A little holiday humor

A holiday story: by Dave Barry

"Tis the special time of year, the Holiday Retail Purchasing Season, a time when we traditionally print heartwarming human-interest stories designed to make you feel better about running up a level of debt normally associated with Mexico. I have such a heartwarming story, which was published by the The London Times and sent in by alert reader John Nicholls. The story, which I am not making up, concerns a man named Neil from Devon, England, who discovered an owl nesting in his garden. Each night Neil would go outside and hoot to the owl. To his delight, he'd hear a hoot in reply; then he'd hoot some more. This went on night after night, month after month; Neil even kept a log of his conversations with the owl. Then one day, Neil's wife got to talking about this with a neighbor, who said that her husband, whose name is Fred, had also been going out every night to hoot to the owl. At this point, the women realized that their husbands had in fact spent an entire year hooting to each other. The owl was not involved at all. The owl was probably inviting its owl friends over to drink owl beer and listen to these hooting twits and laugh until they fell off the branch."