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| Anonymous |
 Posted: 14-05-2004 11:37 Post subject: |
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| escargot wrote: |
Those keys- wonder what happened to them?
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They're in a drawer at my parent's house. Theres about twenty odd ranging from tiny two inch keys to big six inch whoppers. At least some must be extremely old, maybe 2-300 years. I'm sure if the City museum knew we had them they'd want them, but in the late 60's nobody cared. |
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Mighty_Emperor Divine Wind
Joined: 18 Aug 2002 Total posts: 19943 Location: Mongo Age: 42 Gender: Male |
| Posted: 18-05-2004 19:21 Post subject: |
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| Quote: | Car and More Found as Colorado Lake Drains
The Gazette, Colorado Springs, Colo. - May 11, 2004
Motor Trend
As the hulking metal skeleton of a Volkswagen bug peered out of receding Prospect Lake last week, Frank Kazee found his 14th gun nearby.
As the lake is becoming sand, it is revealing a prospector's paradise of guns, knives, class rings - even small German cars.
advertisement
City officials and amateur sleuths are scratching their heads, wondering how so much trash got to the bottom of a 50-acre lake last drained in 1953.
They expected to find some stuff. But it's been stunning what has emerged during the past three weeks the city has been pumping water out of the lake.
"There's shotguns and rifles and everything come up at that lake," said Kazee, a Colorado Springs, Colo., resident who's been prospecting the sand with his Bounty Hunter metal detector since 1969. "You name it, we've found it."
Kazee has discovered his 14 shotguns, handguns and rifles at the Memorial Park swimming hole since the water started receding in 2002. The city is draining Prospect Lake and wants to patch its leaks and refill it by next year.
The serial numbers have been filed off some of the guns, likely used to commit crimes, and most are too old to work. Still, Kazee and other members of the Pikes Peak Adventure Club for prospectors let police know when they dig up anything suspicious.
He's found rings and jewelry, too.
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Most items sprawled across the lake Thursday were trash and junk that hasn't seen the light in decades: an ice cube tray; a 45 rpm record with its label missing; empty pull-tab cans of Colt 45, Coors and Hamms.
The most curious item is the Volkswagen, with its rusted top and broken front window protruding from the water near the east side of the lake.
As birds perched on its top Thursday, 8-year-old Angelica Zins strolled by and wondered aloud: "Are there people in there?"
"There could be," replied her father, Greg Zins.
City parks and recreation director Paul Butcher said his staffers haven't noticed any slimy skeletons but have pinpointed the bug as a model built in the late 1960s. When the water drops low enough to pull it out, they will examine it for a vehicle identification number or license plate and try to determine its history.
Butcher's theory is somebody drove the car onto the lake when it was frozen, causing it to fall through the ice and sink.
The city has pumped about 15 million gallons out of the lake and into Monument Creek. Butcher expects the area will be dry by early June. |
http://www.motortrend.com/features/news/112_news11/ |
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| escargot1 Joined: 24 Aug 2001 Total posts: 17897 Location: Farkham Hall Age: 4 Gender: Female |
| Posted: 19-05-2004 08:58 Post subject: |
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Woooooooooooooooooooooowwwwwwwwwwwwwww
I'd love to go there.
Seeing a lake drained was one of the things I was fascinated by as a kid, probably because of news about whole valleys being flooded to create reservoirs. Saw a TV prog about dams recently and realised that I know everything about the Aswan dam, having learned about it soon after it opened!
Those guns are very intriguing. They are probably crime weapons dumped in a panic. 14 of them.  |
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| elffriend Radix lecti Joined: 31 Mar 2004 Total posts: 2014 Location: At the gates of Mordor Gender: Female |
| Posted: 19-05-2004 09:22 Post subject: |
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I am fascinated by Lady Bower reservoirs in Derbyshire. A village was flooded to make them. When it is dry the levels drop and some of the ruined buildings can be seen at the side.
You can find pottery and glass in the mud. The kids love it (mind you last time we went they were more fascinated by a huge dead pike!!!)
Lady Bower is also the place where they tested the bouncing bombs and filmed Dambusters. |
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| Anonymous |
| Posted: 19-05-2004 09:34 Post subject: |
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What happens to all the jewellery, thats what I'd like to know.
