The ODDs Were in my Favor

Parachute Accident Mars Coleslaw Wrestling

This thing really happened, years ago, in a place called Indiana.

It seems this college student was hitchhiking home for Christmas break. He had several suitcases with him, including a strangely shaped long and narrow one. It was night-time.

A car slowed down and stopped near him. Since he could see that there were already six men in the vehicle, it seemed unlikely they were stopping to give him a lift.

Sure enough, a couple of the men jumped out, pushed the student to the ground, scrambled back into the car with his suitcases and roared off. The young man reported this to the police, but here’s the thing. He was a biology student, and he was taking a very large snake home with him for the holidays, in the long suitcase.

Back in my police reporting days, I came upon this incident report the next morning, and I thought it was the funniest thing I had ever read.

Coffee cascaded from my nose as I pictured the six brigands speeding down the highway at 70 miles an hour, turning on the overhead light in the cramped car to inspect their ill-gotten goods, and finding a live snake.

I wrote the story, but I’m sure I didn’t do it justice. You can’t begin to do justice to something like that.

Phone Sex Operator gets Masturbation Settlement – A phone sex operator wins a workers’ compensation case, claiming she was injured in both hands by having to masturbate frequently throughout the day.

In the journalism business, such stories are variously called “odds,” or “brights.” That moniker is something of a misnomer. Brights always drip with human interest, but they are not always funny. Some are quite tragic, but when the theme of innate absurdity overtakes the theme of tragedy, it’s just out of our hands. It’s going to be turned into an odd.

Journalists like writing odds. Most of the normal rules of our craft fly out the window. You can make puns, you can write a clever headline, the sky is the limit. Double entendres abound.

Political Correctness rings Hunchback Death Knell – A British theater company drops the word hunchback from its production of ‘Hunchback of Notre Dame” to avoid offending disabled people. They call it “The Bellringer of Notre Dame,” instead.

The great British writer Graham Greene wrote a short story called, “A Tragic Accident,” about a nine-year-old schoolboy named Jerome, whose headmaster calls him in to give him some horrible news, about a sudden death in the family.

“Your father was walking along a street in Naples when a pig fell on him. A shocking accident. Apparently in the poorer quarters of Naples they keep pigs on their balconies. This one was on the fifth floor. It had grown too fat. The balcony broke. The pig fell on your father.”

The headmaster has to turn his back on the boy just to keep from laughing.  As Jerome grows up, he never quite escapes the stigma of being that guy whose father was crushed by a falling pig. Everyone he meets tries to keep a straight face, and most of them fail.

Two women are killed in Hyde Park when they are struck by lightning and their underwire bras serve as conductors. A Ukrainian woman is blown to pieces when she pulls the pin out of hand grenade, thinking she is opening a can of beer

Listen. I believe my wonderful wife cares for me very much and is concerned for my well-being. I really do. But both of us were career journalists, and early on in our marriage she actually said to me, “Bob, whatever you do, don’t be a bright.”

“Excuse me?”

“I mean, don’t do something so strange that it goes into newspapers as a bright. And especially, don’t die in an embarrassing way.” A family never gets past something like that. Just don’t do it.”

“I’ll try my best, sweetie.”

When I went to work on an editing desk for Reuters, in New York City, I was surprised to find that the wire service’s voluminous daily file of hundreds of stories from around the world, bristling with news of wars and disasters and politics, always made room for a few odds. It made sense. Newspapers and broadcasters loved them, and Reuters could gather them from every country in the world. That’s a lot of oddness.

Breast-Temptress Thieves Nabbed – Three young women smear their breasts with a powerful drug, stand by the road inviting men to have a lick, and then take their wallets and cars.

I loved editing these things. Of course, I couldn’t admit that I loved it. There is no place at an ever-so-serious news agency for somebody who is happy editing odds. So, over the years I had to feign interest in coups and earthquakes and politics and assassinations and commodities markets. You know, actual news.

Eventually, I found myself in a small office in Hong Kong, called “the glass box.” I was the Asia News Editor, overseeing the work of hundreds of journalists based in 18 countries. At that point, I was in a position to encourage our reporters to watch for good brights. They happily obliged.

Voodoo Latrine  - A  musical greeting card thrown into a village latrine is heard playing “Silent Night,” leading frightened neighbors to fear a voodoo curse.

Then, I went too far. You see, while you may know about Reuters from reading newspapers and watching TV news, the most lucrative part of our business was selling our hot news to capitalists in trading rooms and other financial institutions all over the world. It was thought that these capitalists had absolutely no time for trivial news.

I thought differently. I knew these guys. Sick humor, gallows humor, yes, please. So, despite push-back from our editors in London, I designed a feature for the small but mighty screen by which Reuters delivered our timely news to the capitalists.

My radical new feature offered 10 new brights per day. That’s it. Nothing more drastic. I was warned that the walls of our Fleet Street headquarters would crumble, and the capitalists would see us as clowns. And not even good clowns.

The ODDs feature instantly soared to great heights on our “most read” list, and some days, it was number one. Contrary to what you might expect, this did not make me a hero – the spoilsports still felt like I had somehow soiled the product in a way they couldn’t quite explain.

Too bad, because that genie wasn’t going back into the bottle.

As long as I had come that far, I might as well go all the way. In the mid 1990s, I became News Editor, North America, responsible for news content from all of our bureaus in the U.S. and Canada. This was a time when our online news presence was skyrocketing, thanks to giant customers like Yahoo and America Online and Compuserve and Lycos. We were bursting into new media, and there was no stopping us.

We already offered a robust suite of online news topics – Top News, Politics, Business, Entertainment, Sports, etc. Then, I added a category called Oddly Enough, filled with, you guessed it, brights. Once again, a runaway success. And once again, it was slightly embarrassing to see readers clicking on the brights more than the world’s top news stories.

Parachute Accident Mars Coleslaw Wrestling – A parachutist lands on a beer vendor at a coleslaw wrestling contest during “Bike Week.”

I wasn’t quite finished. Next up, I found us a literary agent and produced a book filled with our brights, called “Six Drown Saving Chicken.” I later edited a follow-up, a glossy little tome simply called “Oddly Enough.” I was making public appearances, doing radio interviews, and autographing copies. I loved it.

If you’re lucky, you can sometimes still find both of my books for sale online. You know, Father’s Day is over, but it’s not too soon to start thinking about Christmas.