The Slatest

The Best Five-Paragraph News Brief You’ll Read All Day Is About a Gang of Drunken Moose

A full-grown moose cow is pictured at a moose farm in Duved, Sweden on March 17, 2013

File photo by Jonathan Nackstrand/AFP/Getty Images

For those of you looking for a respite from All Things Syria, let me point you in the direction of what my colleague Will Oremus is rightly calling the best thing on the Internet today: A short brief published by the Alaska Dispatch under the magisterial headline of “Drunken moose gang menaces Stockholm resident.” (Don’t be distracted by the fact that the story was actually published last week; “obviously, the phenomenon is ongoing,” Oremus assures me.)

The Radio Sweden-authored wire copy opens like so: “Get ready for the season of drunken moose. As ripe fruit falls from the trees and ferments on the ground, it is time for some of Sweden’s most majestic wild animals to act in a most un-regal manner.” It only gets better from there, with turns of phrase like “feasting on rotten windfalls” and “a mob of boozed-up moose.” Even the police quotes lightly peppered into the story deliver punch, a rarity on the cops beat: “Sensibly enough the (moose) left the scene when police arrived,” the officer deadpans.

Really, go read the full thing. Clocking in at seven sentences and about 120 words, it’s both straightforward and surreal—and will take less time to read than this post about it. And definitely take a second to admire the teaser for the related story on the left rail, which proves the old journalistic saw that all news truly is local: “Sweden’s ‘Buzzwinkle:’ Drunken moose gets stuck in tree.” (For those unfamiliar with the journalistic canon of drunken moose stories, the original Buzzwinkle was immortalized as a “downtown [Anchorage] moose with an affinity for fermented crab apples and Christmas lights” in a 2008 obit in the Anchorage Daily News.)

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