Bike swipers
Lots of people getting their bicycles yoinked lately. I sympathize. When I was a lad, someone made off with my sweet honey-colored Schwinn with banana seat, squeezy horn and just the right amount of handlebar tassels. It was my own fault, really. I left the bike laying (or possibly lying) in the woods one afternoon so I could creep into the backyard of a neighborhood girl and . . . But just you never mind what I was doing! I’m not on trial! I’m the victim here! Anyway, I never got the bike back and had to settle for riding a girls’ Le Bike the rest of that summer. You can only imagine the anguish.

Harassed by Roosters: The Russ Dillingham Story
So, photographer Dillingham courageously went out into the wilds of Greene the other day in hopes of getting photos for my story about a hero beaver. Russ didn’t have any luck paparazzi-izing the beaver in question, but he did send me a nice note to express how much he appreciated the opportunity to try: “Hung out for two stinking hours,” he wrote, “and got bit by bugs and harassed by some roosters lurking in the bushes and got some nice dragonfly photos but not a single beaver to be spotted.” He said some other stuff, too, but I probably should leave that part out.

Supersized like ya read about
I don’t want to alarm and/or titillate anyone, but there have been reports of a GIGANTIC Dunkin’ Donuts cup motoring along local streets. I typically pass these kinds of reports off to bad liquor, but in this case, I’ve seen the photos. I SEEN ’em, man! That Dunkin’ cup is huge! Spill THAT in your lap some morning, and you’ll never be the same. If you get my drift.

Fat fingers and wandering cows
Got a cool letter from a lady in Wilton (a lady who has possibly the best penmanship I’ve ever seen) who bemoans the fact that the Sun Journal doesn’t publish lists of all police calls like they do in some other papers. To illustrate her point, she included clippings from a Farmington area paper that included some very loooong lists of complaints investigated by the local sheriff’s department. And I mean ALL complaints. A good bulk of these complaints, like maybe a hundred, were listed as “accidental dials.” The rest involved the usual: inebriated persons doing stupid things, welfare checks, neighbor issues and two reports of cows wandering in roadways. I like a wandering cow report as much as the next guy, but I’m pretty sure we tried producing such a police log in the past here at the SJ and it turned into a space-gobbling mess. Plus, now that I think of it, if we went that route, chances are good I’d be the person tasked with typing it all up. So let’s just forget we ever had this conversation.