To get these issues free by email each week, click here to open a subscribe form. (Or cruise around the web site to see more samples, archive, and info on our terrific book collections of thousands of past stories.)
Since 1994, this is the 1586th issue of Randy Cassingham’s...
| 3 November 2024: This is Why | Copyright ©2024 https://thisistrue.com |
Violent Opposition: Police in Neptune Beach, Fla., were called to a polling station to deal with a man intimidating voters. Officers say Caleb James Williams, 18, “brandished a machete in an aggressive posture over his head” at two women, one in her 50s, the other in her 70s. Both called 911, and officers arrived within a minute, so Williams was easily pointed out. Officers described the assault as an attempt “to antagonize the opposing political side,” and multiple charges arepending, starting with assault on a person 65 years old or older, and improper exhibition of a dangerous weapon. (RC/WTVT Tampa) ...Hereinafter to be referred to as Exhibit 1.
It Worked So Well for the Whale: When two pack horses died on a narrow backcountry trail in the Boulder Basin of Wyoming’s Shoshone NationalForest, the U.S. Forest Service had a dilemma. Because of the hot, dry conditions, forest managers decided against following the carcass disposal technique in the “Recreation Engineering Tech Tip” published by the U.S. Forest Service in 1995, “Obliterating Animal Carcasses with Explosives”. North District Ranger Casey McQuiston said the reason for the policy “is to minimize the potential for conflict with grizzly bears,” which are attracted to the carcasses, and then have run-ins with humans.Because of the fire risk making dynamite too dangerous to use, the best rangers could do was haul the dead horses as far away from the active trail as they could. (MS/Casper Star-Tribune) ...Tough choice: Feed a fire or feed the bears?
I’ve Been Reporting on support for the newsletter, as the budget for sending the free newsletters each weeks takes around 5 upgrades (or re-upgrades, for those who dropped off for whatever reason). This past week there was 1 upgrade, 0 re-upgrades, and $12 in contributions, the latter from a gent in Switzerland who, in 2018, set up a $12 semi-annual recurring contribution that has been running since. That’s reallyappreciated, but despite that generosity, it doesn’t cover this week’s bills. No, he doesn’t need to step up more! Some of you do if you can. If you truly can’t, no worries: stay here as long as you’d like. Of course, Premium Upgrades are the best so you can get all the stories — you missed nine stories this week. Since we got ahead with great support in recent weeks, I’ll go another week withoutan ad to see what happens. Thanks as always.
The Wages of Fame Is Death: P’Nut, a squirrel, had hundreds of thousands of social-media followers. Hishuman, Mark Longo of Pine City, N.Y., had taken the orphaned, injured squirrel in and, eight months later, after determining that the critter didn’t have the skills to succeed as a wild animal, gave him a home. P’Nut even got his own room in Longo’s house. Longo and P’Nut had lived together for seven years when the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation got involved. “Following multiple reports from the public about the potentially unsafe housing of wildlife that could carryrabies and the illegal keeping of wildlife as pets, D.E.C. conducted an investigation,” it explained. “The D.E.C. came to my house and raided my house without a search warrant to find a squirrel!” Longo said. The agency took P’Nut and a raccoon and killed them; it said P’Nut had bitten someone “involved with the investigation,” and it wanted to do a rabies test. P’Nut was the face of the Longos’ animal sanctuary; donors contributed about $10,000 towards each month’s expenses, and Longo, 34,credited the fundraising in large part to P’Nut. “To the people who filed complaints, thank you for taking away the best part of me, thank you for taking away my best friend,” he said by email. (AC/AP, New York Times) ...And by the way, your dogs and cats also “could carry rabies.”
The Wisdom of Solomon: Shohei Ohtani of the Los Angeles Dodgers has set a lot of records, including his 10-year, $700 million contract— the largest player contract for any professional sport ever. He is also the first in baseball history to hit 50 home runs and steal 50 bases in a single season. The ball that he hit for that 50th home run also set a record, bringing $4,392,000, the highest price ever paid for “any ball in any sport,” said auctioneer Ken Goldin. The question is, who gets the money? The ownership of the “50-50 ball” is in dispute: Christian Zacek walked out of the park with the ball, but Max Matus and JosephDavidov have both filed lawsuits claiming they “grabbed the ball first.” But all three agreed on one thing: the auction for the ball should be allowed to continue. (RC/AP) ...Easy: each of them should get 50 percent of the proceeds.
If You Think the Coast Guard Was Happy, You Should Have Interviewed the Victim
‘We Were Ecstatic’: Coast Guard Rescues a Man Clinging to a Cooler in Open Water
NPR headline
Did You Find an Error? Check the Errata Page for updates.
This Week’s Contributors: MS-Mike Straw, AC-Alexander Cohen, RC-Randy Cassingham.
Stories This Week were Written/Edited in Dakar, Senegal, the western-most spot of Africa.
Yes, in the Headline of the Week, NPR was quoting the Coast Guard (in this instance, the rescue chopper pilot). The Florida Man was struggling to get his disabled fishing boat back to shore as Hurricane Milton was hitting, and ended up washed out to sea. Other than that, he is one of the smarter of the Florida Man breed: he was wearing a life jacket, and had an emergency locator beacon. He spent the night clinging to the cooler in 75-90 mph winds riding 20-25-foot swells.
