About a month ago I was in the upper part of Michigan and happened to purchase a copy of the Detroit newspaper. This particular issue had its main news article based on the discovery of the body of a young lady on a Lake Huron beach. The article strongly implied she had died under very mysterious circumstances.

According to an investigator, to figure out who was responsible for her death would be like &8220;peeling an onion&8221; to get the answer.

Since then I’ve been trying to figure out if this particular phrase really means anything at all. Folks will peel an onion to remove the outer layers or what could be considered as the skin portion. What’s left is all onion. From this point on, the onion is used whole, sliced or diced, or maybe cut for fried rings.

A much better analogy for &8220;peeling the onion&8221; is to use it to describe all too many command structures of our military forces or layers of alleged leadership in our governmental bureaus.

To be more specific, during two recent hurricanes in Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, a part of the military control and command structure was based on the Northern Command. One of the peelings of the onion shows that a room filled with officers out in Colorado had a questionable part in the response of the armed forces to the disaster down south. That’s right, folks, our nation’s Northern Command is near Colorado Springs. I could comment further on this strange placement of the command structure of our nation’s armed forces out west. Instead, let’s shift the focus to another stupid statement.

A decade or two ago I was covering a court case somewhere in the area. (I’m deliberately being vague about the exact details.) Anyway, I was discussing aspects of this case with a law enforcement official from another county.

He said this particular case being considered in the courtroom was like a jigsaw puzzle. All the pieces were fitting together perfectly to get a conviction. I was so impressed with his jigsaw puzzle example that I used it in one of my Tribune news reports.

The prosecution actually used this jigsaw puzzle analogy as part of their courtroom presentation. However, there was a flaw with this line of logic. The defense attorney managed to rearrange the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle to produce his own version of the truth and won the case.

Since then I’ve heard this jigsaw puzzle example used all too many times for court cases.

Here’s another stupid statement I recently heard about a court case being covered by one of those cable news channels. The announcer or commentator said solving this particular case would be like lining up all the boxes in proper order. Then everything would &8220;fall right into place&8221; for a conviction.

I’m not too sure if those boxes, sizes unknown, are supposed to be lined up in

numeric or alphabetic order, or in a chain of events. Now the prosecution might have those alleged boxes lined up in what they think is the logical order for presentation of the case in the courtroom. Then

again, the defense may have a different way of rearranging those theoretical boxes in the courtroom.

To close off this column, here’s another saying or statement which isn’t really too stupid at all. In reality, it could refer to action in a courtroom or, better yet, with various aspects of daily life.

This saying or statement is based on getting all your ducks in a row. And since we’re now in the hunting season, this particular phrase is even more pertinent.

This statement could be used to create a vision of a hunter getting all his decoys laid out in a pattern to lure waterfowl within shooting range. Also, there’s an element of excellent guidance with this concept of being better organized as we cope with all the challenges of daily life.

(Feature writer Ed Shannon’s column appears each Friday.)