Fish reaches senior-citizen age
SAN FRANCISCO “”mdash; Rome may be the Eternal City, but San
Francisco could be home to an eternal fish.
On Tuesday, aquarium officials at the Steinhart Aquarium honored
an Australian lungfish, Methuselah, who arrived at the aquarium in
1938 as a fully grown adult. That makes it at least 65 years
old.
Aquarium officials had said Methuselah was the oldest fish in
captivity, but learned they were mistaken Wednesday. The Shedd
Aquarium in Chicago has a lungfish, Granddad, that arrived as an
adult in 1933.
“Well, I’ll be darned. No kidding!” said John
McCosker, Steinhart’s emeritus director, in response to the
news, saying he planned to send a note of apology to Shedd.
The Australian lungfish is rare even in its native waters. An
eel-like fish with large scales, lungfish are thought by scientists
to be the “missing link” between fish and amphibians
because they also breathe air.
Methuselah, who is 3 feet long and weighs about 40 pounds, is
known for its sly grin.
“It probably comes from the wisdom of the ages,”
McCosker said.
Nude photographer caught after 39 shots
COLUMBUS, Ohio “”mdash; Police believe they have caught a man
known as the “naked photographer,” who is accused of
sneaking up on women while wearing little more than a baseball cap
and photographing their shocked expressions.
Officers arrested a naked man late Wednesday night in an alley
behind a supermarket near where a woman reported being confronted.
The man was not identified immediately.
The woman said she was getting out of her car at an apartment
complex on the city’s northwest side when she was approached
by a naked man. She said he snapped her picture and ran away
without touching her.
It was the 39th incident in which a naked man ambushed women and
snapped photos. Police believe he keeps them as souvenirs.
Congenial trash cans released in Berlin
BERLIN “”mdash; Fed up with garbage-strewn streets? Berlin thinks
it has found a solution ““ trash cans that say thank you.
Starting next spring, the German capital’s trash service
will build electronics into a handful of the city’s 20,000
street-side wastebaskets that will allow them to speak or sing to
the public, a spokesman said Thursday.
“We want to encourage people in a nice, funny way to throw
their trash in the baskets and not on the street,” said the
official, Bernd Mueller. The talking trash cans ““ powered by
solar cells ““ are meant to show that Berlin is “a
modern city with high-tech services, and that it is also very
cosmopolitan,” he added.
Making Berlin’s visitors feel at home, some of the baskets
will be programmed to say “Thank you” or
“Merci” instead of “Danke,” Mueller said.
The talking wastebaskets will be installed at heavily visited sites
such as the Reichstag building and the central Friedrichstrasse
train station.
“Some people might feel uncomfortable if these things said
something to them at night,” Mueller said.
Instead, lights around the opening of the basket will glow
green.
Mueller declined to say how much the project would cost or
exactly how many baskets will be introduced next spring, but he
said Berlin hopes to market the product in other German cities.
Tree thieves in for a stinky surprise
MINNEAPOLIS “”mdash; There’s a stinky surprise waiting for
thieves who snatch pine trees from the University of Minnesota to
use as Christmas trees: instead of the smell of a freshly-cut tree,
they’ll get a whiff of roadkill skunk.
The university is spraying balsam fir, Scotch pine and anything
that looks like a holiday tree with skunk scent ordered from a West
Virginia trapping store.
Grounds superintendent Les Potts said the university lost seven
evergreens last year to poachers. Christmas tree thieves have been
sawing down trees in the middle of the night for years, but last
year they lopped the tops off 18-foot trees that were more than 20
years old. The trees probably are permanently disfigured, Potts
said.
The spray, which is being administered on still, rainless days,
should cover at least the tops of 400 to 500 trees.
So, why skunk?
“Can you think of something worse?” Potts asked.
Cold weather masks the smell. But warm, indoor air releases
it.
“We’ll probably still lose some trees, but I have
some satisfaction in knowing that it’s not going to work out
the way the thief thinks it will,” Potts said.
Worker hawks beer for personal profits
TAMPA, Fla. “”mdash; A concessions worker filled used plastic
cups with beer and resold them at Sunday’s Tampa Bay
Buccaneers game and pocketed $1,080 in unreported sales, police
said.
John Angelus Keene, 68, was charged with felony grand theft,
said Tampa police detective Bill Todd.
Todd said he observed Keene picking up used cups from tables and
refilling them without rinsing them at a Bud Light booth near the
south end zone of Raymond James Stadium.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Todd,
who works stadium security at Buccaneers games. “Naturally,
you think of health issues.”
Keene was a volunteer with a military retiree group manning the
booth, but Todd did not know the exact name of the group. Aramark
Inc., the Philadelphia food service company that provides the
stadium’s concessions, declined to release the name of the
organization.
The food service company alerted police after noticing that more
beer was being sold at Keene’s booth than was being
reported.
Reports from Daily Bruin wire services.