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From the monthly archives: September 2009
Same Fish In Queens Petshop For 41 Years – Gothamist
… 
Meet Buttkiss, the black pacu who has eaten more than 175,000 fish during his residence in Queens. “We feed him twenty-five goldfish every other day,” says Steve Gruebel, the owner of Cameo Pet Shop in Richmond Hill. You do the math. He’s been in the shop continuously since 1970, becoming a Richmond Hill landmark in that time.
Why hasn’t he been sold already? “We actually sold him in 1968 to a Holocaust survivor named Kurt Emerick. The fish was about two inches long at that time. But he got so big he was knocking things over in Kurt’s fishtank. Kurt didn’t like that. He was a perfectionist. So he brought him back here in a bucket. Later Kurt got hit by a bus on Metropolitan Avenue and died. But the fish is still here. I had just gotten back from Nam and I decided to keep him.”
The fish has some personality too. Named after the famed linebacker Dick Butkus (though Steve corrected my spelling to “Buttkiss”), he will come to Steve’s hand because he knows that’s where the food comes from. “You can see the marks on the top of his head. He’ll bang on the top of the tank when he’s hungry.” Pacus are in the piranha family. The New York Aquarium did not get back to us when we asked whether or not the fish could possibly be that old, but residents of Richmond Hill swear the fish has been there the whole time, in the same 75-gallon tank. When I walked around the block to go to the (excellent) Alfie’s Pizzeria, Louie, Alfie’s son, said, “That fish! That fuckin’ fish! Is that fuckin’ fish unbelievable or what? When we’re all dead and gone that fish will still be there.”
Insane killer escapes on field trip to county fair
(AP) –SPOKANE, Wash. — Authorities have put out a statewide alert for a mentally ill killer who escaped during a hospital field trip to a county fair, leading to fears that he’ll become more unstable and potentially dangerous the longer he is on the loose with no medication.
Sgt. Dave Reagan of the Spokane County sheriff’s office says Phillip Arnold Paul remained at large Friday and officials believe he’s headed to Sunnyside, the town where his parents live. Anyone spotting him should call 911 and not try to confront him.
[more] via The Associated Press: Insane killer escapes on field trip to county fair.
Lenny has been standing too close to his microwave again:
N.S. garlic farm wards off high-speed internet
A Nova Scotia garlic farmer has put the brakes on high-speed internet coming to Victoria Harbour, a rural community on the Bay of Fundy, fearing radiation from microwave towers will affect his crops.
Lenny Levine, who has been planting and harvesting garlic by hand on his Annapolis Valley land since the 1970s, is afraid his organic crop could be irradiated if EastLink builds a microwave tower for wireless high-speed internet access a few hundred metres from his farm.
“I think over a period of time it will change the DNA of the garlic because it shakes up the molecules,” he said Tuesday.
EastLink uses microwave transmission to provide high-speed internet access to rural areas outside its wired network.
Levine said he moved to the country to get away from pollution, and he sees the radiation from the towers as another form of pollution.”I view it with dread, fear and panic,” he said. “I don’t want to grow food under those conditions.”
[more] via N.S. garlic farm wards off high-speed internet.
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