Interesting and Baffling Headlines

House Arrest of a Child

This is the title of a post in the Angry Arab News Service. It is supposed to point to an article somewhere that tells of a child who is only a year and two months old, yet has been put under house arrest by the Israel occupation authorities on the Golan Heights.

I very much wanted to see what that was all about. I've heard that children mature much earlier now than they did in my day, especially in my own case. But there just happens to be a kid right up the road who is exactly that age, and it's true that he is as extra active as he was expected to be, given his mother and her side of his family. Still, it's impossible to see him as being a threat to anyone except himself, as shown  by his habit of charging straight ahead everywhere while looking at things only at the level of his eyes or upward but never ever downward, leading to his having tumbled down the same full set of stairs, from one floor to the other, not once but twice -- so far -- without any obvious injury.

But fie! The article seems to be in Arabic, and I can't read Arabic, though it is a very graceful-looking language, even if it gives the impression of being oriented in the "wrong" direction, from right to left instead of left to right.


Teenagers Fly Nest in Stolen Plane

I had trouble with this headline in the Times Online because of the two words stuck right next to each other, "Fly Nest," which struck me as being two verbs thrown together in an awkward way that didn't make sense, though they both could refer to birds. For instance, I thought instead of "Nest in," "Next to" might've been intended, as that story was accompanied by another incident on the same day in which a guy stole a light plane in Ontario and flew it over four U.S. states for six leisurely hours before he finally landed safely, even after being followed and screamed at by Air Force fighter jets through most of that time.

But this story is about two teenagers in California, who found another light plane untended, at a tiny, unsecured airport outside Los Angeles, and they took a short joyride before making a quick landing, after they finally realized that they had grabbed an aircraft that had had only about 90 minutes of flying time in its gas tank.

It took me a while to realize that the headline writer, trying to be precious, like many headline writers, was referring to the teenagers' warm, comfy homes, and he was trying to say "flee the nest."  Or could the writer have been thinking of a smiliar expression, heard most often in the past tense: "flew the coop?"  But it's been a long time since I've heard or seen either expression, and also I have to always keep in mind the fact, though I have used the English language intensively in the intervening decades, the written word much more than the verbal, I learned it decades ago and now I fly it strictly by the seat of my pants and relying only on my memory. That means that by now a lot of usages could and have changed without my knowing -- or maybe it was always "fly" instead of "flee," or both.

I suppose I could look it up.

High-Speed Sex Costly in Norway

This article offers slightly less mystery than the two above, though I had to read it to find out if the "High-Speed" refers to the velocity with which the sex was being done, or whether a racing driver had smuggled one of those Nascar-type trophy babes into the only seat in his machine, as there is, I believe, rarely a back one in those vehicles.

The article described an incident in which some Norwegian highway police happened to notice a car weaving across a busy highway, as in drunken driving. But it turned out to be a man having carnal fun with a woman. using the lapdance position while driving along at a pretty good clip.  Though the police were diligent about photographing this, to be used as "evidence in court" they said, they still took a dim view of it because of the obvious vision problem posed by the woman's head and torso. So they pulled the pair over at the next rest stop.

They leveled charges at the man that could mean a heavy fine and losing his driving privileges for a while. The article didn't say whether the woman would be similarly charged, though she was allowed to drive her boyfriend home.

I assume that that time the two lovers waited a little longer -- or either kept out a better eye for uniforms with cameras.

Had they seen that done in movies? I mean the regular ones, not the porns.  I wouldn't be surprised if that bit of "business" was actually first tried in action flicks years ago, and many times since then.