By: David Matthews
WTHIGO?
Pat Niples is used to people giggling.
Nonetheless, Mrs. Niples was not prepared for the backlash that her vanity license plate would cause in her small central Ohio town.
Mrs. Niples and her late husband have owned and operated the Naplewood Tree Farm for years, so when Mrs. Niples had to get her license plates renewed 10 years ago, she decided to get an acronym of the farm’s name put on the plates: NWTF.
This year, however, the Department of Motor Vehicles told the 75-year-old grandma that they would not renew her plate because the acronym is “inappropriate.”
Niples, who clearly doesn’t text message with high school kids as often as DMV officials apparently do, asked her kids and grandkids if they knew what was so offensive about NWTF, but no one had any idea. Niples ultimately had to make a trip into the DMV to find out, and a representative whispered to her that NWTF is known to stand for “Now what the f—-?” Niples was shocked.
Still, she plans to appeal the ruling on the grounds that almost any combination of letters could be construed as “inappropriate.”
Easy-bake dashboard
With all the recent buzz about energy efficiency, a woman in New Hampshire has discovered a way to convert solar power into chocolate-chip cookies.
During the heat wave that blanketed most of North America in early August, Sandi Fontaine decided to make snacks for her co-workers at her Bedford, N.H., workplace. You can’t always find an oven in an office, though, so she headed out to the parking lot and placed two trays of cookie dough on the dashboard of her Toyota Rav4. She returned a while later to find perfectly baked cookies.
Fontaine discovered the trick three years ago when she determined that outside temperatures of at least 95? heat up the inside of her Toyota to about 200?, warm enough to bake dessert.
And the best part is, she never has to buy another air freshener.
Don’t call back
When you’re a kid, grown-ups tell you that dialing 9-1-1 is for emergencies only. Dialing for any other reason can land you in big trouble.
Then you grow up and learn that it isn’t kids who flood 9-1-1 with stupid calls—it’s other grown-ups.
In fact, today only one-third of 9-1-1 calls are actual emergencies, and many are so wacky that they aren’t even documented.
Among the crazy calls dispatchers say they have received:
- A fast-food drive-thru order was wrong;
- A motorist couldn’t find their car in a shopping mall parking lot; and
- Tumbleweed was spotted on the highway.
Putting the d’oh in doughnuts
Police dispatchers in Washington’s Tri-Cities may have thought they were getting another crank call when an officer issued an all-points bulletin on a stolen doughnut truck.
But it was no hoax. A 19-year-old man looking for a ride to Mario Viera stole the truck from a rest stop, along with dozens of doughnuts, apple fritters and bear claws.
Within minutes of the all-points bulletin (“It’s the van that delivers those glazed cinnamon doughnuts with the sprinkles”), police spotted the truck and quickly apprehended the man.
Police defended their swift response by arguing that “a town without doughnuts is not a town worth protecting.”
