Unit 12 Difficult to believe
4 While you read Home alone
'Home Alone'is one of the biggest box office successes in movie history.
Along with its sequel,'Home Alone 2',
it grossed over half a billion dollars worldwide.
If you ask me,they're not particularly funny films.
There's too much slapstick humour for my liking
-people slipping over or having their faces covered in cream
-but there is something about the films which appeals to a deep-held fantasy
we all had when we were children:
the freedom to escape from our parents and do whatever we wanted.
When I was in my teens,my parents went away for the weekend
leaving me and my sixteen-year-old brother to fend for ourselves.
We immediately rang up all our friends
(and our friends rang their friends)and we had a party.
The police came and broke it up at three in the morning
because the neighbours were complaining about the noise.
When we cleared up the following day,
I found hundreds of cigarette burns in the carpet.
Luckily,we had an old piece of the same carpet lying around,
so I got my younger brother to go round the house
and stick little bits in the holes to cover them up.
It actually looked quite good and when my parents got back,
it seemed they didn't notice a thing and I thogh we were in the clear.
Unfortunately,when my mum came to do the hoovering later in the week,
all the bits we'd put in the holes came unstuck.
She was not very pleased and I was grounded for a week,
while my brother got away with it because he said I'd forced him into it.
Typical!Still,this little story is nothing compared to some of the other
horror stories about kids who have been left'home alone.'
Terry and Jerry Schneider didn't just find a few cigarette burns when they came back,
they found their whole house burnt to the ground.
The couple had left their two children,aged twelve and fourteen,
in the house,while they went on a romantic weekend
to Las Vegas to celebrate their wedding anniversary.
The children had bought what they thought were undoor fireworks
and were playing with them.
Unfortunately,the explosive Roman candle they lit was for use outside
and it soon set fire to the sofa,
curtains and carpet in the front room.
By the time the children called the fire brigade half an hour later,
the fire was already completely out of control.
John thomas,a ten-year-old from Yorkshire,an area in the north of England,
was arreted after he shot a dog and terrorised walkers near his home in keighley.
He had taken the gun from a kitchen cupboard
while his parents were out shopping
and had decided to do some shooting practice in some fields nearby.
'I didn't realise I could kill anything,
I just thought they were pretend bullets,'he explained.
Lamine,a twelve-year-old French boy,
went on a ten-day spending spree at the EuroDisney theme park near paris
with the ten thousand pounds he found lying around in his parent's home.
As well as treating other children to ice creams,burgers and free rides,
he hired a chauffeur-driven car
and slept in a three hundred-pound-a-night hotel.
Peter Kerry,a schoolboy of fourteen,went halfway round the world
after he stole his father's passport and credit card.
He had visited three separate countries in twelve days
and spent almost six thousand pounds before he was finally caought:
his credit card was refused after his father cancelled it.
It wasn't actually the first time it had happened.
Two years earlier he spent a week on his own in Germany.
'I like travelling,'he said.
1 While you read Urban myths
Safety first!
Did you hear about the plane which crashed somewhere in South America
as it was coming in to land?
Apparently,it was fitted with a device
which warns the pilot that he's approaching the ground
-a Ground Warning Alarm(GWA)system.
Some pilots find this warning irritating,so they switch it off.
When the black box was examned,the crash was blamed on pilot error.
The dicision had been easy to reach.When the plane had been coming in to land,
the GWA had gone off,telling the pilot he was too colse to the ground.
On the tape the pilot can be heard saying,
'Shut up,you stupid machine!'Then you hear the sound of the crash.
Drowned in a drain
A man from Wakefield in Yorkshire
went out one night for a few drinks at his local pub.
He left his car in the street near the pub.
When he decided to go home,he went out to his car,
took out the keys,and then accidentally dropped them down a drain in the road.
He could see the keys down the drain on top of some leaves.
So,he managed to lift the drain cover,
but the keys were too far down for him to reach.
He lay down in order to reach them.
Suddenly,he fell into the drain head first.
Just as he did that,it started to rain heavily.
Nobody heard his cries for help.The next morning he was found drowned,
his head down the drain,his legs sticking up in the air.
What a rat!
Then there was the story of the couple who were in Thailand on holiday.
The morning after they arrived,
they found a thin little cat sitting on their balcony.
They immediately fell in love with it.They cleaned it and fed it.
By the time they were ready to leave,they couldn't bear to be parted from it.
They arranged for the cat to come home was with them.
Waiting at home was their pet poodle.
The poodle and the cat seemed to get on together very well,
so the couple decided to go out for dinner.
When they got back,they found their sitting room covered in poodle hair
and the dog halfway down the cat's throat!
it turned out the cat wa not a car,but an enormous Thai water rat!
Sunk by flying cow
A few years ago,the crew of a Japanese fishing boat
were rescued from the wreckage of their boat in the Sea of Japan.
They said theat their boat had been sunk by a cow falling out of the sky.
Nobody believed them.
A few weeks later the Russian Air Force admitted
that the crew of one of their planes had stolen a cow in Siberia
and put it into the plane's cargo hold.
At 30,000 feet the cow started to run around the plane out of control.
The crew decided there was only one thing they could do.
So,they opened the cargo door and the cow umped out,
landing on top of the Japanese fishing boat.