When smoking can damage your health

[Explorer the eighth]

Sometimes news stories can seem far-fetched, but yet they are true.

For example:

1. A wealthy Sri Lankan presidential candidate offered to buy a cow for every home if he was elected.

Can you imagine what it would be like if one of the candidates in the next US election promised all the households of Los Angeles or New York a cow each if he got voted in next term? What would you do with a longhorn on the top floor of a skyscraper?

2. There was a news story that instead of sending humans to the moon, engineers have developed a robot called the Lunar Penguin which can jump more than one kilometre in one bound.

When it gets there it might send a message back to Earth: "The penguin has landed. That's one small step for a robot; one giant leap for robotkind."

3. A woman tried to open an aeroplane door in mid-flight so that she could smoke a cigarette. She began tampering with the emergency exit until she was stopped by a flight attendent.

Smoking is bad for your health, especially if you light up a cigarette with the aeroplane door open at 15,000 feet.

4. Milk should have been very popular in Moscow this winter because a large quantity of marijuana crops were mistakenly grown amongst the food crops (sunflowers and maize). The food crops could not be used for people and so they were to be used to feed the cows, in winter, along with the marijuana that got mixed up with it.

You could say that those cows are really going to get bombed out on butter, man. Butter is a slang word for marijuana.

5. In Congo, poachers are endangering the hippopotomas population there. They are killing them for meat.

If you just happen to choose the Congo for your holidays (as if you ever would), and you see hippopotamus with fries, or hippo soup, on the menu somewhere, in the interests of conservation, don't even try it.

6. A man who was driving his car in a traffic jam ran out of cigarettes and so he dialled the emergency number for an ambulance to go and pick up a packet of cigs for him and to deliver them at his home for when he arrived there.

I don't know what actually happened after that. The number of time-wasters is increasing in Britain. If he wanted to go a step further, he could paint a yellow cross on the top of his car so that it can be seen from the air, and then he could get the emergency services to drop him a packet of fags from a helicopter and possibly even a bottle of water to stop him getting thirsty whilst he's slowly driving his way home.