More-interesting news

I know I complain about all the "bad timeline" news, and I do admit there's a bad side to this (breaking-down plastic polluting the water and the beach) but I confess I love oddball stories like this one:
 "Mystery" of Garfield phones on French beach finally solved

(though really? Was it that hard? Of course it's gonna be a shipping container lodged somewhere and belching them out).

That said, I kind of love the sheer whimsy of the story: Garfield phones, of all things.

(There are other stories similar: Shipping containers losing cargo. I had heard the rubber-ducky story; in fact, oceanographers have been using the peripatations of the little ducks and turtles to track ocean currents. And I recall hearing about Lego pieces washing up in Cornwall.

I also think there was a story about tennis shoes washing up, but when I Google search that, I get some....much more horrific stories (involving amputated feet on beaches, if you must know).

And yeah, yeah: plastic waste, especially as the plastic breaks down and releases chemicals into the ocean, is bad news, and it's not cool, and all that. But I am also not immune to the whimsy of Lego washing up on beaches (what fun that would be, to be a beachcombing kid)

(Heh, and a digression. Apparently this is a meme:

Well, I saw another one yesterday:

on someone's Tumblr and I busted out laughing. And maybe I need that for my teaching lab, given the number of students - even Industrial Hygiene majors (ESPECIALLY Industrial Hygiene majors) who tend to ignore my horrific stories about people who got glass in their eyes in a lab accident because they weren't wearing safety goggles, or who wound up sick because they brought a ham sandwich into lab and it got exposed to chemicals. But I also wonder if our students - who do not tend to be Intensely Online in the particular way that I am - are familiar with Propagandgarf so they would not "get" OSHAgarf)

But yeah. Even though "plastics are bad, mmmm-kay," I cannot help but be somewhat charmed by this story.

And I suggested on Twitter that someone needs to write a Garfield on the Beach opera (a la "Einstein on the Beach"), or, even better, make a movie called The Garfies, where a rag-tag bunch of pre-teens and barely-teens set off on a quixotic quest to retrieve One-Eyed Arbuckle's secret stash of Garfield phones....because somehow that saves their homes.

(Yes, I know it's not a cinematic masterpiece, but I have a deep and abiding love for "The Goonies," and I also enjoy parodies/homages to it)


Anyway, given the News Timeline we are in, I would rather hear about a 30-year-old shipping container full of Garfield phones than about the latest rich/famous person getting a slap on the wrist for doing wrong, or the latest atrocity in some part of the world I am only dimly aware of, or the latest news of some highly placed individual being unkind to others.














And the original news report, I guess, en Français: