I just came across this article about Hilton Plettell, (not in the picture), a man from Birmingham, England who was recently astounded to receive a letter from the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital, inviting him for a scan to determine his stage of pregnancy. As we all know (or at least I hope we all know) the male anatomy was never designed to conceive and give birth to babies. My eyes were glued to the screen of my computer as I tried to scan through the article to find out the explanation of this freak of nature!
Now dear reader, a word of warning, when you read such news articles, desist from scanning through just because you want a swift understanding and you think reading the whole article will take an eternity. As my eyes raced through at breakneck speed, my first pit stop was the photograph and caption that reads, "Mr Plettell said he had been the butt of jokes from friends since the letter."
Next my eyes landed on : "... all my mates are enjoying ribbing me...." At that point in mild shock, I was convinced that therein lies my explanation. One of the jokes that he was the butt of, had sired a child with him! Just to try and lesson the shock, I decided to go back and read the piece word for word in case I had left out some other more logical explanation. Indeed I had and boy, was the explanation at a tangent from what I had initially concluded. The moral of my story is simple and you probably know it. Read selectively and you will always send yourself on a wild good chase!
I am not sure if Hilton Plettell himself referred to himself as being "the butt of endless jokes." What I suspect though, is that between Plettell, David Crabtree the Sky News writer and myself, one or more of us has a naughtyand possibly dirty mind. The question is who?!
It turns out that I wrote a piece on my blog about a Newsweek story that wasn't quite accurate, because I didn't read the whole thing through carefully - Notes from underground: Newsweek jumps the shark.
ReplyDeleteBut it was a story on their web site, not the hard copy version you buy at the CNA, and I think I, and other commenters, were victims of a web designer who was do concerned with playing with all the toys at his disposal that he forgot to tell the story.
That's quite a common problem with web designers.