The newspaper story out of London earlier this week was not intended to be what is known in the newspaper business as a “brite” – a story calculated to make the reader smile, thereby brightening his day. But I suspect that that was the result in many a household here in The Real Maine.

The item reported that nine of 11 British peace activists who had gone to Iraq in a double-decker bus to serve as human shields in the event of war had returned home, fearing for their safety. So much for Great Idea No. 1 in the escalating anti-war headline-grabbing sweepstakes.

(Blimey, mate. When I signed on for this gig no one ever told me that lashing myself to the smokestack of a power plant in downtown Baghdad in order to take a direct hit from a Tomahawk cruise missile as a way to get even with George W. Bush might be hazardous to my health. You can bloody-well color me gone, Luv. And that goes for the two-decker lorry I rode in on.)

“The aim was always a mass migration, and if we had had 5,000 to 10,000 people here there would never be a war,” a spokesman for the defectors said, in a valiant attempt to put the best spin on the fizzled publicity stunt. “We do not have those numbers,” he acknowledged, in the mother of all understatements. Reportedly, there are only about a dozen Brits remaining as would-be cannon fodder in Iraq, along with several dozen from other countries. Alas, the human shield business ain’t what it used to be. But then, what enterprise is these days?

Certainly not the telephone company, if I am to believe the likes of Lionel Strong of Enfield, an ultra-laid back regular caller with a flair for milking life’s little speed bumps for a good laugh.

I was pondering the incongruity of a human shield fearing for his safety and what havoc such a sorry approach to martyrdom might have wreaked, say, amongst the kamikaze pilot corps of the Japanese Air Force in World War II, when the phone rang.

It was Strong, to tell me of an adventure he had supposedly endured with a new-fangled piece of telephone hardware employed by a local establishment with which he was trying to conduct business.

He claimed that when he had dialed the firm’s telephone number, a robotic recorded voice had explained to him that if he knew the name of the real live human being with whom he wished to converse he had but to speak the name distinctly and, through the miracle of modern technology, the gadgetry would provide him with that person’s telephone extension number.

Say he wanted to speak to John Doe. All he had to do was to clearly say “John Doe” at the proper time and the robot, in that maddening pedantic monotone, would reply something like, ‘The number for the individual you have requested … John Doe … is 3-6-0-1.”

Never one to back down from a challenge involving the potential one-upping of a piece of machinery reputed to be smarter than the human species, Strong opted to play along. Just as he was about to say the name of the person he hoped to contact, his dog, heretofore calmly lazing around and taking it all in, spotted a squirrel outside the window. Bounding from the couch, Rover commenced to go nuts, barking as though the aforementioned defecting British human shield contingent had just pulled into the dooryard in its double-decker bus, fresh from Iraq.

Strong claimed that the computerized robot on the other end of the telephone line never missed a beat. “I am sorry, but the number for the individual you requested … Woof Woof … is not listed in our data bank,” the voice allegedly intoned. “Please check your records and try again…”

A machine purported to be infinitely brighter than a human being had been faked out by a common dog of dubious pedigree in Enfield, Maine, and Strong’s day was complete. With a subsequent e-mail from BDN librarian Charlie Campo, mine would be, as well.

Appreciating my affinity for all things duct tape, Campo sent me a copy of a news story he had spotted on the Internet. When a defendant answering to an assault charge down in Lubbock, Texas refused to shut up long enough for the judge and the attorneys to get a word in edgewise, the judge ordered the man’s mouth duct-taped shut and had him dragged kicking and screaming from the court room.

Mankind had acquired what it so desperately needs: Yet another practical use for duct tape.

NEWS columnist Kent Ward lives in Winterport. His e-mail address is olddawg@bangordailynews.net.