Congratulations! You're having puppies!

I have come to believe that, unbeknownst to me, January 2009 was declared "Crazy News Story Month." Most mornings before class starts I glance at AOL.com news pages to see what's going on in the world. (I used to not do this until I realized that I had been eating the recalled peanut butter for the better half of 3 months. I didn't read or watch the news...nobody told me!)

Anyway, the crazy news season started out with the plane landing in the middle of the tiny (as far as runways go) Hudson River with absolutely no casualties. What an incredible story!

This morning I read that a woman in California gave birth to OCTUPLETS last week! (That's 8 babies, you guys--8 babies at once.) All the babies were doing amazingly well and were already off ventilators, which is an incredible feat for little preemies that weighed 1.8 to 3.4 pounds at birth. The real kicker, though, is that the doctors could only see 7 babies on the sonograms, so no one (including the parents) knew about the 8th until the Cesarean section. Can you imagine their surprise/disappointment?! The doctor says, "One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, ...eight? Oops! Guess we miscounted!" The mother probably sarcastically said, "Oh good, now it counts as a full litter." Maybe she was excited...I mean, at that point, does one more really make that much of a difference?

My favorite story has to be the one I read this afternoon. The headline: Man trapped by sofa, Survives by whiskey. Seriously. The story said that the man accidentally tripped, fell into his (man-eating?) couch, had a bad back that prevented him from getting up, couldn't reach a phone but could reach a bottle of whiskey, drank it for two days to "survive" until the cavalry arrived. Why don't I believe this story as it's told? The reasons are 3-fold:

1. Regular people don't just fall into couches. People who have ALREADY been drinking whiskey for two days fall into couches.
2. If he had been doing well in the first place, that whiskey bottle probably wouldn't have been in reaching distance from the couch.
3. One doesn't need anything to survive for 2 days. A person can live without water and food for two days without perishing. In fact, the whiskey would have hurt his chances of survival because of the way that alcohol dehydrates the body.

(Then again, who am I to question the veracity of a story on AOL.com--the virtual birthplace of good reporting...and indecent pictures of Britney Spears?)

As always, though--the truth is stranger than fiction.