There is a lake in my hometown that gets dredged for stolen bikes every six months, that the police then sell off cheap at the local auctions. You can usually guarantee at least 30-odd. |
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| Mighty_Emperor Divine Wind
Joined: 18 Aug 2002 Total posts: 19943 Location: Mongo Age: 42 Gender: Male |
| Posted: 18-06-2004 14:35 Post subject: |
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| Quote: | Jun. 17, 2004. 01:00 AM
Hand found was from doll
Police initially said it was human
Discovery sparked land, water search
ROBERTA AVERY
SPECIAL TO THE STAR
WASAGA BEACH—A coroner's examination has ruled that a hand found on a popular beach and believed to be that of an infant or a baby actually came from a plastic doll.
The hand, which launched an intense police land and water search on Tuesday, was made of a spongy, synthetic material, said Dr. Jim Cairns of the chief coroner's office yesterday.
Cairns said a careful rinse of the mud and sand caked on the appendage had provided the right perspective." We looked at it in the appropriate light and it was quite obvious that it was a doll's hand," he said.
Cairns said the hand was so lifelike it had fooled him at first glance. He said he did not blame the officers, the local coroner or the person who found it for thinking it was human.
Standard procedure calls for the "remains" to be handled as little as possible, and for them to be packed up along with any surrounding soil or sand, he said.
The discovery was made by Alina Cimachowski of Woodbridge while walking along the beach with her 9-year-old son Lucas. After seeing the hand, she poked it with a stick.
Initially, it crossed Cimachowski's mind the hand could be that of a doll, but when she looked closely she thought the tiny fingernails and lines in the knuckles were so lifelike that she called police. "They were really human lines," she said.
First one officer and then another arrived to take a look. "They thought it was the real thing," said Cimachowski in a telephone interview yesterday.
Next digital photographs of the hand were sent electronically to the chief coroner's office. "Even they couldn't tell from the images," said Garland.
Then the local coroner arrived and ordered the hand to be sent for examination.
Meanwhile four members of the OPP's underwater search and recovery team staked out a grid search just off shore while two other officers dug into the middle of the 100-metre stretch of beach roped off as a crime scene.
Other officers searched the parking lot while a cadaver dog trained to sniff out bodies was brought in to search the popular tourist beach.
The search was called off at dusk and the area remained cordoned off overnight. The recovery team members were just pulling on their dive suits yesterday morning to resume the search when the call came from Cairns' office, said Garland. |
Source
Last edited by Mighty_Emperor on 15-02-2005 04:37; edited 1 time in total |
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| escargot1 Joined: 24 Aug 2001 Total posts: 17897 Location: Farkham Hall Age: 4 Gender: Female |
| Posted: 18-06-2004 18:41 Post subject: |
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Staggering home drunkenly one night, I noticed a headless baby lying in some bushes. Was immediately shocked into sobriety!
It was of course one of those lifesize cloth dolls with soft plastic limbs.
Reminds me of the times when I've read about people finding real corpses which they've at first taken to be shop window models.  |
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| Mighty_Emperor Divine Wind
Joined: 18 Aug 2002 Total posts: 19943 Location: Mongo Age: 42 Gender: Male |
| Posted: 18-06-2004 21:24 Post subject: |
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It does make you look at the idea of the Roswell aliens being parachute test dummies in a different light 
There are also those cases where people mistook toy jelly aliens for foetuses.
I suppose people see something, interpret it as being something horrid and then they go and find someone else to deal with it. Me I'd be prodding it with a pencil and seeing what it tasted like (which has got me into so much troop in the past ).
Emps |
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| caroleaswas Diva Mentalis Joined: 01 Aug 2001 Total posts: 4607 Age: 8 Gender: Female |
| Posted: 18-06-2004 21:31 Post subject: |
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Quote:
The safe made it on to the annual list of strange finds, which included a leopard-print lounge suite, a glass eye, dentures, a ukulele, garden gnomes and a pay phone.
Unquote
There's nowt so queer as folk . . .
Carole |
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| Mighty_Emperor Divine Wind
Joined: 18 Aug 2002 Total posts: 19943 Location: Mongo Age: 42 Gender: Male |
| Posted: 23-06-2004 15:34 Post subject: |
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This is odd:
| Quote: | Marine uniforms on fence pose mystery
Are they meant as a tribute or simply castoffs?
By KEVIN DUGGAN
KevinDuggan@coloradoan.com
J.W. Weaver, who are you?
Where are you?
And why are your Marine Corps uniforms hanging on a lonely fence line in northern Larimer County?
For about 10 days, an assortment of Marine uniforms has been hanging on a fence just east of where the Buckeye Road exit of Interstate 25 (No. 288) connects with County Road 82.
Who the uniforms belong to and why they are there is a mystery to residents of the sparsely populated ranchland between Wellington and Carr.
