Hard to Believe: You Gotta Be Kidding Me

In August, Democrat Michael Heagerty failed by one name to meet the ballot requirements to run for re-election to the city council in Syracuse, N.Y. He was credited with 334 of the 335 necessary signatures, but realized too late that he had forgotten to list his own name. (He said he would run for re-election, anyway, as an independent.)

For at least the third time in eight years, geography-challenged vacationers bought airline tickets for an Australian holiday but failed to notice (until they landed in "Sydney") that their tickets took them to Sydney, Nova Scotia. Dutch man Joannes Rutten and his grandson appeared shocked when they de-planed in Canada, even though they had boarded an earlier connecting flight in Halifax, Nova Scotia. In December 2008, an Argentine woman made a similar mistake, and in August 2002, a young British couple, after realizing their error, decided to spend their holiday in Nova Scotia, after all.

In April 2008, Jeanette Jamieson of Toccoa, Ga., finally paid off her state income tax lien (covering 1998 through 2005) of $45,000, but a year later was indicted for failing to file state tax returns for 2006 and 2007, when her income was at least $188,000. In Jamieson's day job, she runs a tax preparation service. Also, for the past 24 years, until defeated in 2008, she was a member of the Georgia House of Representatives.

The Department of Homeland Security (relying on a study later termed by the Government Accounting Office to have been rushed and flawed) decided in January that the best place for its new $700 million research facility on infectious diseases would be in Kansas, which happens to be in the heart of America's "tornado alley." The GAO report, leaked to The Washington Post in July, claimed the risk of accidental release of dangerous pathogens is far greater than the department assumed.

The August issue of Gourmet magazine highlighted the apparently high quality of sushi prepared and sold at a BP gas station near the intersection of Ridgeway and Poplar in Memphis, Tenn. A sushi chef works on-site and reportedly sells 300 orders a day.

If society were ever attacked by zombies, we would probably be doomed, and quickly. That was the conclusion of two university researchers in Ottawa, Ontario, who set up mathematical models hypothesizing zombie attacks as infectious diseases with the well-known characteristics of zombie biology from popular fiction. In fact, according to a July BBC News report, zombies are more threatening than virulent diseases because they can regenerate (unless decapitated or incinerated, of course). More troubling was the researchers' presumption that zombies move slowly, as in older movies, but in recent fiction, they're super-quick, making them nearly invincible.

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