Multiple Personality

Yahoo! News shouldn’t put its “Odd News” on the front page, where I will stumble upon it and be made distraught. I just went there to do a search, and this headline caught my eye:

Teacher OK after crashing into bear on a bicycle

The first question you might reasonably ask yourself is, Where was the bear riding the bicycle? The answer is two-fold: No, and Missoula, Montana.

Anybody remember “Twin Peaks,” the great whackadoodle TV series by David Lynch? The whole mystery was: Who killed Laura Palmer? It turned out to be Bob. An evil entity that took over the body of Laura’s father. When Laura’s lookalike cousin came to visit from Missoula, Montana, Bob killed her too, telling her “You’re going back to Missoula, Montana!” before he smashed her into a mirror. Bob was very scary.

That was my only association with Missoula, Montana, before now. I’m glad I can now augment that with a teacher on a bicycle smashing into a 300-pound bear, and the two of them rolling down the hill together. The happened on a street called Bear Run Creek Road. The man is a science teacher, so he is not responsible for understanding irony.

“What did the man look like, Yogi?”

This was the front-page story in the Missoulian. It details how there are frequently bears along this road, “noshing berries.” And you thought there might not be any Jews in Missoula, Montana. Both the Yahoo! and Missoulian versions of this story explain that this teacher “t-boned the bear.” Unfamiliar with the expression, I thought perhaps this meant that it was bear steaks for everybody in Missoula this fine day. But apparently it doesn’t mean that.

The whole thing is screaming for someone to blame. Whom shall we blame? I give you five choices:

1. Yahoo! News, for implying in their headline that a bear was riding a bicycle.

2. The Missoulian, for implying that bears eat like Jews, or that Jews eat like bears.

3. The bear. He was asking for it.

4. The teacher. Because his bicycle wasn’t equipped with bearbags. (ow)

5. Sarah Palin. Because bitch scary.
(Apologies to women everywhere; I am using the Serbian definition of “bitch,” which translates to “unscrupulous lipsticked pit bull.”)

Anybody get my John Irving reference, by the way?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 10th, 2008 at 10:33 pm and is filed under Politics and Life, Television and Life, The Human Condition, The Theater, Writing and Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.