Flight of the Falcon and a Somali pub quiz.

For this post I would like to draw your attention to something that happened a couple of days ago in the good old U.S of A. The story is of a little Falcon Heene, 6, who wandered into his attic to find his fathers home made weather balloon just sitting there ready for lift off. Falcon then proceeded to climb into the balloon and float half away across the country before crashing into a field, where everyone, without sounding hugely insensitive, thought he was dead.

Before I go any further with this story I would like to point out that when the balloon crashed the boy Falcon was found not to be inside it. Therefore there were a number of options as to what had happened for this to occur.

1. Mid flight Falcon discovered that he not only had the name of a bird but also the natural ability to fly and soared off into the distance.

2. The same discovery takes place as suggested in option 1, but instead of soaring off into the distance, it proves only to be a result of his complete insanity and he falls to what can only be described as a truly horrendous death.

3. He was never in the balloon in the first place.

Thankfully it was option three that came out to be the winner and the balloon did not, at any point, have him inside it. Which firstly points out that maybe this was all just an elaborate hoax staged to create publicity for the family. And secondly that the entirety of the American media had been following an empty silver balloon around for three hours, which looked like it was designed by a man trying to draw a U.F.O with his teeth whilst being beaten over the head with a barstool.

It has since been brought to public attention that the family recently appeared on the American version of Wife Swap. A show in which two decidedly different families swap the women of the house with the other. Resulting in an entire hour of entirely un-entertaining predictable garbage that only seems to amuse those who have yet to discover the wonders of basic literacy.

Therefore it has been suggested that this all may have been staged to try and be a free advertisement for the show. Though to be honest I don't think trying to convince an entire country that a young boy floated half way across America only to die when it inevitably crashed to the ground was overly good strategy.

I am going to suggest that this story fits rather easily into the category of, "only in America", and though it did enthrall an entire nation for three hours, lets hope it does not happen again any time soon, (though I did enjoy the fact that the attention of millions of Americans was held for hours merely by the apperance of something shiny).

The second part of this post will be a brief mention to a story I stumbled across and thought I might let you know about. It seems that the Kismayo region of Somalia has been holding a series of quizes organised in an attempt to keep the youth of the region on the straight and narrow. You will not be surprised to hear then the prizes for this quiz are guns and explosives. The first prize is a collection that contains two rifles, two grenades, a landmine, and £1000 worth of office supplies. The office supplies presumably included to help out with all that pesky paperwork that comes along with being a Somalian warlord of death.

I guess one can only hope that popular UK T.V quiz shows will take on a similar approach to spice up our Saturday nights. Instead of giving untold wealth, they could give guns and ammo and film winning contestants robbing friends and family.

All that aside, it certainly makes you wonder what exactly it would be like to live in a community that hands out weapons and ammo so freely to what are a basically still children.
I will leave you to think about that until my next post.