"We're hoping for some answers ourselves," said Evelyn Davis, 6225 Ranchland Lane. "Nobody around here knows what this is about."
Davis first saw the uniforms June 11 while out for a walk. Other neighbors said they noticed the unusual display last week and wondered why it was there and what it meant.
"Somebody is sending someone up here some kind of message," said Barry Hagerman, 6525 Ranchland Lane.
The uniforms are on four black plastic clothes hangers. The hangers are hooked to the top board of a battered barricade that is part of the fence.
One hanger holds three khaki uniform shirts and a pair of dark green trousers.
Another holds a dress-blue coat and dark trousers. An American flag and a yellow plastic rose are tucked into the coat. A white hat rests atop the fence above the coat, which carries highly polished brass buttons sporting the Marine Corps emblem.
Another hanger holds a dark green jacket -- size 36 regular -- and the other a set of camouflage fatigues, as well as several brown or green undershirts. The fatigues appear to be worn and have a hole in the trousers.
The rank insignia of a lance corporal -- a single chevron stripe over two crossed rifles -- appears on the sleeves of the uniforms.
The only identification is "Weaver" on the fatigues' name tag and "Weaver J.W." stamped on a belt.
The display appears to be either a memorial or the purging of someone's closet.
The uniforms, while soaked by recent rains, have been undisturbed. The wind has blown the hat off into weeds and trash along the bottom of the fence, neighbors say, but it has been placed back on its perch.
Marine Corps officials could not immediately verify that a Lance Cpl. J.W. Weaver is currently on active duty with the service. The name does not appear on the list of casualties from the war in Iraq, officials said.
The Marine recruiting office in Fort Collins has no record of anyone named Weaver signing up through the office in the last three years, officials said.
A Cpl. Jack W. Weaver is stationed in Japan with the 1st Marine Air Wing, said Sgt. Matthew Holly, a public affairs specialist in Denver, but there is no telling whether he is connected to the uniforms.
And it's possible the uniforms were owned by a reservist or someone who was discharged from the Marines a few years ago, Holly added.
A Marine who is honorably discharged may keep his or her uniforms after leaving the service, Holly said. There is no protocol for disposing of uniforms after discharge, he said.
Mike Coronado, 6332 Ranchland Lane, said motorists frequently pull off the highway and stop near the fence line. Some people camp in the secluded spot overnight.
The display appears to be a tribute of some kind, he said.
"I'm just glad nobody has messed with it," Coronado said.
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Originally published Tuesday, June 22, 2004 |
http://www.coloradoannews.com/news/stories/20040622/news/695333.html
Emps |
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| Mighty_Emperor Divine Wind
Joined: 18 Aug 2002 Total posts: 19943 Location: Mongo Age: 42 Gender: Male |
| Posted: 24-06-2004 01:57 Post subject: |
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I love books and especially second hand books and I like this story - I especially like the idea of books collecting a new story during their 'life':
| Quote: | At Used-Book Stores, Unintended Mysteries Are Often the Best
Sellers Leave Love Letters, Cash Between the Pages; 2 Photos and a Train Ticket
By BARRY NEWMAN
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
June 22, 2004; Page A1
NEW YORK -- A book is a good place to stash personal, valuable, embarrassing stuff. Unless, forgetting all about the stuff, you sell the book to a used book store.
"I'd always have a book with me when I got arrested," said Richard Ryan on being told that his 1985 rap sheet had fallen out of a book at the Strand, a store on Broadway in Manhattan where anybody can flip through a heap of two million volumes. "Books end up as filing cabinets," Mr. Ryan says, remembering his days as a student apartheid protester. "I'm sure I got my arrest ticket and filed it in the book."
Clearing his shelves years later, he unloaded a few hundred hardbacks -- rap sheet inadvertently included -- into one corner of the book business that has lately been doing well. Americans bought 150 million old books last year, reports Ipsos BookTrends. Online used-book sales, Forrester Research predicts, could double and hit billion by 2007. The more books people dump, the more tittle-tattle they pass on to strangers.
Which is how the Strand's staff came to know that William Richard Ryan, at the age of 23, was charged with criminal trespass for a sit-in at Cornell University on Nelson Mandela's 67th birthday. He was acquitted, but his arrest record, with a nice set of fingerprints, still wound up on a pile of book-borne scraps at the Strand's information desk.
"It's about as definitive a trail as one can leave," says Mr. Ryan, who is now 42 and heads Verse Theater Manhattan, a group that puts on poetic dramas. Whether he likes it or not, the uncataloged archive of oddments that slip out of old books has acquired a fragment of his past.