Regarding Mike’s Story about detonating animal carcasses, he writes that “Iowa State University’s Institute for Transportation has a digital copy of the Tech Tip.” Mike doesn’t just send the URL, he points out the resulting file name for the document: Boom-Boom-Boom.pdf.
“It has handy diagrams showing how to lay things out for ‘partial obliteration’ of a carcass,” Mike continues, “using an 1,100-pound horse as an example. If you can move the carcass, you’ll need just 20 pounds of explosives, but if ‘it is not practical to move the carcass onto the explosive charges,’ then 55 pounds are needed, so you can obliterate it from the top.”
Among the handy points in the document, Mike says, are:
- “Horseshoes should be removed to minimize dangerous flying debris.”
- “Carcasses that have been dispersed will generally be totally gone within a few days.” and
- “Carcasses that have been partially obliterated will generally not show any trace of existence the next day.”
The “Tips” were written by Jim Tour, Project Leader, and Mike Knodel, Northern Region Blaster Examiner. Yeah, really: Blaster Examiner. “What was your job, daddy?”
Can you imagine the story, told for a generation or three, coming from this? “So there we was, deep in the National Park, when we heard a big explosion! We whirled around to look, and thought we saw some dust way over behind the trees. The next thing we knew, we was almost killed by a flying horseshoe! All I can figger is, some poor horse stepped on a landmine. We high-tailed it in the other direction....” Sure, grandpa. Take your pill and lie down for awhile.
“Boom-Boom-Boom” is the file name given by whoever scanned an old paper copy at Iowa State University, not the Forest Service. I did find a clean, un-annotated PDF could be downloaded elsewhere, such as via this 2012 article on the Tech Tip in Discover Magazine.
Mike’s slug on the story, of course, is a nod to the granddaddy (at least on the Internet) of Weird News stories, The Exploding Whale.
Speaking of Animals, the P’nut squirrel story has gone crazy in the media, with J.D. Vance even making it a political issue, claiming at a rally that “Don’s fired up about Peanut the squirrel.” Congressman Nick Langworthy (of New York’s 23rd District) is a little more pointed on the matter: “Instead of focusing on critical needs like flood mitigation in places like Steuben County, where local officials have to struggle just to get permits from the DEC to clear debris-filled waterways,they’re out seizing pet squirrels.”
I agree that people need to be strongly discouraged from making pets out of wild animals, but P’nut’s “Daddy” (as Longo called himself) does claim he was in the middle of completing paperwork to have P’nut certified as an “educational animal” when his home was raided (source) by six to eight officers. Longo did admit that those officers handed him a search warrant, despite what he saidpreviously (source).
It gets a bit seedier. Longo and his wife apparently have a presence on an “adult” site, and the publicity P’nut has brought helped them earn $800,000 on that site ...in one month. (No indication that P’nut made an appearance in such videos. “I just tag my squirrel dad account from the P’nut video I posted, so it gets double the clip views,” Longo said. “Every once in a while, a shirtless photo [on P’nut’s page, too], but I completely separated myself from this entire thing. Obviously, peoplewere going to find both and try to associate them.”) Just that month’s earnings allowed them to buy a 350-acre ranch outside Elmira, N.Y. (source). Meanwhile, after the raid, Longo set up a GoFundMe page to “Support P’nuts Freedom Farm” (presumably that 350-acre ranch) with a $200,000 goal (and that’s one source I won’t link to). As of this writing it has hit$163,740. And that ain’t peanuts.
New in My Blog: You never want to get a “Security Alert” that your email address has been changed on an account when you didn’t make any changes, but that’s what I got Saturday from Verizon Wireless. It was so absurd, well, I wrote it up in my blog, recounting obliviocy after obliviocy on their part. The real surprise, though, is at the end: a Florida Man tie-in. An Obliviot by AnyOther Name.
Ten Years Ago in True: The Meek Won’t Inherit the Earth.
A New Randy’s Random: Why do we have to remember the darker corners of our past? This is Why, by Rod Serling.
This Week’s Sunday Reading: Visiting the White House days before the (2008) election: it was surreal (and made possible by a Premium subscriber).
No Honorary Unsubscribe so far this week: didn’t find anyone who meets the criteria.
- But So Long to baseball pitcher Joey Jay, the first player to go from Little League to the majors. He died Sept. 27, at 89.
- Honorary Unsubscribe Archive.
Basic Subscriptions to This is True are Free at https://thisistrue.com. All stories are completely rewritten using facts from the noted sources. This is True® (and Get Out of Hell Free® and Stella Awards®) are registered trademarks of ThisisTrue.Inc. Published weekly by ThisisTrue.Inc, PO Box 666, Ridgway CO 81432 USA (ISSN 1521-1932).
Copyright ©2024 by Randy Cassingham, All Rights Reserved. All broadcast, publication, retransmission to email lists, web site or social media posting, or any other copying or storage, in any medium, online or not, is strictly prohibited without prior written permission from the author. Manual forwarding by email to friends is allowed if 1) the text is forwarded in its entirety from the “Since 1994” line on top through the end of this paragraph and 2) No fee is charged. I request that you forward no more than three copies to any one person — after that, they should get their own free subscription. I appreciate people who report violations of my copyright.
To get True delivered to you every week, click here to open a subscribe form.