Little things mean a lot
A Portuguese airline was forced to ground one of its passenger planes last week after discovering that 132 hamsters had escaped from cages in the cargo hold and roamed free throughout the aircraft, according to an aviation news website in the country. A TAP airlines Airbus A321neo that flew from Lisbon to the Azores island of Ponta Delgada on Nov. 13 was taken out of service. The plane was carrying a package for a pet shop containing ferrets, birds, and 132 hamsters. The plane was also carrying passengers and their luggage. Sources told the newspaper the animals had been accepted on the flight after being rejected from a previous one because the cages didn’t meet standards. Reports by anonymous sources say baggage handlers had first noticed damaged cages after the plane landed, and then saw the hamsters running amok in the cargo hold.
On Monday, five days after it first landed, the aircraft made the 902-mile journey back to Lisbon, where TAP’s headquarters and maintenance center are located. The plane was flown back without passengers and was to undergo a thorough inspection. The hamsters could have posed a safety threat because they are capable of chewing through electrical cables and wires. In a similar incident in 2017, a cargo plane was grounded due to escaped hamsters, Newsweek reported. The pilot shared a video on TikTok of the hamsters exploring the plane. A video purportedly shot by one of the baggage handlers that appeared to show some of the hamsters scurrying around inside the aircraft’s baggage hold. Other images showed a hamster being pulled out of a crevasse in the plane’s infrastructure by a handler wearing protective gloves. After four days of effort, 16 hamsters were still loose on Saturday.
They are not the only ones:
An airplane was forced to make an unexpected landing in Denmark when a mouse leaped from a passenger’s inflight meal and began scurrying around the cabin, the airline said Friday. The Scandinavian Airlines flight was soaring from Oslo, Norway to Málaga, Spain on Wednesday when the squeaky stowaway popped out of a food tray — spooking passengers. “Believe it or not. A lady next to me … opened her food and a mouse jumped out,” Jarle Borrestad, wrote on Facebook. The pilot was forced to land in Copenhagen due to a policy that prohibits rodents on flights. The passengers and baggage were put on another plane for the rest of their trip.
Hamster Humor
“I don’t think it’s a mouse because it doesn’t have a tail. I think it’s a hamster.”
Sigh… Fine… right-click the hamster.
I was wondering why my hamster was so fat…
Then it became a parent.
A couple on the first date.
She: What are your hobbies?
He (gets a stuffed hamster out of his pocket): Taxidermy.
Hamster: And ventriloquism!
This guy walks into a bar and asks the bartender if he can show him something unbelievable, he gets a free beer? The bartender says alright. So the man puts a hamster and two frogs on the bar and all of a sudden the two frogs jump up and start into a Broadway medley. Well, a man at the end of the bar said, “That’s amazing, I’ll give you $1,000 for the frogs.” The man agreed the guy took off. The bartender said to him, “You could have gotten more for the frogs.” The man said, “Frogs are easy to come by, my hamster’s a ventriloquist.”
November 25th Birthdays
1971 – Christina Applegate, 1960 – Amy Grant, 1969 – Jill Hennessy, 1986 – Katie Cassidy
1835 – Andrew Carnegie, 1944 – Ben Stein, 1947 – John Larroquette, 1967 – Billy Burke