Up, Up and Away!

I did my share of dumb things to get in trouble when I was a kid, sure. I remember when I accidentally squirted glue the whole way across my room's carpet. I gave a kid a bloody nose by thwonking him with a wooden train on my second day of Kindergarten. And I can remember throwing up in my boots one time.

But let it be said that I've never decided to pilot a weather balloon, and I never even accused my brother of doing such a thing. And I don't believe I ever hid in our garage attic for several hours, either. And I'm almost certain that I never did those things in such a way that they garnered international attention and included the activation of the National Guard.

I must say that I got a kick out of watching CNN yesterday when this kid, apparently a member of the Adventure Family from Hell, was thought to be floating through the sky in Colorado. I love watching "breaking news" stories, because the networks usually have every last detail comically wrong, and this was no exception.

For quite a long period of time the news channels followed this Mylar balloon by trailing it with a helicopter. They followed its every move, and it reminded me a lot of O.J. Simpson's white Bronco after a while. The news people seemed certain that there was a kid, somehow stuck inside this balloon, even though to the extremely untrained eye, this looked to be pretty much impossible. It seemed that everyone, including Wolf Blitzer, was convinced that this kid was somehow able to just float away in a glorified Hefty bag.

After a couple hours the balloon finally landed in a field and all of these emergency personnel swarmed upon it and immediately began stabbing the thing with pitchforks and whatnot. I couldn't help but think that if these people really thought that there was a kid inside this thing, perhaps it would be in their best interest to stop jabbing sharp implements at it, unless they also suspected this kid of being Satan or something.

As I (and undoubtedly every other viewer) suspected, the kid was eventually found hiding at home, presumably because he thought he was going to be in big trouble for accidentally letting the giant balloon float away.

I did think for a moment that maybe the kid was a big fan of the movie "Up," where Ed Asner decided to float away in a similar fashion. That would have been a much cooler version of the story.