Pamville News reporters take over news department

The Pamville News editor is out with a phlegm-based illness this week kindly leaving us Pamville reporters free to tell you how we feel about this week's news.

• Our first news item is a backhanded tip of the hat to the Pamville editor's upbringing. The Associated Press reports that a group of Pennsylvania eighth-graders were taken to a Hooters restaurant for lunch on their let's-toss-out-the-books-and-burn-off-the-last-few-days-of-class field trip. The article didn't say if the field trip was for social studies, biology or sex ed purposes.

Pam Burke

Certainly, this lunch stop must've been a little bit of awesomeness for the mid-pubescent male teens. We're not sure what the girls were supposed to get out of it.

However, we're certain our Pamville editor would be there lecturing them that this is a learning experience to do well in school and get a practical degree in college so they wouldn't end up at Hooters making a living off their cleavage.

"When I was your age," we picture her saying, "kids were taken to the vermiculite mines of Libby and exposed to raw piles of asbestos. We didn't learn any life lessons. We just got asbestosis, and we were told to like it."

• On the other hand, a paralegal in Chicago is actually making a living utilizing her advanced degree in Hooterology. Msnbc.com reports that attorney Thomas Gooch has asked a Cook County Circuit judge to make the opposing lawyer's buxom paralegal/Brazillian-born wife sit with the spectators rather than at the lawyer's table. Gooch claims that she is only there "to draw the attention of the jury away from the relevant proceedings."

No word yet on the judge's ruling and whether or not the eyes will have it.

• In the aftermath of the May 22 tornado that tore through Joplin, Mo., 138 people are dead and 156 people are still missing, but a receipt from a Joplin residence was found 525 miles away in Royal Center, Ind. WTHR-TV confirmed with Ernest Agee, a Purdue University professor of earth and atmospheric sciences, that this totally beats the pants off the former record when a check traveled 210 miles in a 1915 tornado.

You never know when a little ray of sunshine will brighten a dark day in history. Thanks WTHR we couldn't have trivialized the tragedy any better.

• For those people who think romance is dead, the Cook County Sheriff website reports that Dewayne Yarbrough of Ford Heights, Ill., has been keeping an alligator in his kitchen because he claims that the animal attracts the ladies. Nothing says "come and lay a little lovin' on me sugar pants" like a 400-pound, raw-meat eating, lethal creature chained up between the refrigerator and the recyclables bin. Maybe Yarbrough was promising them the gator would be used for designer handbags and shoes.

Dude's done busted for possession of a dangerous animal now. We're hoping that his new cellmates also think that gator possession is sexy.

• For those folks who think young people no longer value family unity, The Sudbury Star gives you Justin Beynen of Sudbury, Ontario. Eighteen-year-old Justin was being sentenced to six months in jail for a string of charges, but asked the judge for nine months instead so he could spend quality time with his cell mate — his stepfather — 25-year-old Jason Hastings, serving his remaining nine months for cocaine sales.

It was a Hallmark moment when the judge granted Beynen's request.

• And finally, for those too jaded to believe in miracles, we hope that Sal Bentivegna of Long Island, N.Y., restores your faith. NBCNewYork.com reported that Bentivegna prayed that his mother, who is living on disability and had just lost a bunch of money playing the slot machines in Atlantic City, would win the lottery. And she did.

Gloria Bentivegna will receive $33,000 per year after taxes for the next 20 years.

Atlantic City casino owners told Pamville News reporters, "Praise God! Our ship has come in!"

Thank you for reading Pamville News, your cough-free news source.

(No, we don't want to talk about Weiner's schnitzel appearing on Twitter, but we'll email about it at [email protected].)