My brother is a bit of a wild man.

He lives down in Asheville, NC and is one of those outdoorsy types who takes vacations to go rock climbing in Utah and likes to eat tofu that he has shot and killed himself. 

Anyway, every once in a while he’ll forward on some tale of a recent adventure of a raft journey into the Costa Rican rainforest or climbing up the side of Devils Tower or creating a robot out of an old carbeurator and tongue depressors.

Well, a couple of days ago he sent me a video of him kayaking down a hill in the snow.

Yes, you read that correctly.

I think the logic went, “Why spend $10 on a sled when I already have a kayak.  Besides, the maneuverability is much better.”

So, he took some video and spliced it together to some music and waited for it to go viral (boy, now that it’s made my blog, I’m sure it’s just a matter of time!)  Anyway, the virality never came (It’s awful when someone questions your virality, isn’t it?) but he did make the local news.  He sent me a quick link and I dutifully clicked on it to check out his primetime debut.

Well, I never found his news segment.  I’m sure it was on their somewhere, but as you probably know, local news websites all appear to be cobbled together by monkeys living in a meth lab.  It’s all just a series of lights and ads and blinking boxes - and absolutely no logical format whatsoever. 

I searched around without much success, but the thing I truly couldn’t get over was the horrible horrible news happening in this little town.

Now, my brother sent me a link from the Greenville, SC Fox news station, (not Asheville) and let me tell you there was nothing about the news there that makes me want to drive within 100 miles of that den of misery much less move there.

http://www.foxcarolina.com/index.html

I don’t know what’s on the website now, probably new horrible horrible things, but this is an exact reprint of the top dozen stories there as I write this:

Cherrydale Girl Run Over By Grandmother's SUV, Killed

Campobello Man Killed When He Slips On Ice

Advocates: Bauer Off-Base With 'Strays' Remark

Man Killed In Gray Court House Fire

Cleanup From Winter Storm Continues

Teen Pleads Guilty To Burying Stillborn Baby

Slow, Steady Recovery Expected For SC Travel

Gas Leak Prompts Evacuation Of Middle School

Greenville Man Accused Of Molesting Children

Expectant Mother Killed In Travelers Rest Crash

Suspect Identified In Haiti Donations Jar Theft

Anderson County Woman Shot In Face

Holy Crap!  People burying babies!  People running over their grandmothers!  Child molestations!  Haiti donation thefts!  People getting shot in the face! 

Damn!  The happiest thing that happened in that hellhole yesterday was the gas leak in the middle school.

Now, I know that these crappy little local news stations go out of their way to find the very most wretched things that have happened in their town and then they pretend that those events are news, but still… this is just ridiculous.

I decided that I should check out the local DC news just as a comparison.  I mean, DC has a couple of hundred murders a year and we’ve always got some politician doing something naughty.  Is our news this bad as well?

Here are the headlines from our local Fox station:

 http://www.myfoxdc.com/

Weather Closings and Delays on myfoxdc

2 Men Struck, Killed After Car Accident

Car Slides Into Chinese Restaurant Kitchen

Teen Rescued After Fall in Steep, Snowy Ravine    

Frederick Soldier Killed in Afghanistan

Arenas Writes Op-Ed for Washington Post

Alexandria Officials Don't Want Terror Trials

Md. Scientist Turned Artist Leaves Mark

Md. Sex Offender Advisory Board Grows

Wintry Mix, Light Snow for Tuesday PM

Biologist Protects Aircrafts From Birds

Ok, so we’ve got some bad stuff too.  I mean some idiot drove into a Chinese Restaurant and there was a bad car accident, and another soldier’s been killed, but come on!  Most of the stories are about the weather and we’ve even got tales of a teen being rescued from a ravine and artists doing artsty things and biologists trying to save us from some Hitchcockian aeronautical demise.

That’s good stuff!  I mean we even have a story about how a basketball player wrote a letter!  Now that’s news!

So in short, Greenville SC is a wretched, horrible, miserable place to live….. or at least to watch the news.

However, I do have to complain that neither of these stations carried my favorite news story of the day. 

Thank God for MSNBC. 

The headline is:

“Lovers Told to Pay Fine In Buffaloes, Pigs”

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35164774/ns/world_news-weird_news/

Ok.  So apparently a couple in Malaysia was having an affair.  This is illegal, so the court ordered them to make restitution to the community in the only form of currency they had….. pigs and buffaloes.

My favorite part of the article was this quote right here:

“The man's wife filed a complaint last year after finding her husband in shorts and her colleague in a sarong at the man's second home. The court rejected their claim that they were just "best friends."

Oh, I think we’ve all heard that one before haven’t we?  You’re having a great day and then you walk in and find your spouse in a sarong and your friend there in shorts.  And they’re claiming that they’re just “best friends.”

Uh huh. 

Best friends who are now short a buffalo and a couple of pigs.

The only thing that was weird about this story (Ok, maybe not the only thing) was that the infidelitators had to make restitution to the community.  Why the community?  Why not the wronged wife who had to come home to the sight of her husband in shorts with another woman?

I think it’s the same logic as to why we can’t allow gay marriage, because it will damage the community……. somehow.

So, here’s my solution, we can let the gays marry and parade around in their…… well, shorts and sarongs, ….. but we will require them to pay something to the community as restitution – something as valuable as pigs and buffaloes. 

Perhaps gym memberships and Liza Minnelli posters for the men and Home Depot gift cards and clogs for the women.

(If there was a line there that I just crossed, I apologize…. but not much.)

So, I think we’ve all learned a valuable lesson from our Malaysian neighbors… primarily about shorts…. but also about other things.

And I hope our local news stations have also learned a valuable lesson – that this is the kind of news that people are interested in!  Something that stirs the soul and makes you view the world differently, not one more story about a dead baby or a kitten being eaten by a meth addict or whatever. 

Or at least that’s the kind of story that I’m interested in.  Of course, I never never watch the local news because it is so unbelievably bad.

And for all of you who have stuck with this blog entry this long wondering if I had some kind of point buried in here somewhere, well the answer is: no, I don’t.  But I do have a little gift for you.

A video of my brother kayaking in the snow.

Enjoy.