Now That Was One Fast News Cycle...

It's amazing how quickly the main elements of a news story can change, especially if you're away from any media for a while. This afternoon, while on a quick coffee break, the TV in the coffeehouse was showing a most unusual and potentially heartbreaking story: Some sort of odd-shaped Mylar balloon had broken free of its moorings in Colorado and was floating away, and the big concern was that it appeared that a little six-year-old kid was inside it when it took off. I followed the story during my break and all the way up to school, and it seemed at the time that things would come to a horrible end, as the balloon kept going higher and higher, and it didn't seem like there would be a way to get it down at all, much less with the kid still alive.

So imagine my surprise when, over eight hours later (yes, the teaching days run long right now), I turned on the radio and found out that the kid had been in his attic the whole time. Evidently, he had been the one to cause the balloon to come unmoored in the first place, and he was afraid that his dad would yell at him.

I don't know if any more will come out of this story in the next few days or not, but it's possible that little Falcon Heene's fifteen minutes of fame will barely last more than, well, fifteen minutes.

UPDATE: OK, after several days of this, it's obvious that the fifteen minutes may have gone into overtime.