Turkey in the Str . . . Store

Was. Bob got fired. Because of a turkey.

It happened like this: Bob was at the door of the Wal-Mart, doing his job, greeting folks as they came in. And this turkey decided she needed an ugly shirt or a cheap watch or something, and walked right into the store.

Employees managed to corral the bird in the garden section, and they called a wildlife officer, who caught the turkey and released it outside. No harm, no foul. Or fowl.

Sorry. Couldn’t resist.

Anyway, a couple of days later Bob got fired. He was told he should have run to alert management when the turkey came in. He didn’t. So they fired him.

Well. Bob is 88 years old. I don’t think it’s fair to expect an 88-year-old man to run anywhere, especially over a turkey. A bear, maybe, but not a turkey. One of the teenagers who worked there could have stopped picking his nose long enough to go get the boss, for goodness sake.

Plus, and this is the kicker, here, Bob wasn’t hired to run off customers. He was hired to greet them. If he didn’t greet the turkey when it came in, then I could understand his termination. “Mr. Tallinger, the turkey claims you didn’t say hello when it came in. We are a non-discriminatory establishment. Please turn in your blue vest and your cheerful disposition.”

But I don’t have time for Bob, as tragic as his story is, because I’ve got bigger fish to fry. Sharks, to be specific. In Lake Brownwood.

No doubt you’re going to think I made this story up, about sharks being in Lake Brownwood, but I promise I did not. Someone else did. And I can’t even find out who it was.

Someone with a satire website called breakingnews247.net seems to have run a story entitled ‘Fresh water shark caught in Lake Brownwood.’ It ran about a week ago, under a picture of a little girl, about 6 years old, squatting beside a shark on a pier. Which is pretty convincing, if you ask me.

Honestly, I don’t think the image was photoshopped, but it’s impossible to tell where exactly it was taken. The only thing you can tell for sure about this photo is that I’m not in it. Which is not surprising, since there is a shark in it. I avoid sharks at all times.

Well, a LOT of people evidently believed the story was true, despite the boatload (sorry again) of evidence pointing to the fact that those people are idiots. There was no byline on the story, and the angler who caught the shark was named Ima Lion. Brownwood High School’s mascot, in case you aren’t aware, is a Lion. And the little girl in the photo, supposedly Ima’s granddaughter, was identified as Shebe, of Denton, Texas.

The sidebar lists other feature stories on the site, such as ‘People who own horses are horse owners,’ and ‘Greensburg clown found eating a live cat.’ It’s actually worse than a supermarket tabloid, if that’s even possible. No way anyone with an IQ higher than stinkbait could have taken the site seriously.

The story was also full of typos and grammatical errors and structural mistakes, which don’t necessarily prove the author was pulling a fast one, but do prove that the author is no writer. A typo or two can be overlooked, but this was pretty bad. A tragedy, actually.

Readers were admonished not to go near Lake Brownwood, Lake Proctor, Lake Coleman, or Hords Creek until the ‘Texas Deartment of Wildlife and Parks’ could ‘assess the situation and see just how many sharks are in the water.’ As if you could tell that by ‘assessing.’

Adding insult to injury, the site then ran another story, claiming that the Texas Commission of Elections went on Facebook and made a list of Brown County voters who shared and/or promoted the shark story, and revoked their voting privileges. Authorities named were Commissioner E. Fudd and Judge Roy Bean. And, for the record, revoking these peoples’ voter registration cards is probably not a bad idea. Just sayin’.

Full disclosure: I was once party to such a hoax. My friend, TJ Greaney, asked me to be a guest on his Austin Outdoor Zone radio program (104.9 The Horn, 7-9 a.m. Sundays) several years ago on April 1. I pretended to be a shark expert, and the show was about great white sharks being loose in Lake Travis. And I should stress here that the story was NOT true. But a bunch of people believed it, anyway. And instead of staying away from the water, a great many Bubbas were loading up their boats and going shark fishing. They were calling in to ask what to use for bait. Seriously.

You can fool some of the people some of the time, but you can fool all of the fools all of the time. I know that’s true, because A. Lincoln posted it on Facebook last week . . .