No, actually the barman didn't say that. I said it. I was having a drink with the aforementioned trio, and I had just noticed how real life was replicating the opening of a thousand jokes.

My comment reminded the Irishman of something he had read. You know those far-fetched tales in which a villain commits a crime, then eats the weapon? Last week, it really happened.

A man threatened staff at a shop in the United States with what looked like a gun beneath his T-shirt. It turned out to be a banana, which he ate before the cops arrived. (But I once met a villain in a Beijing nightclub who was so tough he could have eaten a real gun.)

The Irishman's tale in turn reminded me of a story I saw on Reuters. A Taiwanese man sat on a toilet, and felt something bite his "undercarriage." He leaped off the seat to discover a snake in the bowl. "Urban legend comes true" was the headline.

One of the others reported he had that day read a news story headlined: "Crocodile walks into a bar," about an incident near Darwin, Australia.

What does all this mean? Humanity has reached such an extreme level of weirdness that even the wackiest jokes and stories we swap at bars are actually happening somewhere on the planet.

It is only a matter of time, I told my friends, that a cow will fall from the sky, as celebrated in a famous urban legend sometimes set in the Pacific, and sometimes the Atlantic.

That night, I noticed that even the silly fake stories in internet chain mail are coming true. For six years, I have received panicked e-mails saying that Yahoo was shortly planning to shut its website hosting service. Yahoo recently announced it was doing just that.

In one of the oldest urban legends, Americans find huge, dangerous snakes or alligators living in the sewers after having been flushed down the toilet by pet owners. A May 22 report in Science Daily says snakes abandoned by pet owners have grown into 100-kilogram monsters terrorizing homeowners in Florida.

Where will it all end? The following day, a friend at an open-air cafe showed me a cutting from the British press. A cow was found in a swimming pool in the UK. No one saw how it got there. Homeowner Mark Ryder heard a splash, and ran outside. He told reporters: "There she was - a cow staring at me from the shallow end."

You know what all this means, don't you? If all these wacky stories are actually coming true, this indicates that someone from Nigeria is going to send me US$40 million (HK$312 million). Woo hoo! Then I can buy an island, and make those desert island jokes come true.

It was a nice dream, but I was brought back to harsh reality when it started to pour with rain.

What a deluge. It took us 1 hours to finish our soup. Comment on this article at www.mrjam.org