She'll Be Waiting In Istanbul

Network news is a snorefest, yet every so often, the teasers tempt me to watch. I made popcorn when I heard: Chicken Shop Owner Allegedly Sets Fire.

The Bronx food fight began when a Twin Donut shop started competing with a Kennedy Fried Chicken by adding legs, wings, breasts and thighs to its menu and selling plates of food for 50 cents cheaper, supervising fire marshal Robert Pinto said.

...needs salt. Wait - doughnuts and chicken parts?

The chicken place's owner, Kabeer Ahmad, whose business had taken a nosedive, used a hammer to punch a hole in the wall between the stores around 4 a.m. Monday, squirted gasoline into the doughnut shop and tossed in a lit match before driving off, Pinto said.

GET OUT! The same building? GET OUT!

"The chicken store guy eventually admitted he was suffering," Pinto said. "In a moment of weakness he punched a hole in the store wall and sprayed gasoline." Ahmad, who was charged with arson, a felony punishable by up to 25 years to life in prison, was in custody Monday night. He didn't have a lawyer and hadn't been visited by his family, and there was no telephone number listed for him at the home address provided by the FDNY. He was to be arraigned Tuesday.

The owner of the doughnut shop, Mike Chhor, said he didn't know why his neighbor set the fire and destroyed his business, which he bought three weeks ago.

"I don't know why he burned the store," Chhor said. "I had no problem with him."

Ah, the bitterness of recrimination and the sweet taste of kettle corn don't mix! You'd think our amateur arsonist would know this but - and I say this cautiously - people are really very fucking stupid.

The centre on Regent Street in London prides itself on being a one-stop shop for inquiries. But sometimes, the agency has admitted, the questions asked by travellers are simply unanswerable. For example, one visitor wanted to know: 'What is the entry fee for Brighton?' Another asked: 'Do you have any information on (former Page 3 girl) Samantha Fox?'

It is not known what mode of transport was envisaged by the person who wondered: 'Can I get to Jersey any other way apart from sea or air travel?'

Another clearly jet-lagged visitor asked: 'When is the changing of the guard at the White House?'

A person once called the library I work in and asked for a photograph of Jesus. I did not mention the fake in Turin.

Encounters could be just as strange in the help centres of VisitScotland, where questions from tourists included: 'What time does the midnight train leave?', 'Which bus do I get from the Orkney Islands to the Shetland Islands?', and 'Is Edinburgh in Glasgow?'.

Another tourist wanted to know: 'What time of night does the Loch Ness monster surface?'

Look, I'm no genius and I've never invented anything but if there's a God, I bet she wonders how this dud of a species got through R & D.

The Federal Aviation Administration acknowledged that a United supervisor had called the control tower at O'Hare, asking if anyone had spotted a spinning disc-shaped object. But the controllers didn't see anything, and a preliminary check of radar found nothing out of the ordinary, FAA spokeswoman Elizabeth Isham Cory said.

"Our theory on this is that it was a weather phenomenon," Cory said. "That night was a perfect atmospheric condition in terms of low (cloud) ceiling and a lot of airport lights. When the lights shine up into the clouds, sometimes you can see funny things."

The FAA is not investigating, Cory said.

I've put down the popcorn because I hear the banjo strains of dueling eyewitnesses.

At least one O'Hare controller, union official Craig Burzych, was amused by it all.

"To fly 7 million light years to O'Hare and then have to turn around and go home because your gate was occupied is simply unacceptable," he said.

That guy sounds pretty sane. Huh.

Some of the witnesses, interviewed by the Tribune, said they are upset that neither the government nor the airline is probing the incident.

Whatever the object was, it could have interfered with O'Hare's radar and other equipment, and even created a collision risk, they said.

That sounds kinda rational. Ruh roh!

"I tend to be scientific by nature, and I don't understand why aliens would hover over a busy airport," said a United mechanic who was in the cockpit of a Boeing 777 that he was taxiing to a maintenance hangar when he observed the metallic-looking object above Gate C17.

"But I know that what I saw and what a lot of other people saw stood out very clearly, and it definitely was not an [Earth] aircraft," the mechanic said.

If this story is still playing a real nutburger must warming up his glowing psychosis.

One United employee appeared emotionally shaken by the sighting and "experienced some religious issues" over it, one co-worker said.

Oh, Jesus Christ! I mean, really! If our Sky God can make whole universes including other populated planets, why can't the aliens make it through baggage check? Meanwhile, around full circle and back on earth, some people really need to skip the fryolator and upgrade to a microwave: Gas cooker blows up island. You read that right.

This was the staggering scene after a faulty gas cooker exploded in a timber-framed shack – and devastated a tiny Caribbean island. The blast caused an inferno that leapt from hut to hut, taking less than ten minutes to sweep across Soledad Miria. Many of the 1,014 inhabitants dived into the sea or took to fishing boats to escape. More than a third – 348 – were injured but, amazingly, no one died.

Mmmm. Chicken...