News That Needs To Be Fake

Yes. I saw the headline: The FAA Can’t Stop People From Throwing Live Turkeys Out Of Planes. I clicked on it. I really could not believe that this was an article that could be true. But it came from Huffington Post. I trust these folks. It cited a Turkey Drop in Yellville, Arkansas. The Federal Aviation Administration was asked to find a way to stop the annual festival in that corner of the map that uses the plummeting fowl as a promotion for their Turkey Trot. Their city website proudly announces  them as "Home of the Famous TURKEY TROT." Or infamous. Dropping turkeys from an airplane flying fifty feet above the ground seems like a bad idea for the people on the ground as much as the birds in the air. 
Really? I thought this was just a play on the episode of WKRP in Cincinnati in which Les Nessman, winner of the coveted Silver Sow Award as well as three Buckeye Newshawk awards, described the scene at a local shopping mall where his stations's owner and sales manager were pitching live turkeys out of a helicopter. It's a sit-com. It's not real. Even at the end of the episode, as owner Arthur Carlson returns to the station in the aftermath of the debacle of a promotion, he states, "As God as my witness, I thought turkeys could fly."
For the record, no turkeys were harmed in the filming of that WKRP episode. Those in the Yellville festival were not quite as lucky. While it is true that Thanksgiving tradition suggests that  the mortality rate for turkeys is high, what brain trust got together to figure that replaying a scene from a seventies situation comedy in celebration of our annual feast was a good idea? 
Wouldn't it be better if this was a made up story? And while we're at it, wouldn't it be nice if we could select a news item each week to be the one that didn't happen? What a treat it would  be to turn back the clock and  tell everyone that the shooting in Texas was really just pretend, and nobody died. No innocent victims, fish, fowl, or human. Hit that big red FAKE button and put the brakes on any more carnage. That might mean that we would have to let Melania Trump turn out to be a replicant, but that should be left up to us. We, the people.