This Week’s Not So Nasty News
. . . from John, awaiting Nancy’s draft of her week’s news.
Item #1: The Christmas Tree
Nestled between the intersections of two local roads in the Belhaven neighborhood of Jackson, Miss. is a Christmas tree. After growing tired of waiting for repairs to a street, an unknown resident placed the decorative tree inside a small pothole.
The festive holiday decoration had a sign that said: “Merry Christmas Belhaven. From our sinkhole to yours.” The sign was no longer there on Monday afternoon but the tree was lit up like, well a Christmas tree, to help drivers see the road hazard.
Item #2: U. S. Coast Guard duties
A turtle has been rescued after finding itself
tangled in drugs . . . literally.
The sailors found the loggerhead turtle in the Pacific Ocean last month, trapped in the middle of 26 bales of cocaine.
The bales, that contained over 800 kilograms of the drug, were strung together with rope which was tangled up with the turtle’s neck and limbs. 
IMAGE SOURCE: Skyenimals for kids
Colored arrows in blue circles move to other pictures.
At the top, click on ‘BROWSE’ to search for other animals.
They also combine animals, such as a horse+giraffe.
The ‘Home page’ is upper-left as Skyenimals.
Item #3: Proof we don’t get out much
The image of the red faucet floating over a pool appeared on the internet this week. I thought ‘isn’t that clever’.
It seems half the people in the world have seen one of these and a whole bunch of people own one. You can too.
One for your yard?
They are even sold via Amazon – – – Who knew?
Item #4: Snow cancels Snow Day
Six Flags Great Adventures in Ocean County, NJ, planned a “Snow Day’ last Saturday. Then it snowed. The park closed instead.
This place is mid-way between NYC and Philly, 120 feet in elevation, and just 20 miles from the Atlantic Ocean.
Developers had to carve out a section of the very northern Pine Barrens.
The upside is that all the riff-raff go there to spend money, and leave the plants and animals alone.
Item #5: A right to be upset
When people build houses and otherwise intrude on wild things, one should not be surprised when some of them get belligerent.
This appears to be from a small point of land between Lafayette Bay and Echo Bay, about 16.5 miles southwest of Minneapolis.
Coordinates are: 44.924694, -93.582278
Probably a really neat place before West Point Ave, houses, and boats arrived.
Item #6: Walk the dog, meet technical climbers
Just west of Seattle and Puget Sound is the Kitsap Peninsula(KP). It is almost an island, and would be, were it not for 3,500 yards of rock rubble left by melting glacial ice about 13,000 years ago. On the west side of KP is the Hood Canal, a melt-water discharge passage that carried water north into the Strait of Juan de Fuca and the Pacific Ocean.
After the continental glaciers melted, Hood Canal became a flooded valley open to Ocean tides. And that’s important.
This past Tuesday, about 4:20 PM the tide was in (or high) at the time a young woman (Leilani) took her Great Pyrenees (Sage) for walk. Sage went down a steep embankment, couldn’t scramble back up, and Leilani went down to rescue her/him.
Had the tide been out, Leilani and Sage could have walked the beach to a spot about 500 yards northeast to an easy slope and up toward home. But Mother Nature, conspiring for the past 15,000 years had not cooperated, required that the lady and her dog needed rescued.
First, the firefighters from Central Kitsap Fire and Rescue arrived and they enlisted the Regional Technical Team to hoist the woman and her dog up the embankment.
Leilani was more cooperative than Sage, but they were eventually reunited at the top of the cliff. I note Sage seems better fed than the Lady.
And that, for this week, is the not so nasty news.
John