According to the BBC, a bunch of elephants raged through Seoul — but, no, it wasn’t Tom DeLay and friends on yet another junket:
South Korea’s busy capital Seoul faced an added complication on Wednesday when six elephants escaped from an amusement park, causing chaos.
The elephants broke into a restaurant in the east of the city, and tore through the garden of a private home.
Officials said one elephant was briefly detained at a police station, before all were returned to their park.
“It seems one of them panicked, causing the others to also panic and flee the grounds,” one official said.
Police squad cars cordoned off the area and placed officers at key cross-sections to prevent the elephants from escaping to other parts of the city, Yonhap news agency reported.
One of the elephants ran into an alley and hit a 52-year-old woman with its trunk, Yonhap said.
So we learned:
(1) A woman got hit with a trunk. That happened to my Uncle Sid when he told my Aunt Edna he was all packed and ready to run off with a younger woman
(2) One elephant was detailened by police. They wanted him to be a stool pigeon, but the stool broke. They wanted to grill him but decided not to — since grilled elephant aren’t good. He was allowed one phone call so he made a trunk call.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.