Reading Leads to Monkeyshines

--The children made a monkey out of Gary Ogg, principal of Powell Elementary School in North Baltimore, Ohio. But Ogg didn’t mind. It was his idea in the first place. Ogg was just paying off a bet he made with 340 students in grades 1 through 5 last October. He told the students that if they could read 9,000 books by the end of the year, he would dress as a monkey and ride to school in a “banana car.” By mid-January, they had read 9,639 books--each verified with a note from a parent. “Obviously, it was a bet I wanted to lose,” Ogg said. “But I really never thought it would take off like it has. We’ve had a crazy morning. I showed up . . . driving a banana car.” The banana car is a lawn tractor with a fiberglass yellow body. For his next act, Ogg has upped the ante: If the pupils read another 9,000 books by June, they get “the largest banana split” in the city, he said. “We’ll try to keep the momentum going.”

--The next time Fred might think twice about leaving home. Fred, a 10-year-old mutt, is back in his warm home in Staatsburg, N.Y., after being frozen to an ice floe in the Hudson River. Fred, a cross between a collie and a German shepherd, had been lost since Dec. 6 and was spotted last week sitting on the ice as it passed near a river bank restaurant at Highland, five miles south of Staatsburg. Reports said the dog had been on the floe for more than three days. Russell Kell of Kingston, who was working in the restaurant, saw the dog and called for help from a nearby canoeist. They rescued the dog and used a crowbar to chop away the ice to free Fred, who was then taken to a veterinarian. Ann Boenm, Fred’s owner, said that she was glad “there are still nice people in this world.” She said it was the first time Fred had ever left home.

--It wasn’t Orson Welles’ classic “War of the Worlds,” but listeners of radio stations in Portland, Ore., must have been just as rapt when commercials touted the Stardrive 2000, a car of the future that required no gas, maintenance every 200,000 miles and acceleration from zero to 50 in 5.2 seconds. The car, the commercials said, would be available Feb. 1 “at a dealer near you,” and would be priced at $8,000. As it turned out, the dream car was unmasked as a commercial experiment by the Portland Area Radio Council to test the effectiveness of radio as an advertising tool. To Jan Margosian of the state attorney general’s division of financial fraud, the experiment might be a violation of the law. “Unfortunately, it was done to prove the effectiveness of advertising, but I’m afraid this is going to do the opposite,” she said.