Maybe because of my love of puns and other forms of wordplay, my brain, whenever it encounters any ambiguity in a sentence due to its construction or punctuation, immediately seizes upon the more bizarre meaning, rather than settling on the more reasonable interpretation. Take for example this story about fish falling from the sky.

Fish are falling from the sky in parts of San Francisco, and a boom in coastal anchovy populations is to blame. 

Reddit user sanfrannie posted earlier this month that about a dozen 8-inch silver fish “rained down from the sky” onto their friend’s roof and back deck in the Outer Richmond. Several other users commented with similar experiences — one person said they “heard a whoosh sound behind me and heard a massive splat” before seeing fish scattered on a nearby driveway. Another commented that they “almost got hit by a fish waiting for a bus” in the Castro, and a third person said they assumed “a band of roving kids were doing a Tik Tok sardine-throwing challenge on a roof somewhere” after seeing several fish fall onto an Outer Richmond sidewalk.

Local fishers and researchers are blaming seabirds that, because of an explosion in the anchovy population off the coast of the Bay Area, now have more fish than they know what to do with.

My attention was caught by the line about someone saying that they “almost got hit by a fish waiting for a bus”. My thoughts went along the lines of: Why was the fish waiting for a bus? Was it in order to get back to the ocean? What did this person do to the fish that it tried to hit them? How does a fish hit someone anyway? With its tail? Its fins?

That is the way my brain works. Newspaper headlines are often my biggest source of raw material because their enforced brevity makes them ripe for misinterpretation for warped minds like mine.