Keep your eyes on the road

One of the leading news stories here concerns a kindergarten class. You see them all over Japan, lines of kids in their little uniforms, usually with bright hats, lined up in twos, often holding hands, with teachers walking them somewhere.

In this case, the teachers were walking them from the kindergarten to a nearby park. Five teachers, 33 children, on the edge of the road.

And a 37-year-old man apparently was fussing with a cassette tape in his car. He swerved and ran through the kids, hitting a utility pole.

Two dead, two in critical condition, over a dozen injured.

Apparently he was speeding, in addition to not watching where he was going. The police have said that he wasn't drinking, so that's not an excuse.

Maybe they can arrange to run that tape on a permanent loop, repeating over and over, in his prison cell.

Oh, now that's clever, actually!

This was on one of these odd shows here in Japan where they show various odd situations, stop and ask the panel to guess, and then show the real ending. Apparently this case was somewhere in America.

As they dramatized it, the young couple had been looking at big screen TVs for a while. Then he came home and found a big package with a card. On opening it, he was amazed to find the big screen TV he had been mooning over. He called her, and she explained that this pair had stopped her in the street and were selling $1,500 dollar TVs out of a van for $500, today only. They explained that one of them was the owner of a store, and he had overstock to get rid of, so they were taking this unusual step. She worried about it, but decided to go ahead and buy one.

When he opened it a bit further, he was amazed to find out that it wasn't a TV. But what was it?

Here is where the program stopped and had the panel guessing. Obviously they were cheated, but what had the two men packaged as TVs? Can you guess?

Okay, time's up.

Here's the answer. There had been a rash of break-ins and thefts in the neighborhood that baffled police, since the only thing missing was oven doors! Someone broke in, unscrewed and carefully made off with the black glass doors of ovens.

And then they packaged them neatly, and went out on the street with their van full of "flat-screen TVs" to find some people who really wanted a deal.

I have to admit, I sort of admire their ingenuity and industry. I mean, they could have just stolen money instead of this scheme to make fake TVs, right? It shows a certain imagination and creativity!