This is one of those stories that runs in a local paper (in this case, the Cleveland Plain Dealer), is picked up by a newswire (the Associated Press), and has just enough quirkiness to elbow aside dry news about Hezbollah and Iraq for a spot at the CNN.com table. The odd tale: Maria Bergan, 23, allegedly tried to enter a Westlake, Ohio, bar with a fake ID proving she's 21. The ID really belonged to waitress Kathryn Mooney—to whom the ID was presented. But reporters, so excited by the coincidence of Mooney encountering her own stolen ID in the field, neglected to ask what a 23-year-old was doing sporting a fake ID.

CNN.com, under the headline "Waitress checks customer's ID, discovers self" (and in the category of offbeat news), runs this quote from police Capt. Guy Turner: "The odds of this waitress recovering her own license defy calculation." Not so fast, Joe Palca writes on NPR.com:

The waitress lost her wallet in a bar in Lakewood Ohio, population 57,000. She worked in a bar eight miles away in Westlake, Ohio, population 32,000. I bet you could calculate the odds that someone in Lakewood would bump into someone from Westlake in a bar.

Of course, the odds are better than 1 in 89,000 because Mooney probably spots lots of stolen IDs, and because there are a lot fewer than 89,000 women in the relevant age group in the area. (One oddity: The Plain Dealer named Mooney, but the AP calls her "the 22-year-old waitress, whose name was not released.")

Which brings us back to the point that Bergan is not, in fact, in the relevant age group to use fake IDs, and that she was named by her companion at the bar, who perhaps isn't the best source for a reliable name. Maybe the pal of the real ID fraudster happened to read this recent report in the Nashville City Paper and figured Bergan wouldn't mind the false accusation because she was leaving the area soon, anyway. Gelf doesn't actually know this is the same Bergan, but our lazy Googling was more work than that done by the 100+ of sites which picked up this article. Apparently, they were too busy repurposing the AP article to fit onto their websites.