oddly enough

oddly enough

For sale in Pennsylvania: 5-ton safe; buyer must move

BERWICK, Pa.

Police in central Pennsylvania are selling a 10,000-pound safe to the highest bidder — as long as the buyer can move it.

Berwick police Chief Kenneth Strish describes the stronghold as “humongous.” Still, he says it’s too small to store police munitions and isn’t suitable for an evidence locker.

The 5-ton safe already was in the basement of a building that police moved into in 2009. It’s unclear how long it had been there.

Public-works employees had to remove doors and door frames to get it out of the building. Several men dragged it through the station to where a backhoe and winch could take over.

The Press Enterprise of Bloomsburg reports the safe now is outside, covered by tarps. Officials say the minimum bid is $3,000.

London ‘Micrarium’ aims to showcase tiny animals

LONDON

They’re minuscule, there are millions of them, and one museum manager says they’re massively under-represented.

Jack Ashby, who is in charge of the Grant Museum of Zoology in central London, said Thursday he is trying to give dragonfly nymphs, tortoise mites and sea spiders the attention they deserve, unveiling a “Micrarium” devoted to some of the animal kingdom’s smallest subjects.

“You go to any natural-history museum, and it’s normally full of big animals, but actually, the huge majority of life on Earth is absolutely tiny, and we thought we’d right that wrong,” he said in a telephone interview. “We want to give people a chance to see what makes up most of the animal kingdom.”

The Grant Museum, whose history stretches back to before the Victorian era, has an eclectic group of items typical of 19th-century collections. It houses Dodo bones, a giant deer skull, an unusual batch of animal brains pickled in alcohol and an even eerier-looking jar jammed full of preserved moles. Ashby said the back-lit walls of the Micrarium — housed in a former storage room within the larger museum — display 2,323 slides of minimonsters, from tortoise beetles to baby cuttlefish.

NYC Valentine’s Day tour of sewage-treatment plant is back

NEW YORK

Lovers of the unusual are getting another chance to impress their Valentines this year in New York City.

The Department of Environmental Protection again is offering Valentine’s Day tours of the Newtown Creek sewage-treatment plant in Brooklyn’s Greenpoint section.

The DEP says it’s offering three tours this year due to “overwhelming demand.”

The 9:30 a.m. and 1 p.m. tours were filled quickly. So another was added at 11 a.m. Thursday.

Associated Press