View from the North 40

The following is a sampling of news items and information bites that we , the ever-vigilant here in the Pamville Newsroom, felt compelled to share — and comment on:

News agencies in the San Fransisco Bay area are reporting that a semitrailer overturned on the freeway, spilling more than 25,000 pounds of frozen turkeys onto the pavement.

Though the turkeys were still contained in their shipping boxes, federal regulations prohibit stores from selling foods which have been in major accidents, so all the turkeys have been donated to an area food bank and some shelters.

No word from the North Pole if this “accident” is part of an on-going feud between the jolly man in red and tom turkey about whose holiday starts when.

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Researchers studying The New York Times found that stories about dogs printed in that newspaper are 2.6 times more likely than any other news stories to be picked up nationally.

This new story, which was run on NBCNews.com, did not mention any response from U.S. congressional delegates or the one-percenters as to why the “liberal media” shows a clear bias for an animal that poops in its own backyard over, say, cats which poop in a box in their own home and expect someone else to keep that clean for them.

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An Italian artist spent two days searching for a needle in a haystack.

That’s it, just a guy in a public building looking for a 3-inch needle in a big pile of hay … and it’s art.

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Everything old is new again is a real thing … even if it’s old world ways meeting new technology.

Everyone who truly loves “the queen’s English” and thinks those texting shortcuts, like: 2nite, brb, idk, lol and ur, are a lazy perversion of “real” English, can stand corrected, thanks to a young stable boy in a Thoroughbred racing barn in the late 1700s England.

A thoroughbred racehorse, born in 1773 in the stables of the fourth earl of Abingdon in England (where the queen’s English was originally invented and is still produced today), was named, humbly, Potatoes.

According to legend, and a post in Wikipedia.com, when told by the boss to put up a nameplate outside the colt’s stall, a young stable worker took it upon himself to write the name as “Potoooooooos,” which would be read Pot-eight-os … which sounds like potatoes. Get it?

The earl was greatly amused and later registered the horse as “Pot8os” thus using text-speak more than two centuries before texting was invented.

L8R G8R.

(If it’s newsworthy, you probably won’t find it here at [email protected].)