Crop Circle Jokes

Saint found in cereal? Makes a nice change from the IMF

UNA MULLALLY

August marks the start of silly season, when real news is in short supply and anything goes – even on the front page

AUGUST IS a season of its own in the media. It is a time of frivolity on news pages, which include stories that otherwise would not make it into print. The Germans call it Sommeroch; the French prefer la morte-saison. Welcome to the silly season. In England, it used to be known as cucumber time because, once the cucumbers were in season, the gentry would leave town for their country estates and the tailors noticed a drop in business.

Apparently the term “silly season” was invented by a writer at the Saturday Review  in the 1860s to denote the slow news cycle of the summer months when the parliamentary forums and law courts took a break, leaving reporters to scramble for stories before their news conferences each day.

It still happens today as the Dáil and most of the courts are closed until the autumn. This means that there are few spin-off stories for parliamentary and legal correspondents to chase up, except perhaps those about what holidays the politicians are taking, where they are going, how much it will cost and who is left in charge.

Something has to fill the vacuum and usually it is a bevy of silly-season stories.

In July 2009, for example, a supposed image of the Virgin Mary appearing in a tree stump in Rathkeale, Co Limerick, resulted in a week’s worth of headlines. Newspapers are still waiting for something similar to come along, but no doubt it will.

The tabloid press print some outrageous and unbelievable stories, as explained in ex- National Enquirer  infamous front-page story “Victor Meldrew Found in Space” in August 2005. By found in space, the newspaper meant that if you could join up some stars as you would with dots, you could conjure up a crude image of the actor. Of course, you could create a picture of almost anything by joining up stars in the sky, but that doesn’t matter.

There is a benign, almost antiquated, innocence to these stories, such as the one about the giant pet toad that featured in the Evening Herald  on Thursday with an aside about whether it might be the largest in Ireland, or stories about crop circles, or invasions of killer bees, ants and jellyfish.

Gardaí and crime reporters used to say that criminals took an unofficial sabbatical from their gangland feuds in the summer – ridiculous as that may seem. Now, however, that does not happen.