BUT ISN’T THAT KIND OF SELF-EXPLANATORY? A Florida man was convicted of first-degree murder for stabbing his ex-girlfriend’s boyfriend 100 times, because he did a Google search called, “how to kill someone with a knife.”
WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG? A 62-year-old woman was arrested for shoplifting in a Walmart in Genoa Township, Mich., while more than 70 police officers were in the store for a “shop with a cop” event. A clerk told the cops that the woman had packed a cart with about $730 worth of merchandise and ran through the self-checkout. She was taken into custody while loading the stolen goods into her car, which was parked next to a police cruiser.
WAIT HERE, MOM, I’LL BE RIGHT BACK: A 56-year-old man drove to a bank in Haverford, Pa., with his mother, and then went inside and robbed the place. She told police, who immediately swarmed the car in the parking lot, that she had no idea that her son was going to do this. She was released. He was not.
AND NOW YOU’RE GOING BACK, PAL: A man was arrested for burglarizing a car parked outside of an apartment building in Tampa, Fla while wearing a black T-shirt that said, “I just got out of prison.”
SO YOU’D PROBABLY KNOW HIM IF YOU SAW HIM: Police in Canada have issued an arrest warrant for a 31-year-old parole violator who had been convicted of arson. He was described as having tattoos “covering most of his face,” including large black circles around his eyes, a large set of teeth across his mouth and a tear drop under his right eye.
OK, MAYBE I HAD A COUPLE OF BEERS: A man, waiting in his car to pick up his children in Lakeland, Fla., was so drunk that school personnel refused to release the kids to him. He had a blood alcohol level four times the legal limit, and failed every task in the sobriety test. Police said, “He was so drunk, he couldn’t hit the ground with his hat,” adding, “The children went home with their mother, who was sober.”
MY DATE OF BIRTH? HOLD ON; LET ME CHECK: A man, who tried to get a driver’s license for a neighbor in the Rivne region of Ukraine by attempting to take the driving test on his behalf, was asked why his face didn’t match the one on his ID. He claimed that his appearance had changed since the photo was taken. But his story fell apart when officials saw that he couldn’t tell them his birthdate without looking at “his” ID.
I WASN’T SPEEDING, WAS I, OFFICER? When police approached a man who had parked his car in the middle of the road near Lawton, Mich., he asked the officers they had pulled him over. Drugs or alcohol were said to be a factor.
WHY NOT?! YOU’RE ALREADY HERE: A man called an ambulance, falsely claiming that he had been stabbed outside a supermarket in Warwickshire, England, so that he could get a ride home. Paramedics raced to the scene, but he admitted that he was uninjured when they arrived. When they refused to take him home, he spat on one of them, and was arrested.
January 7, 2024
Mike Pingree – for RevereBeach.com
Mike Pingree is a native of Lynn, MA and has written the offbeat “Through The Looking Glass” column for 35 years. For many years it appeared locally in the Boston Sunday Herald, and at one point was distributed to 283 newspapers in the United States by Tribune Media Services of Chicago and to 300 college papers by Knight Ridder.
“Through The Looking Glass” also appeared regularly in The Star of Johannesburg, The Belfast Daily Mirror, the Bermuda Sun, Ireland on Sunday, The Barbados Daily Nation, The Sherbrooke Record in Quebec, The Daily Post in Fiji and the Central America Weekly in Costa Rica. At its highest point the column’s total worldwide circulation reached 2 million.
RevereBeach.com is pleased to bring “Through The Looking Glass” back to local readership – offering long-time journalist Pingree’s take on quirky and entertaining news items as a regular feature.
Mr. Pingree has worked as a newspaperman at the Boston Herald, USA Today, the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune and the Thomaston (Conn.) Express. He has also been a working actor for the past 15 years, appearing in short films and on stage in Boston and Newburyport. He has acted as an extra in more than 150 movies and television shows.
