Top story · Oak Park, Illinois

An emu let herself out of the zoo and spent three hours seeing the neighborhood

By Marla Quintero August 29, 2026 Glaze meter 5 of 5

Doris walked out of a gate that two volunteers swear was latched, crossed four streets at a pace nobody could match in sandals, ignored a beagle who wanted very badly to be involved, and stopped at the door of a bakery on Wisconsin Avenue. She stood there for forty minutes. She never went in. She waited, the way you wait for a table.

Keepers arrived with a bag of apples and a horse trailer. Doris got in after the second apple. The bakery sold out by nine and taped a sign in the window that said SHE WAS HERE, with an arrow pointing at the mat.

“She looked at the doughnut case the whole time. I am not saying she can read. I am saying she knew.” Peg Ferris, who opens the bakery at five every morning.

Illustration: Doris outside Ferris & Daughter, drawn from three phone photos and one very excited voicemail.

This week around the country

Eight stories, newest first. The glaze meter sits on every one.

Animals

A cat named Biscuit is the honorary mayor, and he keeps office hours

Elmwood Bend has 812 people, one hardware store and now a cat with a ribbon. Biscuit sits in the clerk’s window from ten to noon, which the clerk calls office hours and everyone else calls a nap.

Elmwood Bend, KS Aug 27 Glaze 4/5

Wholesome

A library book came back 47 years late, with a note and a photograph

The Missoula branch got back a bird guide checked out in 1979, plus a card that said sorry and a picture of a woman holding it on a porch. The fine was waived. The photo is taped behind the desk now.

Missoula, MT Aug 26 Glaze 2/5

Odd Jobs

Her job is naming paint colors. This month she wrote Wet Sidewalk.

Renata Ochoa names about ninety colors a year and keeps a notebook of things she passes on the way to work. Wet Sidewalk won a vote against two other names, including the one she liked better.

Grand Rapids, MI Aug 25 Glaze 3/5

Small Towns

The town voted to keep the crooked lamppost

A delivery truck clipped the post on Marina Street in 1994 and it has leaned ever since. The council priced a straight one at $2,300, then voted six to one to leave it alone and put a bench under it.

Bell Harbor, MI Aug 25 Glaze 3/5

Animals

The duck family gets a police escort across Route 9 every spring

Two cruisers hold traffic for about four minutes while a mother duck walks her line of ducklings to the pond behind the shopping center. The department has done it every spring since 2011.

Trenton, NJ Aug 24 Glaze 2/5

Wholesome

The school band played for a crossing guard on her last morning

Delphine Ward worked the same corner for 31 years. On her last day the band turned up at 7:10, played two songs badly, and she cried into a whistle she did not have to use once.

Dayton, OH Aug 24 Glaze 1/5

Odd Jobs

Somebody has to tune the ice cream truck jingles, and he is booked all summer

Curtis Bell repairs the little music boxes inside ice cream trucks, which drift flat in the heat. He has forty trucks on his route and says the worst one plays in two keys at the same time.

Memphis, TN Aug 23 Glaze 4/5

Small Towns

Three parades a year, no traffic light, one very serious committee

Little Ash has 900 people and holds a parade for the county fair, the fire truck’s birthday and the first snow. The committee meets in January and argues about float order until March.

Little Ash, ID Aug 23 Glaze 3/5

The glaze meter

1 Sweet. You will smile at a stoplight.
2 Worth reading out loud to somebody.
3 Worth a text to your sister.
4 You read it twice.
5 You call your mother.

How we read it

Coffee first, paper second, and never before the coffee. The Monday email takes about four minutes, which is one cup at our speed.

The week, drawn

Where this week came from

Eight towns, one emu, no capital cities. We keep a rough map on the wall and stick a pin in it every Friday. The pins have never once landed where we expected.

Our map is drawn from memory, and it shows. Friday, 4:40pm: eight pins, one of them running.

A town that sent us something this week
Where the emu went

How we pick

The doughnut rule

We print odd, funny and kind. If a story only works because somebody is embarrassed, it does not run. If it needs an argument to be interesting, it belongs in another paper.

Everything here is checked with a phone call to a person who was there. Sometimes that person is a town clerk, sometimes a bakery owner, once a volunteer who really did think the gate was latched.

Three questions before we print: Did it actually happen? Does it make somebody smaller? Would you read it out loud to the person sitting next to you? Two yeses and a no, in that order, and it runs.

Wholesome · the long one

Ruthie, 74, beat her grandsons at their own game. Then she asked for a rematch.

She had never held a controller before March. Her family taught her the buttons so she would stop calling the console the box.

By Danny Ochoa Rockford, Illinois August 28, 2026 Glaze meter 3 of 5

Illustration: the second round, drawn from a photo taken by the youngest grandson, who was losing at the time.

The Alcaraz family plays on Sundays, after the dishes. It started as a way to keep the grandsons in the house for another hour and turned into a standing appointment with a written schedule on the refrigerator. Ruthie watched from the couch for four months and asked one question a week, always the same one: what does that button do.

In March her grandson Teo handed her the second controller. She lost eleven races in a row, mostly into walls. Then she stopped steering like a person parallel parking and started cutting the corners the way the boys did. By July she was finishing third. On August 16 she won a race on the last turn, and the room made a noise the neighbor came over to ask about.

Teo, who is 19 and has been playing since he was six, took it well. He says his grandmother has one advantage nobody can coach around: she does not panic. When the boys crash they mash the buttons. When Ruthie crashes she waits, straightens out, and drives.

The family has since added a rule. Whoever loses does the dishes the following Sunday, which means Ruthie has not washed a plate since the middle of August. She has asked for a rematch anyway. Her words: the win only counts if it happens twice.