Kitten hitches 100-mile ride on bumper
PLATTSBURGH, N.Y. — A woman says a 6-week-old kitten hitched a ride on the outside of her vehicle as she drove about 100 miles over upstate New York roads.
Stacey Pulsifer said she recently drove from her home in Plattsburgh to Elizabethtown in the Adirondacks, then back to her apartment. Along the way she stopped for coffee and heard meowing coming from her Jeep.
She asked two friends to help her search the vehicle. They finally found the kitten wedged behind a bumper and had to cut it free.
Pulsifer has since adopted the hitchhiker and named it Pumpkin. She estimates the lucky black cat was lodged in the car for about 22 hours and traveled some 100 miles. She suffered a broken paw during the ride.
Cussing cockatoo violates noise law
WARWICK, R.I. — A Rhode Island woman has been accused by her neighbors of violating an animal-noise ordinance by training her cockatoo to cuss.
The Providence Journal reported Lynne Taylor is accused in Warwick municipal court of training the bird, Willy, to say expletives.
The bird allegedly aimed the invectives at the neighbors, who happen to be Taylor’s ex-husband and his girlfriend.
A municipal judge on Thursday denied Taylor’s request to dismiss the case.
The neighbors, Kathleen Melker and Craig Fontaine, said they have been subjected to repeated curses from the bird, at one point for 15 minutes at a time.
The animal noise ordinance imposes a small fine on any pet owner whose animal creates habitual noise.
A judge issued restraining orders telling both women to have no contact.
Michigan lovebirds rescued after marriage proposal
CASEVILLE, Mich. — Two Michigan sheriff’s deputies can expect wedding invitations in their future for rescuing a couple who became stranded on an island during a meticulously planned, elaborate marriage proposal that apparently accounted for everything but bad weather.
Nathan Bluestein, of Northville, and May Gorial, of Madison Heights, set out by canoe last weekend in Wild Fowl Bay near Caseville, about 110 miles north of Detroit, the Huron County sheriff’s department said. Gorial, 32, accepted the proposal, but strong wind and waves kept them from returning to shore.
Bluestein, 27, told the Detroit Free Press he had been planning the proposal for months. He tucked a message in a bottle inside a lunch bag he brought on the trip.
“I made sure that she never could touch the lunch bag,” he said “I had it around my arm the whole time.”
Inside the bottle was a sheet of paper, soaked in tea and burned around the edges, with a poem written in French. Gorial, a French teacher at Bishop Foley Catholic High School in Madison Heights, began reading and translating the poem before finding a proposal written in English on another piece of paper.
“The way I look at it … she’s my best friend and the love of my life,” Bluestein said.
The two talked and snapped pictures, and didn’t realize they were too far from land. They ended up on North Island and the sheriff’s department sent the two deputies by boat from Caseville. Bluestein and Gorial don’t have a wedding date set, but the deputies will definitely be invited to the event.
“If it wasn’t for them, we wouldn’t have seen the wedding day,” Gorial said.
By wire sources
