OMG!  They’re taking over the world!  This article stolen from the Boston Channel. I’d put in a link but I don’t know how.

After Accident Woman Finds Cow In Car

Cow Lands In Back Seat

POSTED: 7:50 am EST February 2, 2008

UPDATED: 2:42 pm EST February 2, 2008

REHOBOTH, Mass. — Holy Cow! A Seekonk woman suddenly found an unexpected passenger in her back seat while driving home with her daughter after running a simple errand. Tonya Coccia, 46, said the street was dark when she suddenly saw cows that had wandered out onto the road from a nearby farm. She swerved, but hit two of them. One was a massive Black Angus. “I only saw it for a split second before it came up it into my windshield,” Coccia said.

One of the cows had gone airborne.

“There was airbags and smoke and me and my daughter was losing it. I thought that was it, but I felt my car start shaking.”

The cow had flipped over the roof of the car, gone through the back window and landed in the back seat.

“I didn’t really want to see what was there, but I saw a black cow head in my back window. My daughter turned this way and said ‘Mom there’s a cow in the back seat!’ And we just took off,” Coccia said.

The car’s hood and roof were crushed and the windshield was smashed.

Coccia said she realized there were bound be jokes. The cow in the back seat was not seriously injured, but the second cow did not survive.

“It could have just as easily gone through the windshield and we’d be talking about very serious injuries or possibly death,” said Rehoboth police Sgt. Richard Shailor.

The cow was frightened and agitated. Firefighters and police had to tie it down so it wouldn’t move inside the car. They towed the car to the farm and let it out.

Both Coccia and her daughter Haley, 14, suffered minor injuries. Her car was a total loss.

Oh my gosh the cow came back. Like a bad spaghetti western, the irrepressible bovine has returned! Talk about a story that just begs to be written - actually it’s practically writing itself. What to call such a story? The Cow with No Name? Shall we call him Paddy? Something about Cows? What was that sticky white stuff? Spy Cows?

You’ll remember from our last episode - oh wait - blogs are read backwards in time so unless you’ve been following along you wouldn’t know about the cow that fell through a mini-van windshield and then we had the farmer who shot a cow accidentally mistaking it for a coyote and now this! A cowknapping! Or perhaps the cow was the mastermind and the media cleverly twisted the story around to protect the little related calves and calfettes - or maybe the cow was actually the driver and the brother of a highly placed politician. We’ll probably never know the true story but here’s what the media is saying about the lastest farm animal incident. … and I’m going to milk it for all it’s worth!

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia - Thieves in Malaysia stole a cow, squeezed it into the back seat of a car and drove off with it but abandoned the animal when the getaway vehicle crashed into a tree, police said Thursday.

The cow, injured in the crash, was slaughtered by villagers. The thieves managed to push the cow into the back of a mid-sized sedan Tuesday night but were spotted by villagers who gave chase, said a local police official in the northern state Kedah. He declined to be named, citing protocol.

The driver lost control during the chase and drove into a tree, injuring the cow, he said. By the time villagers got to the crash site, one person was seen running from the car but police believe more people were involved in the theft, the official said.

It was not clear how they managed to push the cow into the car or whether the animal had been sedated. A blurry photograph in the New Straits Times newspaper showed the cow’s head with closed eyes sticking out of the back seat window of the crashed car.

I don’t know why there are so many bad movies out these days when writers only have to read the headlines for inspiration. Take this dynamic duo for example: what on earth could be the back story to inspire such desperate measures on their part, much less carry a loaded gun. Surely this pair would be better off….well … writing situation comedies.

MELBOURNE, Australia - Two Australian robbers thought they were hauling away a big sack of cash from the Cuckoo Restaurant but it turned out to be bread rolls - and one of them accidentally shot the other in the buttocks during the heist.

Benjamin Jorgensen, 38, and his accomplice Donna Hayes, 36, were sentenced Tuesday after pleading guilty to robbing the restaurant in the southern Australian city Melbourne on April 1 last year.

During the April Fools Day holdup, Jorgensen grabbed what he believed was a bag with the Cuckoo’s daily take of about $27,000 in cash but later found it was full of bread rolls, the Victorian County Court heard.

He also fired his gun accidentally during the heist, shooting Hayes in the buttocks.

Judge Roland Williams told the robbers they were a “pair of fools,” before sentencing Hayes to eight years in prison and Jorgensen to seven.

Earlier this week, defence lawyer Greg Thomas said Jorgensen had been under the influence of drugs at the time, had made a full admission to police and was remorseful, News Ltd. newspapers reported.

© The Canadian Press, 2008

Story ideas. They’re everywhere. And this particular little nugget proves that the ‘Peter Principal’ applies to the criminal as well as the corporate world.

Police: Indiana man accidentally shoots himself during store robbery

Published: Wednesday, January 16, 2008 | 10:07 AM ET

Canadian Press: THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

KOKOMO, Ind. - Oh, shoot!

Police say a man accidentally shot himself in the groin as he was robbing a convenience store on Tuesday.

A clerk told police a man carrying a semiautomatic handgun entered the Village Pantry demanding cash and a pack of cigarettes.

