View from the North 40: Pamville News, the winter boredom edition

The burden of trying to be funny this week is too great for my tense and increasing stooped shoulders to bear. Fortunately, we here at Pamville News are fond of gathering odd news and this week has enough of that to fill the gap.

They fought the law

Reuters reported Wednesday, Jan. 17, that psychic Sally Ann Johnson was sentenced in Boston to 26 months in prison after she admitted trying to avoid paying taxes on $3.5 million she was paid by an elderly Massachusetts woman looking to cleanse herself of demons. First, any psychic who is caught and convicted of any crime should automatically be charged with fraud because, y’know, shouldn’t they have seen this coming? Maybe Al Capone would’ve been shouting at her from the great beyond. And second, this story is even funnier when you know that the U.S. District Court judge’s name is Casper.

Nights get long and cold near the Arctic circle and those desperate times sometimes call for desperate measures, as it did for a man in the Russian town of Apatity. Reuters reported Jan. 10 that a man stole an armored vehicle, drove it into town, crashed it through the window of a convenience store, climbed out the hatch and stole a bottle of wine. He was caught later with the stolen wine bottle. That hunger for wintertime amusement hits everybody, apparently, though, because witnesses were caught on film just standing around watching, undisturbed by the incident and the local news reporter took time and ink to note that the store was not licensed to sell alcohol that early in the morning.

If you’re the person who has

everything

In case you have money sitting around and no psychic exorcism to spend it on, the following is a short shopping list.

Mexico is auctioning off the fossilized tail of a 22-tonne sauropod of the Atlasaurus imelakei species that roamed the Atlas Mountains of Morocco during the Middle Jurassic, some 165 million years ago. Reuters reported Tuesday, Jan. 16, that the reserve price is 1.8 million Mexican pesos, about $96,000. The fossil was donated by a wealthy collector and proceeds from the sale will be used to rebuild schools damaged by two major earthquakes in Mexico in 2017.

But if education isn’t your thing, and sketchy provenance isn’t enough to keep your wallet shut, Wade Jones of North Carolina has a now-yellowed, crumpled, blue and white Dixie cup to sell you. The Associated Press said Thursday, Jan. 18, that the Dixie cup is being sold on eBay along with a letter that says a woman named June swears she retrieved the cup in April 1956 after Elvis Presley drank from it, crushed it and threw it away. The letter says that the day after Elvis discarded this paper Dixie cup, June asked to keep it “as a little memento.” By Wednesday bidding had reached $1,280 on the 60-year-old, crumpled paper cup.

Owls gone wild(er)

Atlanta, Georgia, residents are beset with attacking owls. The latest victim, the AP reported Jan. 11, is a man in downtown Atlanta who’s head was sliced open by an owl that swooped in on him as he left his home. But a woman in an Atlanta suburb in Cobb County around New Year’s Eve was scratched and knocked over by an owl attacking her dachshund and just prior to Christmas a Yorkie in Atlanta’s Henry County died from wounds it sustained from an owl attack.

Farther north along the East Coast people at the Pineland Farms outdoor center in Maine are being warned to watch out for an “aggressive dive-bombing” owl that cut open a skier’s head. A Jan. 11 AP report says the center has recommended people follow two safety precautions when in or near the area: 1) wear hats for protection and 2) “wave their arms overhead” to ward off an attack.

This second recommendation might be an especially valuable tactic for people in and around Atlanta to employ to protect themselves and their pets from marauding owls because, if those mildly interested bystanders in the near-Arctic Russian village taught us nothing else, people of Georgia being hit by surprising cold and snowy weather can watch the spectacle, whiling away the time and helping to fight winter boredom.

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I guess it beats just sitting there doing nothing, waiting for a chinook to arrive at [email protected].