Just Odd News, Or A Harbinger Of Things To Come?

     You may savor the Darwin Awards. You may delight in the Bulwer-Lytton contest. You may giggle over the oddities reported at Cracked. But the “real news” often demonstrates the veracity of that old saw, “Truth is stranger than fiction.”

     Take this escapade. The report says that the perpetrator stole...what? $160,000 worth of Jamaican cheese? Really? That much of even very expensive cheese – say, $20.00 per pound – would mass to 8,000 pounds. Four tons of cheese. Moreover, this was a specialty cheese, used in a narrow range of products and seldom sold separately from them. The questions are several and imperative:

• How did the thief get away with his haul?
• Did he really expect to escape detection?
• How did he store it? Surely he didn’t “eat it on the way home!”
• Most urgent of all: What did he plan to do with it?

     The report linked above speaks to none of that. Rather, it bombards us with a series of little eye-opener news-grenades:

• The theft occurred:
  1. On September 23;
  2. In New Jersey.
• The thief was arrested “after a two-week investigation.”
• The bail was “$10,000 less than the value of the canned, processed cheese.”

     Let’s recap: in New Jersey, the most mob-ridden of the fifty states, an 18 year old decided to brave the wrath of the Jamaicans, well known for their intemperance toward those who wound them, for several tons of cheese. It then took two weeks for the authorities of Bergen County, New Jersey to trace the aroma to the thief’s hiding place – the nature of which was not mentioned in the story, though it would be one of the most interesting things about this event – and when the thief was brought before a judge, the judge assigned a bail less than the value of the items stolen.

     As the kiddie-puzzles printed on family restaurants’ paper placemats ask us, “What’s wrong with this picture?”

     Someone is hiding something here. Does this “cheese” have national-security implications? Is it a component in a super-powerful explosive, perhaps? Or was it ballast for the concealment of a huge shipment of “crack,” another well-known (and very popular) Jamaican product?

     Let’s not neglect the “investigators.” The theft of several tons of “cheese” should leave a slime trail a deaf-dumb-and-blind quadriplegic could follow. Yet it took two weeks to find the perpetrator? Were the detectives of Bergen County, New Jersey somehow limited in their methods, to “make it interesting?” Were they required to conduct their investigation entirely by mail?

     Finally, we have the judge. What’s he hiding? Bail is supposed to be set proportionally to the damage the crime caused or could have caused. But he set the bail at less than the averred valuation of the stolen product. Was he promised some of that cheese? Or did the Jamaicans intervene out of sympathy for a criminal moved by love of one of their specialties?

     Great God in heaven! Stories like this make it easier to believe the police can look at a corpse shot in the back of the head while handcuffed and rule it a case of suicide. Perhaps if the perpetrator had taken the cheese across state lines...but no; the last thing we’d want after the “investigation” into Hillary Clinton’s multiple felonies is FBI involvement. Better to see if the Keystone Kops can be induced to come out of retirement.

     From now on I’m sticking to the Star and Weekly World News. No, no, keep the Enquirer away from me. That organ once ran stories about Bill Clinton and John Edwards that turned out to be accurate. The last thing my delicate psyche needs is more of that.