From bacon shortages to trout fingers: It's True Stories!

It’s been a while since I’ve ventured into the strange, unusual and weird. And no, I don’t mean the political campaigns, which actually are more bizarre and redundant.

No, as you may already suspect, I mean the land of True Stories, those odd little accounts of strange, unusual, weird and sometimes laughable (again, I’m not referring to candidates nor their speeches). Thanks to the advent of the Internet, these no longer are consigned to the back pages of newspapers near the classified ads. They’re everywhere, and seem to be the hunting grounds of reality TV producers.

You already may have heard some of these stories, or you may not. In either case, here’s the latest compilation of True Stories.

Sounds like a Cinemax After Dark movie: In Norway, a gentleman out for an evening of drinking decided he might have had a few too many and decided to “take a nap” in the backseat of his car. When he awoke, reported The Local (Sweden’s News in English), he discovered he and his car had been stolen by two women and driven to Sweden. Apparently not feeling as lucky as the man, the two women dumped him outside a train station. He contacted police, who put him up for the rest of the night and were giving him a ride back to Norway when he spotted the women and his car. The ladies were taken into custody, the man was given his car and drove back to Oslo.

How dare they scare us like that: Bacon lovers went into a near-panic this week when Internet reports circulated of a coming bacon shortage. Amid visions of BLTs floating away, eggs with no bacon, bacon cheeseburgers becoming a thing of the past, it was learned there is no shortage. It was just a British trade association trying to prep UK customers for an increase in the price of bacon. According to Slate, there’ll be plenty of bacon, although even here in the U.S. it may be higher because of this year’s lower corn harvest. Slate also included a helpful explanation that in Britain, bacon comes from the back of the pig and is what we call Canadian bacon. What we think of as bacon the Brits call streaky bacon. And in Canada, what we call Canadian bacon is known as back bacon. Bacon is simply bacon in Canada, too. (I think I need a BLT after that.)

Dog bites man, not news. Prosecutor bites clerk, that’s news: It was just a typical Saturday night in a Chicago adult store until one of the clerks asked a customer who, with her companion, appeared to be intoxicated to leave. Instead, reports The Associated Press, the woman became belligerent and bit the clerk on the leg while her companion made “menacing gestures.” It turned out the woman was an assistant state’s attorney. Charged with misdemeanor battery and trespass, the assistant prosecutor was placed on administrative leave.

It’s just one of the job risks: Two burglars in Leicester in the UK asked the court for lenience because they’d been shot by the owner of the farm cottage they burgled. According to The Guardian, one appeared in court with injuries to his face and the other had his arm in a sling. That was a result of the homeowner having caught the two in his kitchen in the middle of the night, according to the report. One of them was reaching into a knife drawer when the homeowner fired his shotgun. The burglars fled, but later were apprehended. At court, their barrister asked for a lighter sentence because of they’d been traumatized with a near-death experience for which they were not prepared. Judge Michael Pert, QC, disagreed: “If you burgle a house in the country where the householder owns a legally held shotgun, that is the chance you take.” He sentenced them to four years in prison.

Maybe that wasn’t such a good idea: In Phoenix, a man dressed his 16-year-old son in a sheet, gave him a fake grenade launcher and had him walk the streets while being filmed. He said he wanted to test police response time to a possible terrorist threat. According to Reuters, the man was arrested and charged with several misdemeanors. By the way, the response time was three minutes.

You won’t see this among John Berry’s recommended trout flies: A trout fisherman was cleaning fish he’d caught at Priest Lake in Idaho when he found a human finger in the fish. He turned the finger over to the sheriff’s department, which was able to identify its owner from the fingerprint. When the sheriff contacted Haans Galassi in Colbert, Wash., and told him he had a strange story. “I was like: ‘Let me guess, they found my fingers in a fish’,” he told AP. Turns out Galassi lost four fingers earlier this summer in a wakeboarding mishap on Priest Lake. The sheriff offered to return the finger that had been found, but Galassi told him thanks, but “I’m good.”

Well, that’s all for this look at True Stories. Until next time, keep watching for the strange, the unusual, the bizarre; they should be campaigning door-to-door by now.

Sonny Garrett is opinion page editor of The Baxter Bulletin and author of “Just Another Day in Paradise.”