oddly enough

oddly enough

Photo of Robert E. Lee fetches $23,000 for charity

NASHVILLE, Tenn.

A Goodwill worker who spotted a photograph of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee has helped the charity make $23,000 in an online auction.

The tintype photograph was in a bin, about to be shipped out, when a worker grabbed it and sent it to the charity’s local online department. The item was put up for auction, which closed Wednesday night.

“It would have gone to our outlet store where everything is sold by the pound,” Goodwill spokeswoman Suzanne Kay-Pittman said Thursday. She estimated the tintype would have fetched a dollar and change based on its weight.

The sale was a record for the charity. The previous record was an early 1900s watercolor that sold for $7,500 in 2009 to a museum in New Orleans, The Tennessean reported.

The newspaper first reported the photograph sale.

Kay-Pittman said Thursday that the successful bidder lives in Virginia, but officials didn’t immediately know his name.

Dutch woman accused of calling man 65,000 times

AMSTERDAM

Dutch prosecutors are charging a 42-year-old woman with stalking after she purportedly called her ex-boyfriend 65,000 times in the past year.

The 62-year-old victim from The Hague filed a police complaint in August due to the persistent phone calls. Police arrested the suspected stalker Monday, seizing several cellphones and computers from her home in Rotterdam.

Hague prosecution spokeswoman Nicolette Stoel said Thursday the woman argued to judges at a preliminary hearing she had a relationship with the man and the number of calls she placed to him wasn’t excessive. The man denied they had a relationship.

The court ordered her not to contact him again.

Seemingly drunken Swedish moose found stuck in tree

STOCKHOLM

A seemingly intoxicated moose has been discovered entangled in an apple tree by a stunned Swede.

Per Johansson, 45, says he heard a roar from his vacationing neighbor’s garden in southwestern Sweden late Tuesday and went to have a look. There, he found a female moose kicking about in the tree. The animal likely was drunk from eating fermented apples.

With the help of police and rescue services, Johansson later managed to set the moose free in part by sawing off tree branches.

But the animal appeared confused and wandered into Johansson’s garden, where she was still resting Thursday.

Other neighbors in the Goteborg suburb Saro had seen the animal sneaking around the area for days. Johansson said the moose appeared to be sick, drunk, or “half-stupid.”

Associated Press