Sunday, July 23, 2017

Olds

I wonder if there is a market for a journal reporting "the rest of the story?"

The news feed tells you what is supposedly happening right now, but anybody with an attention span longer than a day knows that those stories are almost invariably incomplete at best, and often simply wrong. I exclude celebrity gossip stories from "news."

Call it The Follow-up Gazette with the motto All the things we found out later.

  • After the drive-by shooting the police woke up everybody on the block to find out if you had heard anything: One kid was playing with his parent's revolver and accidentally shot his buddy, and they made up the "drive-by" story to try to deflect blame. You didn't hear anything because the shot was indoors.
  • The man who claimed he "just said hello to the sleeping homeless man" when suddenly the homeless man attacked him: He is sticking to his story, but nobody believes that was all he said. The homeless man was charged with battery.
  • A report that claimed that the brains of men and women are indistinguishable received a lot of admiring attention. Peers believe the authors should not be allowed out in public without a minder.
  • The Badger Ammunition facility was declared excess and slated, with great fanfare, for cleanup and transfer to other agencies. This is still going on. Cleanup takes years, and so do negotiations. Ho Chunk wants part of the land but the BIA is not on the same page with them.
  • A was standing in front of his house in his underwear when B walked up to him and shot him dead. B was charged with murder. At the trial he was found not guilty. The defense had argued that he shot A because he had reason to fear for his life.
  • Yesterday we reported that Vlad won a blue Lada in a lottery on Tuesday. We have some minor corrections: It was not blue it was green; it was not Vlad but Oleg; it was not a Lada but a bicycle; it was not Tuesday but Thursday; and he did not win it, he stole it. Aside from that the story is substantially correct. Purloined from You Call This Living?

I took a little liberty with one of the above stories, in which I don't know the complete outcome.

4 comments:

Assistant Village Idiot said...

Great idea. I think I would even purchase a subscription to that.

Dubbahdee said...

I would think that a "drive by shooting" that struck someone indoors would strongly imply the existence of a bullet hole in some wall or window. Of course, if the window was open, and if the victim happened to be in the alleged direct line of trajectory with the window...

Maybe "Some of the things we found out later." or "What you don't know..."

james said...

That was one of the give-aways: the kids claimed the shooting happened when one was on the porch. I gather their story fell apart quickly.

Donna B. said...

I'd pay for that too.