Headline number one reads, “Ex-Sen. McGovern celebrates birthday with sky dive.”
Headline number two reads: “Parachuting donkey shocks Russian beachgoers.”
Our initial reaction was that it was the same news item reported by two different sources, but much to our surprise, these are completely unrelated stories.
Here’s the first story, as reported by Newsmax:
Ex-Sen. McGovern celebrates birthday with sky dive
In his 88 years, George McGovern has served as a U.S. senator and made a run for the presidency. And now he can say he’s jumped out of an airplane, too.
McGovern, a Democrat who represented South Dakota in the Senate from 1963 to 1981, celebrated his 88th birthday Monday morning by going sky diving in Florida.
He said his tandem jump was dedicated to increasing awareness of people who are starving around the world, particularly children.
He told the Florida Today newspaper that he hoped people would contact their congressional representatives to encourage them to increase funding to fight hunger.
McGovern lost the 1972 presidential election to Richard Nixon.
And then there’s this story, the one not about McGovern, reported by AFP:
Parachuting donkey shocks Russian beachgoers
Russian beachgoers got a shock when they saw a donkey soaring in the blue skies over the balmy beaches on the Sea of Azov in southern Russia last week, police said on Tuesday.
Attached to a parachute, the animal screamed in fear as it circled over heads of holidaymakers sunbathing on a beach in the Cossack village of Golubitskaya in the Krasnodar region.
A regional police spokeswoman said the donkey ended up in the skies as a result of an impromptu advertising campaign by several Russian entrepreneurs to attract beachgoers to their private beach.
Instead, they attracted the attention of regional police who learned of the flying donkey earlier this week and launched a probe.
“The donkey screamed and children cried,” regional police spokeswoman Larisa Tuchkova told AFP. “No-one had the brains to call police.”
Instead, she said, people reached for their cameras and bombarded a local newspaper with phone calls.
Now that we’ve given it a little more thought, it’s should have been obvious that the second story had nothing to do with George McGovern. If it had, the headline would have read, “Parachuting ass shocks Russian beachgoers.”