At the Strand's main desk, Richard Lilly said, "Let this be a warning to those who don't look through books before they sell. Bored clerks see it all." He laid open a copy of "Diverse Images -- Photographs From the New Orleans Museum of Art." Lodged between pages 62 and 81 was a spent bullet. "Another piece of a life that can't be tracked," said Mr. Lilly, who runs the Strand's art department. "It could be worse. At least there's no blood."
Erin Thompson, who enters new buys into the Strand's computer, found a key in a book and wears it on a string around her neck. Ephemera drift up on her desk: the Louths' hand-drawn family tree. An ink sketch dated 1901 -- hidden in a 1969 Christmas card -- of a horse pulling a plow. A doctor's prescription pad with the following notations: "Wednesday -- mambo, lindy, spins. Thursday -- rumba or tango. At work -- angry. Really got angry. How to use?"
"Yesterday, I found this really cool picture of this naked wrestler guy," Ms. Thompson says. In the fiction department, Ben McFall says: "I have a collection at home, which I can't bring in, of men in negligees. How do these things get away from people?"
Easily. A letter from Mrs. Robert E. Lee once dropped out of an old novel at Main Street Fine Books in Galina, Ill., birthplace of Ulysses S. Grant. Books from the Crypt in Gaithersburg, Md., found a 1933 horse-race tip-sheet in a 1938 copy of "Astounding Stories." Christmas Every Day, a used bookstore in Dallas, acquires leftovers from Christmas dinners in leftover Christmas books.
At the Strand -- New York's oldest and biggest independent used-book seller -- the most gripping finds produce new enigmas. Adam Davis, a 25-year-old from Oregon, took a job as a Strand clerk when he came to New York three years ago to write fiction. One day, he opened a copy of Barbara Tuchman's medieval history, "A Distant Mirror," and discovered a birth certificate. The baby's father was listed as "not known." An attached rider, dated years later, named the father.
Wrapped inside the certificate was a snapshot of a woman posing nude in a motel room, and one, in black-and-white, of what appeared to be the same woman as a child. There were some traveler's-check receipts, and the stub of a train ticket, issued shortly after the date on the rider, for a trip to the town where the birth certificate was issued.
"It's as if the book picked up a new story," says Mr. Davis. "I'm not sure I want to know the whole truth. The suppositions are so interesting." The fiction he has been writing since coming to work at the Strand, he says, has been about "the previous owners of books, based on the traces they left in them."
Novelist A.S. Byatt did the same in "Possession," which begins with a letter left in an old tome. Novelist David Bowman extended the theme: He deliberately filled a first edition of his novel "Let the Dog Drive" with letters from publishers rejecting it, and then sold it to the Strand. "They gave me a good price," Mr. Bowman says.
Used books often gain value from forgotten paper -- paper money, for example; the Strand's staff rakes in lots of that. They haven't yet found a "hell scene with fish monster," as Cristiana Romelli did two years ago at Sotheby's in London. The original Hieronymus Bosch sketch fell out of a client's old picture album and sold for 6,000. A few years earlier, her colleague Julien Stock found a Michelangelo stuck in a 19th-century scrap book. In 2001, that one brought its owner million.
The Strand did buy a doodled-over book of drawings by the Renaissance artist Ucello. The doodler was Salvador Dali. Fred Bass, the Strand's owner, once opened a book titled "The Bill of Rights" to find it was hollowed out. The bottom of the inside was signed, "Boo! Abbie Hoffman." Mr. Bass says he learned later from Mr. Hoffman that he had hidden a tape recorder in there during the Chicago Seven trial.
Mining the dusty stacks, browsers can strike gold too: a signed photo of Bette Davis; a dried four-leaf clover; a ripped-out flyleaf from a first edition with a poem scrawled on it: "A plague upon/ and to perdition/ the Hun who mars/ a first edition..."
Harvey Frank wasn't pleased, though, to learn that a personal note he wrote had landed in a customer's hands at the Strand. Mr. Frank had slipped it into a copy of his own self-published book of poetry, "My Reservoir of Dreams," before sending it to WOR Radio host Joan Hamburg. "I thought I would bring her into my life," says Mr. Frank, who is 80. Ms. Hamburg remembers the book, vaguely. "I was sort of touched," she says. "I put it on my desk. Or somewhere." She says she has no idea how it ended up in a used-book bin.
