Don't look up

Here in a very small Maine town in the summer, one of my favorite bits of reading each week is the Police Blotter in the local paper.  This is also true in reading the Cambridge Chronicle the rest of the year, but Cambridge is a city and real crime abounds. Not so much here in Maine.  There are the usual domestic abuse calls, the "fox stealing chickens" (yes, really, not a nursery rhyme), and the perpetrator-left-convenience-store-without-paying-for-gas.  But always there is one report that stands out as truly unique. 

Two weeks ago it was this: man in town calls police and tells them that someone has dropped human excrement from a plane onto his roof.  Police officer goes to check it out and reports back that actually, it was vomit.

That was my favorite so far this summer.

This week: maraudng teenagers rearranged the letters of a church sign, and spelled, instead of the religious message, "something foul."   Since the police report didn't repeat either the pious phrase or its foul anagram, this caused me to waste an entire afternoon on speculation. I had very little luck. Best I could come up with is that "only begotten son" can be rearranged to spell "teeny oblong snot."  I don't think this is what the teenage vandals spelled out.

But it did lead my thinking next about combining the two criminal events, and wondering what would happen if an airplane dropped teeny oblong snot on someone's roof.

 

Comments

[Anne]

Haha, thanks for the laugh! I love our police blotter in Concord, MA, too. One favorite was a caller who called the police because her co-workers at the hospital were talking behind her back. "Caller was advised this was not a police matter." I'll say!

[Sarah Guenther]

Love the police blotter! I'm also fascinated with the names, and often the spellings, on billboards and businesses. "Shirl's Curls's" is a recent one. I also LOVE to read obituaries. My favorite among the deceased: Elvis Duck.

[Lori in OR]

This made me truly laugh out loud. I love your sense of humor; this is exactly the kind of time-wasting speculation I would indulge in.

I read "Looking Back" to my (almost-thirteen) daughter this week, and we were in hysterics over your story about "Modest Storewrecker." Each time we reread it, something new would strike us as hilarious: your mom saying, "That's you!" - Modest saying, "Aw, shucks, it was nothing..." - your line about how nothing is unusual when you are four.

Cracked us up.