Sympathy? Insurance? They had to have motive to have had it done

  Our friends at the Associated Press today carried this disturbing lead on a story out of Portland, Ore.

A Washington state woman who had acid thrown in her face last week has left the hospital.

Why, you might reasonably ask, did this woman have acid thrown in her face?

We can surmise that, to cover up her own involvement, she first stopped by the salon to have her hair styled and have her nails done. She knew that no one who went to the time, trouble and expense of having those things done would be suspected of then having acid thrown in her face.

Then she had her car washed, called an interior decorator about having her house painted, and arranged with a neighborhood boy about having her lawn mowed. Such normal behavior would provide no clue about her strange plan to have herself disfigured. Brilliant!

 We suspect that this woman must then have had acid thrown in her face, perhaps to elicit sympathy, or maybe to draw much-needed attention, like that woman whose children kept dying in their infancy until it was discovered that she was suffocating them to sustain the attention, directed to her as a new mother, to which she had become addicted.

Mose believes that last sentence is the best 60-word independent clause he has ever written. He promises never to do it again.

He hopes the AP, and writers everywhere, will similarly promise to refrain from that odd phrase that people "had" awful things done to them – unless, of course, they truly did arrange such activity.

Newspaper reporters are fond of writing that a woman "had her purse stolen," but Mose has never read a story in which the motivation was explained. Maybe it came during the trial in which the woman was proved guilty of false reporting because she had actually hired an acquaintance t o stage the fake robbery.

Perhaps for the insurance money?