The clerk put the cash in a bag and as she turned to get the cigarettes, she heard the gun discharge.

Police say surveillance video shows the man shooting himself as he placed the gun in the waistband of his pants.

A short time later, police found 25-year-old Derrick Kosch at a home with a gunshot wound to his right testicle and lower left leg.

The clerk wasn’t injured.

Kosch was released from the hospital Tuesday and booked into the Howard County jail on a charge of armed robbery, criminal recklessness and battery. He is being held on a $100,000 cash bail. A jail official did not know if he had retained an attorney Wednesday. 

“The mystery form is like gymnastic equipment: you can grasp hold of it and show off what you can do.”  - Mickey Friedman

The above quote is what makes mystery writing so fun! If a writer is adept then they can take the reader along on a tandem ride - like gymnastics for the technical expertise and like jumping off a mountaintop with a trained paraglider for the thrill.

Dovetailing nicely with the story of the cow who crashed down on a minivan earlier this month, comes this choice morsel from the Canadian Press. (I have to wonder, however, why all this amusing stories come from other countries than Canada; and I can wonder, since as a Canadian, I know there are many ridiculous things that happen in this country too) But back to the cow.  For the sake of a story: this could be a revenge seeking relative - the cow, not the guy with the gun. Maybe the cow knew something and the guy with the gun, who possibly allegedly was involved with in the first incident, had to shut the cow up before he talked. Shades of Animal Farm …………………

Man says he shot cow after mistaking it for coyote; authorities are skeptical

Published: Thursday, November 22, 2007 | 8:24 PM ET

Canadian Press: THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

COLFAX TOWNSHIP, Mich. - A man says he shot and killed a neighbour’s cow after mistaking it for a coyote.

Authorities and the cow’s owner are skeptical. The undersheriff in northern Michigan’s Benzie County says he doesn’t see how anyone could confuse a 635-kilogram, pregnant cow with a coyote, which typically weighs about 13 kilograms.

Shooting coyotes is illegal during deer-shooting season and authorities asked the county prosecutor to bring charges.

Undersheriff Rory Heckman says the 42-year-old man told authorities he was out to shoot coyotes near his home Saturday when he killed the cow and then tried to drag it home.

The owner of the cow, DeAnn Mosher, says her husband thought that their neighbour should go through some therapy looking at repeated pictures of cows and coyotes, because they look nothing alike.

One of the most enjoyable movies ever! Starring Bill Pulman and Ben Stiller. Truly a fantastic way to spend two hours. Richard Stark, one of the writers,  is a pseudonym for that master mystery writer Donald E Westlake - who can do no wrong as far as I am concerned. Alternately a dark or delightful read depending on which series you are devouring:

“Passion is the enemy of precision. Forget the nysnomer crime of passion. All crime is passionate. It is passion that moves the criminal to act, that disrupts the static inertia of morality. The client’s passion for this dead woman had facilitated his downfall. And the blackmailers passion would facilitate hers. When you live with no passion at all other people’s passions come into glaring relief.”

- Richard Stark & Jake Kasdan The Zero Effect

When I see headlines like this I start to wonder….

“Cow falls off cliff and crashes onto van on highway; motorists unhurt”

Lucky motorists. The article goes on to say that the happy couple in the minivan, were on a trip, celebrating their first wedding anniversary when a six hundred pound cow fell from the sky onto their vehicle. They were inches from death as the bovine fell from an overhead cliff two hundred feet above.

Now when I read something like that, I have to wonder … did the cow fall … or was he pushed? Is a cow viable as a murder weapon? The ‘old school’ of mystery writing praises ingenuity in the method of death. Definitely all trace of fingerprints would be wiped out and well as all the other evidence probably.

How strong would you have to be to push a cow over a cliff? It would be doable other wise there would never have evolved the questionable entertainment of cow tipping. Is that what happened? Two teenagers were too close to the edge and old Bessie dropped off? Was there a lookout with a cellphone watching for the van, rate of travel and cow trajectory carefully calculated on a Blackberry? Do Blackberries calculate? So much research to do… Was it a milk cow?

Oh yes … inspiration for writing whodunits are everywhere and this one seems pretty promising. The only thing is, after it’s all over, would the reader be echoing the words of the mini driver, shaking their collective heads: “I don’t believe this. I don’t believe this.”

I think this blog should be called the ‘unblog’ because, so far, I have no interest in writing about the process of writing, reading or solving mysteries. No doubt that will change in the future but for now I am content to pass on pearls of wisdom for other, worthy, writers.

 “Nobody reads a mystery to get to the middle. They read it to get to the end. If it’s a letdown, they won’t buy anymore. The first page sells that book. The last page sells your next book.”
  - Mickey Spillane

This week I was delighted to go into my daughter’s grade four class and help out with mystery writing as part of their language arts program. We started off by playing an engaging game from the Gumshoe Detective Agency then went on to discuss the elements of mystery writing (it doesn’t have to be a crime) and planting clues so that the mystery can be solved.  Fun as it was, it occurs to me that mysteries could hold an exciting place in the classroom but better at Grade Seven and logic or social as well as writing. I would love to work with a teacher developing a cirriculum unit or two.