Odds or Onions Challenge XXIII

Can you pick The Onion without hovering your mouse over the links?

Not much of a challenge really, but if you just looked at the headlines you’d have an easy 50 / 50 shot at being wrong.

 
Genuinely puzzled Keith Richards survives 2016

ROLLING Stones legend Keith Richards has expressed his genuine surprise at surviving 2016.

As much-loved celebrities died at an alarming rate, Richards revealed his initial paranoia quickly turned into acceptance and resignation.

He said: “By the end of March I just assumed my demise was imminent.

“The thing is, I feel great, so I reckoned it would have to be something spectacular, like being flattened by a falling piano, or being mauled by a cheetah.

“I spend a lot of time with cheetahs. You don’t need to know why.”

 
After dead birds arrive in mail, woman gets living canaries

The carnage of broken wings and dead canaries that arrived in an Alabama woman’s mail have been replaced by the cheerful chirps and tweets of brand new birds — live ones.

The U.S. Postal Service paid for seven new canaries plus the postage needed to send them to Rhonda King, who operates a hair salon in Grant, Alabama, postal officials said.

King was crestfallen earlier this month, when she received a half-dozen dead canaries in a package marked with tire tracks.

Nothing can bring back the canaries from that first mangled package, whose tiny souls left this Earth somewhere between Houston, Texas, and the tiny northern Alabama town of Grant.

Now, the avian horror of that first delivery has been replaced by soothing orchestral music, King said. The sound made by a canary is one thing she loves about them, but even better is the combined song produced by a flock, she said.

“They sound like small instruments of orchestra music,” she said. “It’s just beautiful, soft, harmonizing, orchestrated music.”

On Thursday, like seven small mythical phoenixes who rose from the ashes, the new birds arrived in Grant.

“They’re beautiful birds,” King said a few hours after their arrival. “They’re just picture perfect!”

“It’s not going to replace the other birds, but they did the next best thing and I’m proud of them,” King said of the Postal Service.

A postal manager who visited King Thursday named one of them “Carrie Canary,” Postal Service spokeswoman Debra Fetterly said.

Asked whether she’d use the Postal Service again, King paused for a brief moment and then said: “I would. I really would.”