They don't teach squirrels to look both ways before crossing the road. Maybe someone should look into it.

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I read in the paper the other day about a student who died on his motorcycle. Actually, he didn't die on his motorcyle, he died off his motorcycle and on a tree. Wrapped around a tree to be more exact.

His girlfriend was quoted as saying, "That's the way he wanted to go. On his bike, with the wind in his hair," she said. "He always said he wanted to go doing something he loved."

I wonder if he thought that as his bike lost control, sending him hurtling towards a tree at 70 miles an hour. "This is it. I'm glad I'm going out like th..."

"Ripley's Believe It or Not" once ran a story about a skydiver who jumped from a plane, only to find out that her parachute didn't work correctly. The parachute would have worked fine, but the pack that cased the parachute was a different matter. The rip cord didn't release the chute, and she found herself in a free fall at 12,000 feet.

A sudden and powerful gust of wind propelled her upwards a couple thousand feet, only to catch the bottom of another gust of wind that propelled her upwards another couple hundred feet. This series of falls and wind upthrusts repeated for nearly 2 hours. It lasted so long in fact, that her jump team sent out a search party for her.

If that story wasn't amazing enough, she finally resumed her uninterrupted freefall, sans parachute mind you, and landed on the soft sand dunes of Yuma, Arizona. The soft sands cushioned her fall, and she only broke her arm, her hip, fractured both of her legs, her nose, 3 ribs, and all the toes of both her feet.

But she survived. And through a voice box, she told the "Ripley's" viewers that as the wind bounced her around like a human pinball, she resigned herself to the high probability that she was not going to survive the fall, and that she was glad that she was going to die doing what she loved. She thought this until she was roughly 15 feet above the sand dune, and for that one-hundred-thousanth of a second, all she wanted to do was eat an ice-cream cone.

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The UNT Jazz program recently failed someone for plagiarizing their Jazz saxophone performance. Plagiarizing John Coltrane takes a skill that few possess. I would have promoted him to Dean of Music.

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Someone found part of a finger in a cup of chili at Wendy's a couple of weeks ago. What went through the mind of the person who found the finger in the seconds after the discovery? Do you wonder if there are other pieces still in there? Do you wonder if there's a four-fingered cook at the "Wendy's Cooking Institute" in Stockholm, Sweden? Do you wonder if you accidentally ate some? Do you wonder if Ronald McDonald put a hit out on Dave Thomas, chopped up his body, and is shipping bits and pieces of his body to all the "Wendy's" of the world?

Do you take one more sip of your Frosty?

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matt out