22 June 1996

Verdict: Slow Down

I'm sure it seemed like a good idea at the time. Jim Nutting, a British vacationer, decided he'd jump bounce off an inflatable bed onto the edge of a balcony. (It is, after all, the kind of thing one does on a Spanish holiday.) The information I received does not record whether Nutting was an accomplished snooker player, but in this case he spectacularly miscalculated critical trajectories and fell some twenty meters to his death.

I brought Mr. Nutting's demise to the attention of a couple friends. One said he'd heard the story of the bad bounce as an urban myth, "like the story about the Jamaican toothbrushes."

"No," the other corrected him, "the Jamaican toothbrushes story is actually true. It really happened to some friends of mine."

Urban myths aren't fables; each and every one of them are completely true.