Papayas, like bombs, are no joking matter

by David Burns on September 12, 2008

I’d like to think I wasn’t one of those devil children, but one day, when I was about ten or eleven, I decided it would be “fun” to launch a papaya through a neighbor’s plate glass window. Not a very good idea, in hindsight.

Papayas were the “bomb” of choice for the boys in my southern Florida neighborhood; they were free, ubiquitous, easy to pick, and they splattered and made a big mess if you managed to nail your friend with one as he zipped by on his bike.

I had to pay my neighbor back for the repair of his window by mowing his lawn and weeding his garden every week for the next year. And every week, I had to look him in the eye, knowing what I had done.

I’ll bet Ms. Rosalinda Baez wishes she were facing a lawn mower and some garden gloves instead of six months in jail, a possession of marijuana charge and a $23,000 fee to pay jetBlue back for the cost of an emergency landing after she made a false bomb threat to the airline.

Ms. Baez, it seems, missed her jetBlue connection at JFK, en route from Costa Rica to Austin, Tex. Her luggage managed to make the connecting flight. After unsuccessfully demanding the plane return so she could retrieve her bags, reports are that she suggested to jetBlue staff there was a bomb in her luggage, forcing airline officials to declare an emergency and divert the already-airborne flight to Richmond, Va.

I never again used a papaya as a projectile after my childhood fiasco. I’ll bet Ms. Baez has learned to keep her mouth shut after hers.

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Tagged as: bomb threat, JetBlue

  • Frank

    We need a “NATIONAL” YOU CAN NOT FLY ANYMORE LIST. And, Rosalinda Baez needs to be on it.

  • Alan Fiermonte

    Let’s start tattooing these people with large “I”‘s on the forehead so we can all see them coming. I for Imbecilic.

  • http://www.ffocus.org Bruce InCharlotte

    Moron. Pathetic moron. Maybe the pot had something to do with her idiocy.

  • Ed Kummel

    Kinda related…to the papaya going through the plate glass window…
    While in Hawaii several years ago, my wife an dI were driving through a nice residential neighborhood. We spied a man walking from his garage to the street with a snow shovel…a weird thing to see in Hawaii to be sure…but we were too interested in the scenary to care.
    Upon our return, we spied the same man and he was hosing off his snow shovel so we stopped and asked him why he had a snow shovel in Hawaii!
    He pointed to two rather large shade trees in his front yard somewhat near the road. He said that those trees were Avacado trees. And that when the Avacados fell from the tree, they invariably rolled into the street where passing cars would run over them. The tires would squish the Avavacado and shoot the pit at an extremly high velocity into the front of his house, sometimes shattering the several large windows. And since the trees were planted by his long dead grandfather, cutting them down wasn’t an option, so several times a year, he scoops them up by the hundreds into bags and donates them to the local co-op…
    Ed
    web/gadget guru

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