The Village NEWS 11 Nov - 18 Nov 2020

By Murray Stewart murray.stewart49@gmail.com

The For Fact’s Sake columns are – according to Google and the Duck ’n Fiddle’s Explanation of Everything – based in truth. Occasionally, however, names and places have been changed to protect innocent people involved.

Blowing up a storm

Most people, whether they’re smokers or not, can inflate a kid’s party balloon without any problem. A couple more puffs and you could easily burst it if you wanted to frighten the younger ones.

Now how about trying that with a hot-water bottle. These charming little bed pals are 12 times thicker than a balloon, and are specially designed not to burst. This is encouraging. Nobody wants to share their sheets with something that could perhaps explode boiling water all over the family jewels while you slept. Yikes! (Latin: slumberati scaldem scrotus eish!)

Anyway, meet Brian Jackson from Oklahoma. He saw a Ripley’s Believe it or Not TV programme, where some guy did in fact blow up a hot-water bottle, and decided to give it a try. He’s a short chap, around 40, with a large barrel chest which affords him 26% more lung capacity than we regular folks. Exactly how they measure that is a mystery, but our Mr Jackson took full advantage of this abnormality and started blowing up water bottles willy-nilly.

Soon he aspired to greater heights, and started inflating motor car tyres. Before long he’d progressed to the odd tractor or lorry tyre. Quite why he did this is unclear, but he reckoned that God had given him this... um... talent, so he’d be silly not to exploit it. He would inhale through his nose and exhale into a tube/pipe in his mouth, which seemed simple enough to him, so he set his sights on more outlandish challenges.

Click below to read more. (The full article can be found on page 6)