Electric Fork. I find useless kitchen gadgets fascinating. Quite often, tenants of mine buy me absurd kitchen gadgets as gifts. One of my tenants recently gave me an electric fork. This fork has batteries in the handle. When you press a button on the side of the handle, the tines of the fork rotate. The box that the fork comes in says: “Why risk injury twirling spaghetti the old fashioned way?” Hmmm. I am suspicious about that claim. I have never heard of anybody suffering an injury by twirling spaghetti on a fork. If you know someone who was injured twirling spaghetti, let me know. I really doubt that anyone ever wound up in a hospital from twirling spaghetti.

The Strange Story of “The Indestructible’ Bobby Leach.’ You can never tell what will send someone to the hospital. Here is a story you may find hard to believe – –

Bobby Leach was the first man to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel and survive. Several other men had tried before him, but all had been killed in the effort. Bobby Leach suffered terrible injuries going over the falls, including 2 broken knee caps, a fractured jaw, and serious damage to a number of internal organs, but after spending 6 months in a hospital, he recovered completely. Newspapers called him ‘The Indestructible Bobby Leach.’ That was in 1911. 15 years later, in 1926, Bobby Leach slipped on a banana peel on a sidewalk and died as a result. His leg became infected and gangrene set in. (No, I didn’t make up this improbable story. This actually happened, although according to some accounts, Leach slipped on an orange peel instead of a banana peel.)