Hand springing into action
Sometimes all you need to fight crime is a little cheer. Or at least the Lincoln High varsity cheerleading team from Ypsilanti, Mich.
The squad was visiting Ann Arbor, Mich., for a Universal Cheerleaders Association camp when they witnessed an accident near the University of Michigan campus. The driver of a truck hit a car stopped at a traffic light. The impact of the crash caused the car to hit another vehicle, which then hit another.
The team’s coach managed to read the license plate of the truck before it sped away from the scene of the accident. Worried that she’d forget the plate number before police arrived, the coach repeated it to her team who then promptly turned it into the worst cheer in cheerleading history.
The memory trick worked, though, and police were able to track down and arrest the hit-and-run driver at his home. Next up, the girls plan to debut a cheer they hope will end identity theft.
Dead man rolling
Mary Ellen Douglas thought she saw a large white package fall from the back of a covered pickup truck recently on her way home from work in downtown Dallas.
But as she switched lanes to avoid hitting the parcel lying in the middle of U.S. 175, she realized that the parcel had feet.
Other rush-hour commuters were equally alarmed, particularly when they saw the pickup driver return to the scene and retrieve his cargo: a dead man strapped to a gurney.
The driver, from Foreman’s Funeral Service, was supposed to transport the man’s body from the Dallas hospital where he died the day before back to his home in Shreveport, La. Along the way, the back door of the truck came open and, unbeknownst to the driver, the man’s body rolled out onto the highway.
“I didn’t think it was possible for that to happen,” Douglas told the Dallas Morning News. “I wanted to get out of there. It was too freaky for me.”
Whatayou, retahdid?
Residents of Easthampton, Mass., are wondering which is worse: the fact that the city accidentally installed Alabama road signs in its own downtown, or the fact that it took the city and its residents a full week to notice.
The signs at the corner of Rte. 10 and 141 feature highway numbers printed inside the silhouette of Alabama, which doesn’t look anything at all like the silhouette of Massachusetts.
Still, the construction crew that installed the signs and even nearby residents and store owners didn’t spot the error right away. Finally, a full week later, a highway department worker alerted the superintendent of public works.
The superintendent believes that the contractor took the example of a proper highway sign design from a federal manual and sent it to the sign maker as a guide. The example featured a sign for Route 21 in Alabama. The Massachusetts signs are supposed to feature simple black numbers on a white background, but the sign maker misunderstood and gave the contractor exactly what it asked for.
The man who ordered the signs for the contractor, Roger Remy, offered this insightful explanation to the Boston Globe: “It’s kind of an oddball situation. But sometimes stuff happens. Confusion does happen sometimes . . . I mean, I don’t know. Who knows?”
Sacre bleu!
Thanks to mounting competition from countries like Australia and Chile, the wine industry in France is suffering from an overproduction crisis. In fact, a large part of France’s 2004 stock remains unsold.
So after discussing the problem over a few glasses of Chablis, growers in southern France have decided to give away 400,000 bottles of wine this summer.
But where does one find the next generation of wine connoisseurs? Naturally, at tollbooths.
And so goes the master plan to revive the French wine industry. Motorists speeding along busy highways will be given free bottles of wine bearing a special label detailing the virtues of the wine, along with a pamphlet explaining the current overproduction crisis.
Industry experts predict that the giveaway may either be exactly what the French wine industry needs to break out of its slump, or it will cause enough fatal traffic accidents to rival the number of dead from the smallpox epidemic of 1438.
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