NO DEPOSIT, BUT BOTTLE DOES NET A SURPRISING RETURN
Geoff Hight and his elementary school classmates in Portland, Maine, discovered that a bottle carrying a message really could cross the Atlantic Ocean when they received a letter back from a 13-year-old French girl.
Amelie Kriskovic wrote to Geoff that she had found his bottle while walking with her father on the beach near their home in Pornichet, France, the Portland Press Herald reported yesterday.
Geoff was among 21 fourth-grade students who sealed messages in wine bottles in the spring of 1992 and had them released off Portland by a fisherman in an experiment to learn more about the ocean and the Gulf Stream.
Two bottles washed up in Canada three months after they were released, but the rest were assumed lost at sea - until Geoff's school received a letter last week from Amelie.
The Gulf Stream flows up the East Coast before turning toward Europe, and Pamela Trieu had told her students that if any of the bottles reached the stream they might be carried to the British Isles.
Trieu admitted she was surprised to hear that Geoff's bottle had landed in Pornichet, which is in the south of France and much farther south than she had expected the Gulf Stream to carry it.
Sounds as though it hit a bit of a bottleneck.
Of about two years' duration.
JIG JUST MIGHT BE UP FOR FLEA-MARKET FIDDLER
Parisian police are accusing a former junk salesman caught with more than 700 violins in his apartment of being a virtuoso of violin fraud.
Police say the man bought nearly worthless violins at flea markets, altered their identifying marks to make them appear valuable, and sold them to Japanese buyers for at least $1,300 apiece.
The man is being held in jail during an investigation, which police say shows he made $300,000 to $900,000 a year through the alleged scam.
Time to face the music.
SCIENTISTS TRYING TO TAKE THE WIND OUT OF GAS TAX
Australian scientists are testing an anti-flatulence compound for livestock that could take the wind out of a proposed greenhouse gas emission tax.
Every year the nation's 24 million cattle and 150 million sheep produce more than two million tons of methane, a greenhouse gas believed responsible for possible global warming.
The government has been considering taxing animal flatulence as part of an effort to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent by 2005.
But if a newly found nontoxic compound, antimethanogen, is truly able to suppress methane production, as scientists theorize, it could render the gas tax moot.
Might prove less taxing on the ozone layer as well.
