Hoosier lore

The recent session of the General Assembly wasn't just about bitter partisanship over a new, two-year budget, although it certainly seemed that way at times. Hoosier lawmakers also spent 29 hours of the session -- yes, someone actually added up the time -- on resolutions, those "back-patting measures with no actual impact." Sugar cream pie was named the official state pie. Gary native Michael Jackson was memorialized.

I was almost halfway through this article from the Indiana Daily Student when I started thinking, "Oh, come on, this can't be true!" Then I finally went back to the top and saw the note identifying it as satire for the Radish, a humor page published by the IDS at the end of each school section:

The list of new diseases to worry about just keeps growing:

Cases of nausea, headaches, insomnia and other ills have become common enough in states with wind farms that they've been given a name: "wind turbine syndrome."

When is pork not pork? The president speaks in Elkhart County and brags about how the Recovery Act was passed without any "earmarks or pork-barrel spending," then later tells the audience how much of the $2.4 billion in grants Indiana will get:

At least the audience is consistent--no applause for the opposition to pork barrel, but tons of applause for the pork-by-another-name that will be sent to Indiana.

Spoiler alert!

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. - Indiana University students will hold mock murder trials this month based on the Shakespeare tragedies "Hamlet" and "Macbeth."

The trials are part of a "Shakespeare and the Law" class offered through IU's Intensive Freshman Seminars . . .

U.S. Rep. Mike Pence apprently had a lot of applause lines during a recent town hall meeting in Muncie, including this one:

The time has come for America to build 100 new nuclear power plants in the next 20 years.

Beware of alleys, where bad things can happen:

SOUTH BEND — Police say a man who went to the hospital Wednesday morning with a gunshot wound accidentally shot himself.

The 21-year-old man told police he had stopped to urinate in an alley between Vassar and Humboldt streets just before 3:30 a.m., when his gun accidentally discharged.

So, you're hurrying to prevent one accidental discharge when you cause another. Sometimes, you just can't win, huh?

The headline on the story says, "Nude, intoxicated man tough to nab, cops say." Yeah, that's been my experience, too. It took up to 10 police officers to nab the 18-year-old man in question, who had started several fights in a campground and who continued struggling "despite being bitten by a police dog and hit several times with a stun gun."

So how's that stimulus package working out for you, Elkhart?

A silly woman named Sarah Harpold in Rockville, Ind., tried to use the "I didn't know it was the law" excuse when she recklessly and callously tried to defy the community's standards and all decency by buying too much cold medicine: