‘A gang of street robbers in Palm Beach, Florida,’ the legend ran …

‘had to learn the hard way, never to steal from a magician!’

Of course our hero magician was named – indeed the only point to the tale.

‘After his evening performance his two female assistants and he were held at knife-point by four teenagers. The women had money, passports and plane tickets stolen. The magician said he had nothing and turned out all his pockets to prove it.

The thieves fled with their loot. Immediately the magician produced his mobile phone from thin air, and rang the police who soon apprehended the criminals!’

Strangely, even though the story appeared not just in the Florida papers but also in New York, his next venue, the local police precinct had no record of the robbery!

The moral?

Believe nothing that you see or hear from a magician or a newspaper proprietor. 

There was a time not so long ago that our local newspaper proprietors demanded that anyone submitting such an obviously self-promoting lying article, had to, at the same time, PAY for a parallel advertisement in the appropriate pages. Not so now.

They simply got rid of all their journalists instead and survive on these fabricated self-promoting advertisements!

Apparently the great public never noticed the difference!!

 
‘My rod got stuck in the flue!’ whined the suspected burglar as the police arrested him.

The rather inappropriately-named Frank Urbane was arrested stark naked, after he had been hauled from the chimney in which he had been stuck fast.

‘I was locked out of my own home, the chimney of which I had been cleaning.

I decided to free the stuck rod by kicking it downwards.

Clothes would only have made it more likely I’d get stuck myself. So I took them off.

I didn’t want to get wedged!’ he concluded, enigmatically.
 

 
Police in Balasore, India raided a local cinema suspected of showing pornographic movies to schoolchildren and adolescent boys.
 

Having failed earlier to dissuade the owners from running these, they decided instead to punish the audience by forcing them to do ten press-ups each.
 

‘Look! No hands!!' yelled one teenage wag.