Lets pay a little game. Below you will find several headlines from the now-defunct Weekly World News. For those who never had the privilege of standing in a US grocery store checkout line during the 80's or 90's, let me explain that the WWN was a schlocky tabloid publication that eschewed the normal celebrity gossip in favor of the most randomly bizarre, outrageous, and absolutely preposterous "news stories" you can imagine. Tucked in the middle of all that nonsense is a real headline from an actual current news story.

Your mission is to see if you can identify the real news story:

Seeing Eye Squirrels For Blind Dogs

Blind Man Regains Sight After Doctors Implant Son's Tooth in His Eye

Groom Freezes at Nudist Wedding

Severed Leg Hops 75 Feet!

Scientist Invents 'Reverse Lightbulb' that Makes Room Darker

Doctors Reattach Siamese Twins

Think you've got it figured out? Well, click here to see which one is actually news.

How did you do? If presented with that list, I believe I would have gone for the freezing nudist groom or the hopping severed leg. But, no.

The procedure is called Osteo-Odonto-Keratoprosthesis. It is described thusly:

McNichol’s son Robert, 23, donated a tooth, its root and part of his jaw for his father’s surgery. McNichol’s right eye socket was rebuilt, and a lens was inserted into a hole drilled in Robert’s tooth. The procedure required two surgeries lasting a total of 15 hours.

How wonderful that a man's eyesight has been restored. But what is more striking to me about this is -- even if you guessed correctly -- how well that headline fits in with the others. We live in an age of such robust possibilities that it is getting difficult to make a claim that is so outrageous that it is rejected at face value. Maybe this is why the WWN went out of business; they just couldn't compete with the real news any more.

A world in which real news is as outrageous as faux news becomes risky if we allow our sense of credulity to grow at the same pace that possibilities are increasing. I think the key is to continue to be startled by, and to push back against, claims that sound outrageous.

With that in mind, is anyone prepared to tell me that the headline linked above is, in fact, a hoax? If it is, I am hardly the first to fall for it.

As Paul Simon put it:

It's a turn-around jump shot
It's everybody jump start
It's every generation throws a hero up the pop charts
Medicine is magical and magical is art
The boy in the bubble
And the baby with the baboon heart

And I believe
These are the days of lasers in the jungle
Lasers in the jungle somewhere
Staccato signals of constant information
A loose affiliation of millionaires
And billionaires and baby
These are the days of miracle and wonder
This is the long distance call
The way the camera follows us in slo-mo
The way we look to us all
The way we look to a distant constellation
Thats dying in a corner of the sky
These are the days of miracle and wonder
And don't cry baby, don't cry
Dont cry

Via GeekPress.