Perhaps "Linda" would say the same about the postcard signed "XXXX" mailed to her from Nantucket on July 29, 1965. "I mean, do you love me?" it said. "Please write me. I miss you terribly..." And maybe "Sarah" wouldn't recall how the copy of "Art & Illusion" she was given on her 21st birthday made its way to the Strand with this card inside: "I love you! I hope you enjoy this present. I love you and only you. Yes I do. You. You. You. With love from Nick."
Snippets caught in books never solve these mysteries, but a while ago, Will Bobrowski did add up some clues. He was shelving a book on the Third Reich when an envelope dropped out. Two letters were inside: one from a woman to a Dr. Muller in America; and one signed by an Albert Kesselring. There were two snapshots: one of a group of Nazi officers standing at a table, and another showing one of them leaving a building with Benito Mussolini.
"I went crazy doing research," Mr. Bobrowski says. Soon he knew that Field Marshal Kesselring led Hitler's forces in Italy, was convicted of war crimes in 1947, was pardoned in 1952 -- and was the man walking out of that building with Mussolini.
Mr. Bobrowski thinks these letters and photos may be valuable. He says he might someday give them to an academic institution. Until then -- for safekeeping -- he has tucked them inside an old book. |
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/0,,SB108785738519943459-Ihjf4NklaN3np2vZoKIaaeFm5,00.html |
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| escargot1 Joined: 24 Aug 2001 Total posts: 17897 Location: Farkham Hall Age: 4 Gender: Female |
| Posted: 24-06-2004 07:22 Post subject: |
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Worst thing I ever left in a library book was a paper working model of Gillian Taylforth doing that thing she does. Allegedly.  |
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| H_James Ancient Cow (&)
Creepy thing Joined: 18 May 2002 Total posts: 5624 |
| Posted: 24-06-2004 10:04 Post subject: |
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| my dad buys a lot of secondhand books, and if often fascinated by how far the previous reader got. He has what he claims is a particularly crap DH lawrence novel (forgotten which one) for which a double page is completely blackened, apparently because the previous reader had got up to there, stopped reading and just left it open for years. |
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| Mighty_Emperor Divine Wind
Joined: 18 Aug 2002 Total posts: 19943 Location: Mongo Age: 42 Gender: Male |
| Posted: 09-07-2004 19:13 Post subject: |
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| Quote: | Jul 6, 12:36 PM EDT
R.I. Man Finds ,000 in Coins in Stove
CENTRAL FALLS, R.I. (AP) -- A landlord is sure glad he looked in an old stove before he threw it out. Inside were vintage coins and nearly ,000 worth of gold and silver bars.
Vincent Bilotti came across the stove when he was cleaning the Broad Street apartment of Ben Mizera, a longtime tenant who had died recently. He pried open the coal-burning chamber and found several wrapped parcels and canisters.
The cans had plastic bags with ancient pennies - wartime zinc, Indian head and wheat. The brown paper packages had 133 one-ounce gold and silver bars. There were also five-dollar bills minted in 1851 and solid-silver dollars from the 1880s.
Bilotti said he'll make sure the valuables get to either Mizera's wife or a relative.
"It's possible that they had forgotten about it years ago," he said. |
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/C/COINS_IN_STOVE?SITE=VTBUR&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT |
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| Timble2 Imaginary person Joined: 09 Feb 2003 Total posts: 7114 Location: Practically in Narnia Age: 58 Gender: Female |
| Posted: 08-08-2004 20:08 Post subject: |
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Its easy enough to lose your drink in a pub, by putting it down and not keeping an eye on it, but losing an entire pub looks a bit careless.
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Officials 'lose' demolished pub
A pub which was dismantled to make way for a ring road has been lost by officials.
The White Lion, an imposing timbered building, was lovingly broken down piece by piece in the late 1970s so that it could be rebuilt.
Drinkers had decided not to oppose the planned road - on condition their cherished pub was replaced on another site in Stafford.
But it has emerged that officials have mislaid the materials.
Now, Staffordshire County Councillor Robert Simpson wants to see it rebuilt and has launched a hunt for the pub's parts.
'Someone must know'
"It's been put in storage somewhere," he said. "Now everyone's forgotten where.
"I've made some inquiries and so have local residents, but no-one is any the wiser.
"Someone must know. Someone should have records somewhere. The search goes on."
Local historian Joan Anslow is also at a loss to know where the pub has disappeared to.
"The White Lion was an attractive building, used by many residents of Stafford," she said. "They used to hold fairs in the back yard, selling geese and turkeys."
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/england/staffordshire/3546358.stm
Published: 2004/08/08 13:26:56 GMT
© BBC MMIV
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I'd be checking on any ex-councillors or council workers who've gone into the architectural salvage business |
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