Armed bots, an HOV Grinch and bikes for all
Mishaps and mayhem from around the region.
CALIFORNIA
The “City of Love” — San Francisco — seems like the last place you’d expect to find “killer police robots” surveilling the streets. Yet, in December, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted to allow armed bots to join the police department’s bomb disposal arsenal. Not surprisingly, everyone who has ever watched Black Mirror — or any of a hundred other dystopian sci-fi movies — objected. Ars Technica reports that 44 community and civil rights groups, including the ACLU, signed a letter saying: “There is no basis to believe that robots toting explosives might be an exception to police overuse of deadly force. Using bots that are designed to disarm bombs to instead deliver them is a perfect example of this pattern of escalation, and of the militarization of the police force.” The Board of Supervisors quickly backtracked and banned the use of lethal robots, at least for now. Does everyone feel safer?
NEW MEXICO
It was an old-fashioned treasure hunt that inspired podcasts (“Missed Fortune”), books (Chasing the Thrill) and numerous articles, not to mention speculation and a lot of controversy. What is a treasure chest worth today, anyway? Some unlucky seekers paid for this one with their lives. In 2010, Forrest Fenn, a Santa Fe art dealer and author, buried his trove somewhere in the Rocky Mountains, with the only clue being a 24-line poem, and the hunt began. “One man served time in prison for digging up graves at Yellowstone National Park,” Outside reported, while “five people died while looking for the cache.” Jack Stuef, a 32-year-old medical student from Michigan, finally found Fenn’s trove in 2020 and sold it to Tesouro Sagrado Holdings LLC; Dallas-based Heritage Auctions then auctioned the contents off. Highlights include a 549-gram Alaskan gold nugget that sold for a whopping $55,200; a Diquis/Greater Chiriqui frog pendant from Costa Rica or Panama, circa 700-1000 A.D.; and a gold pectoral from Colombia, 200-600 A.D., among 476 other items, including gold jewelry and coins. The most unusual item? Fenn’s 20,000-word autobiography, printed in text so tiny it required a magnifying glass to decipher. Fenn’s 2010 memoir, The Thrill of the Chase, explained that he included the autobiography — sealed in a glass jar — “because maybe the lucky finder would want to know a little about the foolish person who abandoned such an opulent cache.” The manuscript sold for $48,000. Altogether, the 476 items brought in $1,307,946 — enough to buy a lot of frog pendants. But let’s hope the goods aren’t under a curse. We’ve all seen that movie, too.
OREGON
An Oregon couple, Phillip and Rachel Ridgeway, became the proud parents of twins, a boy and a girl, on Oct. 31, abc7news reported. Healthy twins are always a good cause for celebration, but what makes this birth extra-celebratory is the babies’ origin story. It’s more than a skosh on the unusual side: The twins came from frozen embryos that were donated 30 years ago, on April 22, 1992. That means that this particular miracle of life involved embryos that were submerged in liquid nitrogen at 200 degrees below zero for three decades inside a “device that looks much like a propane tank,” and stored in a West Coast facility before being transferred to the National Embryo Donation Center in Knoxville, Tennessee, in 2007 — meaning the embryos were 30 years old before they were even born. As Phillip Ridgeway put it, “I was 5 years old when God gave life to Lydia and Timothy, and he’s been preserving that life ever since.”
ARIZONA
Nice try, buddy! The Arizona Department of Public Safety tweeted a photo of a vehicle whose rather “Seusspicious-looking” passenger bore a striking resemblance to the legendary green goblin that almost ruined Whoville’s Christmas once upon a time. Turns out the driver used the carpool lane with an inflatable Grinch as his passenger, UPI reported. Officials said they appreciated the driver’s “festive flair,” but that didn’t stop them from citing him for an HOV violation.
IDAHO
The Boise Bicycle Project made 580 kids happy by giving them their very own set of wheels. “Our goal is to make sure that everyone, regardless of income, has access to a bicycle and safe places to ride,” Boise Bicycle Project founder and Executive Director Jimmy Hallyburton said. KTVB7 reported that 200 volunteers helped to customize donated bikes based on the kids’ specifications. To date, the Boise Bicycle Project has given away over 10,000 bikes and shows no sign of hitting the brakes.
Tiffany Midge is a citizen of the Standing Rock Nation and was raised by wolves in the Pacific Northwest. Her book, Bury My Heart at Chuck E. Cheese’s (Bison Books, 2019), was a Washington State Book Award nominee. She resides in north-central Idaho near the Columbia River Plateau, homeland of the Nimiipuu.
Tips of Western oddities are appreciated and often shared in this column. Write [email protected], or submit a letter to the editor.
