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Friday, March 4, 2005

Rat Sandwich

A long time ago, I was the news director of a very small radio station in Southern Maryland. One of the things I had to do to clear stories off the AP teletype machine and choose which to read as part of the regional news. There was a story one day that I knew I could never pass up: someone in Baltimore was suing the local chain bakery because he found a rat baked into a loaf of bread.

My mind, ever helpful started to wander. The story seemed incomplete; there were questions to be asked. How was this noticed? Was it sliced bread? How far into the loaf do you have to get before encountering baked rat? Was it baked in horizontally or length-wise? And did the victim (assuming you don't consider the true victim to be the rat) begin at the nose end or the tail end? When does one begin to notice the subtle addition of Rattus norvegicus to one's pastrami?

Which, of course, lead me to wonder what kind of bread? White bread? rye? ("Honey? Does this raisin bread look OK to you?) pumpernickel? What does one do when encountering such a windfall? There certainly were a lot of questions, more than one small news story was able to answer. Even though I was reading the story during the breakfast hour, I never got any complaints. That was when I began to suspect that no one was really listening.
10:34:20 AM

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