The big news in the world of supermarket tabloids last week was, apparently, a South Dakotan woman who delivered her own baby while skydiving, which seems like quite a feat.
I love tabloid headlines. They are a great way to pass the time, which is why grocery stores put them at the checkout counters in the first place.
I had a dozen eggs, some apples, four cans of tuna and half gallon of milk. The woman in front of me had $131.85 worth of groceries. I know for a fact that it was $131.85 because it wasn’t until the cashier said, “That’ll be $131.85, ma’am” that the woman began to look for her checkbook. So I had plenty of time to pass.
In addition to the woman who delivered her own baby, there was news of an alien mummy going on a rampage, proof that werewolves sunk the Titanic, and the story of a judge who was turned into a guinea pig after he denied witches the right to adopt children.
I know the term “fake news” is all the rage these days, and it has really become necessary for people to become much smarter about what they read on the internet and watch on TV.
I’ve been a professional journalist for more years than I’d like to admit. It’s been a truly rewarding experience, and even with the challenges that real journalism faces today, I wouldn’t trade it for anything.
I know there are folks out there who already think we make up the news to suit whatever it is we believe. That’s not true, of course. We work very hard to dig up the facts, and we try not to report rumors or innuendo until we can prove it.
You may not like “unnamed sources,” but they’ve been around forever and without them, a lot of corruption in government would never be exposed.
Yet as I left the grocery store — the woman finally found her checkbook — I thought of how much easier my profession would be if we could, like the tabloids, just make up the news.
I have a pretty good imagination. The possibilities for made-up news are endless.
Did you hear that Bigfoot is going to audition for “The Voice”?
“I auditioned several years ago and they rejected me. But I’ve been working with a singing coach and I think I’m good to go now,” Bigfoot said in an exclusive interview with the Yakima Herald-Republic, his hometown newspaper in Washington state.
What about the story of the woman in Cow Bluff, N.M., who gave birth to a six-headed baby?
“We’ve ’bout named three of them heads,” said Sheila Silkwater, the mother. “We’ll have to keep working on the other three.”
There’s the 45-year-old man in Beauregard, Miss., who’s been saving belly-button lint since he was a teenager and now has a 135-pound ball of lint in his room.
“Hey, what else am I gonna do in a small town?” he said. “We ain’t even got Netflix here.”
And don’t forget about the preacher down in south Georgia who filed a $2 million malpractice suit against his surgeons for accidentally removing his soul during an operation.
“They were supposed to take out my gallbladder,” he said.
I could go on and on, but I’ve really got to stop now. I’ve just received some shocking breaking news to investigate. Turns out President Trump really wasn’t born in the U.S.
He’s a space alien from Pluto.
