Hits & Misses
HIT: First responders – EMS workers, firefighters and police officers – get plenty of love, and deservedly so. In fact, they don’t get nearly enough. But one group whose efforts get too little attention are the folks who restore our utility services after water line breaks, gas outages or major storms. This past week, tens of thousands of people in this region lost their electrical service because of a highly destructive wind storm, and while it sometimes took days to restore service, electric company crews worked tirelessly – some pulling 12-hour shifts, day after day – to get people back on line. We owe them a heaping helping of gratitude.
HIT: If you’re at a flea market and looking through a pile of Life magazines from the 1960s, chances are you will not find the Sept. 13, 1968, issue. That’s because it had the Beatles on the cover, and it’s now a sought-after collectible. But the Cuyahoga County Public Library in Ohio now has its copy back after someone returned it last week – a full 50 years after they stole it. The conscience-plagued offender admitted to taking the magazine from a library branch shortly after it was published, and enclosed a $100 late fee. The world would be a better place if every thief experienced a similar sense of remorse.
HIT: An emu is hard to miss. The bird is the second-largest in the world, weighs in at 100 pounds or more and is in excess of 5 feet tall. Since they are mostly found in Australia, residents in York County have been understandably shocked recently to see one wandering in the backyards and down their roads. But the stray emu was finally captured last Tuesday and taken to a farm in the area that has other emus. The owner of the emu remains a mystery, though, since no one has come forward to claim it, or even report it missing. This state of affairs resulted in one of the most unusual sentences to ever appear in an Associated Press story: “Anyone missing an emu is asked to contact police.”