK-COCAINE CITY
In 2011 tourism officials in Detroit launched a new ad campaign in an attempt to counter the city’s reputation as a place of rampant violence and drug use. After posters were put up all over the city, bloggers pointed out that the font designers had selected for the “Believe in Detroit” logo is called “Crackhouse.”
THESE ARE THEIR STORIES...DUN DUN!
In 2011 Paterson, New Jersey, police received a tip regarding the whereabouts of a man who’d robbed a family at gunpoint. Informed that the man might be carrying one of the family’s cell phones—which has a very distinctive ring tone—an officer dialed the number as he approached the suspect. Sure enough, the theme music to TV’s Law & Order started playing. The man was arrested.
About 50% of people who are allergic to latex are also allergic to bananas.
NAME THAT TUNA
The origins of the names of some common fish, and a few that you may not have heard of before at all .
B ASS: Bass are ray-finned fish, meaning they have sharp, boney spikes in their fins, as opposed to the lobe-finned fish, which have loose, fleshy fins. Fishermen have known this for eons, and that’s how the fish got their name. “Bass” comes from the ancient Germanic word bærs , which meant “sharp.”
GUPPY: In 1866 an English clergyman and naturalist discovered a species of tiny fish on the Caribbean island of