I woke up to some "news of the weird" this morning -- something I could picture too, too well.

So you heard about the wrecking ball that got free in Northwestern Pennyslvania, took out a part of a college library it wasn't supposed to, then kept rolling down hill, pushing cars into each other and finally ending up in the trunk of a car.

Well, it was Meadville, PA, and the college was Allegheny, although neither report mentioned Meadville -- maybe it's "the town to be named later." But I'm familiar with that hill. My grandmother was a resident of the Methodist Home, further up that hill, for over twenty years.

Town planners in that part of the country ignored hills, built streets and roads up, down over and through just as though they weren't there -- the grid must be square! So a spherical object which began to roll had nothing to stop its progress. If you were playing catch with a softball, for instance, and missed it -- well, your dad better have the car keys handy because it may well land in a creek half a mile away.

My sympathies to Allegheny College. I, of course, went to Edinboro state, a few miles away. We were lucky to have a flat campus -- though we might at times thought a wrecking ball might have made improvements.