Randomness Corner: Did you steal three tons of chickpeas recently?

Thieves are on the run with three tons of chickpeas, it what can only be defined as the Great Hummus Theft of 2020.

A small, two-location Middle Eastern chain restaurant in Washington, DC, called Little Sesame is in a lot of trouble, as a recent UPS delivery of 6,150 pounds of chickpeas has gone missing, according to the Washington City Paper.

Little Sesame purchases the chickpeas from a grower in Montana, who typically sends quarterly shipments year-round of three pallets, or one ton each, per pallet.

Tracking records from UPS show the purloined 'peas at a distribution warehouse in Landover, MD, on February 10th. The delivery was supposedly made in an alley out behind one of the two restaurant locations two weeks later on February 24th, in what is apparently the slowest and most casual Big Brown drop-off ever.

Little Sesame's co-owner, Nick Wiseman, tells the Washington City Paper that they're working with other farmers for an emergency shipment of chickpeas before they run out. He notes that three tons of chickpeas roughly equals the weight of an African elephant. That's not necessarily the visual you had mingling with thoughts of hummus, but let it simmer.

In the meantime, clearly someone needs to keep an eye out on a ton of shipped tahini, too. If you happen to see a galore of garbanzos in your local neighborhood, you're urged to contact police.

Tests reveal that...[[[extra long dramatic pause]]]...Maury Povich is the father of the newspaper!!

Jerry Springer would never exist without Maury Povich, and Maury Povich would never exist unless vast numbers of people with poor decision making skills decided to air their dirty laundry on national television. For twenty-two years, Povich has made a career out of unruly teenagers, abusive men, polygraph tests, and revealing paternity test results. In essence, the worst dinner party guests ever. People like this guy:

Sounds legit.

Despite all of the tabloid angles to what's made Povich wealthy, he still has roots in the newspaper business. His father, after all, was the famed Washington Post columnist Shirley Povich. This has led Maury to helm a rural, out-of-the-way newspaper, nearly unknown to the public for nearly a decade.

The Flathead Beacon newspaper serves the town of Kalispell, Montana, and the accompanying Flathead County, where Povich and his wife, former news anchor Connie Chung, own a vacation home. And in an era when many newspapers around the country fold on a monthly basis, the Flathead Beacon has actually seen readership increase--and with a total lack of paternity test revelations, too!

That doesn't mean Povich is ready to quit daytime television for newspapers just yet. As he told CNN Money, "After nine years, we're almost breaking even."

Apparently people in Montana don't make nearly as many bad decisions.

CBSNews: The ten best college towns to live in...includes a place in Nebraska?

These sort of list come around every few weeks, always with completely different outcomes. Each media outlet uses different metrics, weighs those metrics in varying proportions, and typically offers some random statistic to completely skew the results toward something entirely randomized.

Which brings us to CBSNews, which decided to create their own "scientific" analysis of the best college towns today. The results (with college in parentheses):

1.)  Princeton, New Jersey  (Princeton University)
2.)  Kearney, Nebraska  (University of Nebraska--Kearney)
3.)  Boulder, Colorado  (University of Colorado--Boulder)
4.)  Bozeman, Montana  (University of Montana)
5.)  Cedar Falls, Iowa  (University of Northern Iowa)
6.)  Cambridge, Massachusetts  (Harvard, MIT, Cambridge College, Lesley University)
7.)  Ann Arbor, Michigan  (University of Michigan)
8.)  Grand Forks, North Dakota  (University of North Dakota)
9.)  Ames, Iowa  (Iowa State University)
10.)  Madison, Wisconsin  (University of Wisconsin)

Don't rub your eyes. You're seeing that correctly. Something called "Kearney, Nebraska" is considered the second best college town in America. Nothing Nebraska-related is ever good news. Even Bruce Springsteen hit a low point in his career in 1982 by naming one of his albums Nebraska. Do you know how Wikipedia describes that album?

"The songs on Nebraska both deal with ordinary, blue collar characters who face a challenge or a turning point in their lives, but also outsiders, criminals and mass murderers, who have little hope for the future - or no future at all, as in the title track, where the main character is sentenced to death in the electric chair."




Mass murderers and the death penalty! Sounds like a real toe-tapper, get down with your bad self kind of album. Even the album is in a bleak black and white. But you know why it's so depressing? Because it's Nebraska, that's why.

And then there was that murky movie a few years ago filmed in black and white as well, called--you guessed it--Nebraska. You know why it was filmed in black and white? Because seeing Nebraska in color is too much of an offense to the eyes of the rest of America.

The movie was nominated for six Academy Awards. You know how many it won? Zero. Do you know why? Because it's...

Oh, but, hey. Let's all move there.

Social media and an obsession for morning haikus has led little known poet to crack bestseller lists.

Tyler Knott Gregson is a 33-year old Montana-based poet and photographer who started posting one poem a day--usually with an accompanying photo--to his social media accounts, like Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. For five years he's continued this, never missing a day, which has led to over a quarter million followers on Tumblr.

According to the Wall Street Journal, usually his mornings start with posting a haiku and photo, followed by afternoons where he scans longer poems composed on a typewriter, which are then shared with the masses.

This addiction to his craft has paid off, as his first collection of poetry, Chasers of the Light: Poems from the Typewriter Series, has cracked multiple bestseller lists, with over 50,000 copies in print. That's largely unheard of for poetry, never mind a first-time published poet.

As for his daily poetry, Gregson sees some sort of potential for it ending eventually. As he tells the Journal, "I don't know how long I'll be able to keep it up. [...] But I have a noisy brain, so I just keep going."