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129 Kidnapper-Couple Who Forgot to Leave a Ransom Note Sentenced to 14 Years Forget the terror of the four-year-old, abducted by a man who spelled money mune in the note he left in his pocket, scratched in blood because he sharpened not his pencil, but his thumb. Forget his dunderheaded wife, who tossed the toast because she’d buttered it on the wrong side. Ignore the fact that fourteen years is barely time for them to start exploring, with their pen-light minds, the Carlsbad Caverns of their own ineptitude. Disregard the anguish of the mom, who never married her child’s father, or memorized his name, and thought her hooker friends sat babies too. Throw them all into the joint with the bank robber who wrote a holdup note on his own deposit slip, and the john who flagged the cops after some tranny stole his stash. Don’t get your undies in a bunch about the sub that did an “emergency blow“ to impress civilian guests, and bisected a ship full of students, drowning nine. Drop that debacle in the same dustbin with power “deregulation,“ airline (in)security, aerosol cans, infernal combustion engines, and the atmospheric-nitrogento -fertilizer process that has let Earth’s population skyrocket, and will bring it crashing down. Bungling makes the world go round. The stolen missile is cancelled by bad aim. The rising of the sea from global warming is countered by ten million basements flooded by men trying to fix their sinks. Even if Ebola rides out of the Congo on some epidemiologist’s shoe, so many people have screwy DNA—so many cells can’t get the genetic code quite right—Homo sapiens will survive. 130 My new house “must have been wired by an arsonist,“ the electrician says. All my Hot and Cold knobs are reversed, but at least no rain, snow, or carcinogenic sun can get to me. Ma Bell may bill me thousands for a local call routed through Fiji. Doctors may amputate my leg when I walk in for an appendectomy. The car-alarm installer may nick my brake line, causing my safety-first Volvo to dive off a bridge, killing my family. Still, some mortician will gain three burials. An antidepressant maker and a crutch company will add a customer-for-life. The human race will stumble on. ...

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