Los Angeles, CA

You can always count on LA to provide you with a never-ending stream of weird news. The latest item is about crafty thieves posing as maintenance workers who steal copper wiring from public street lights. This may sound bizarre to you, but have you ever taken your recycling into an actual recycling plant? They not only take plastic, paper, and glass, but scrap metal such as steel and copper, and other construction-grade material.

Also, the price of precious metals has gone up significantly in the past year. I have a friend who is a jeweler, and while her business is still small (her jeweler’s bench is in her bedroom, and she has three other jobs to support her art), she is still hurt badly by the rising price of gold, which has more than doubled, steel, and copper. Moreover, when you buy over a few ounces of a precious metal, you have to fill out government paperwork so they can keep track of how much you buy to be sure that you’re not hoarding. And with the rate of the dollar these days, I can’t really blame anyone for wanting to hoard.

The easy way around that is to steal! You get enough copper scraps to turn in and get a pretty sum of cash, and there’s no trail leading back to you. The downside? People are left in the dark for months, making it very dangerous at night for pedestrians, cyclists, and even drivers. This wire theft has been growing in popularity, and is now affecting not only LA but San Bernadino, Redlands, San Francisco, and Pasadena. It might not be a bad idea to take down the license plate of a plain white truck or work van you see when the worker is up a pole fiddling with the lights and call it in to the nearest DWP, just to be sure nothing fishy is up. It may save a life.

To read more about these strange thefts, go here.

Just about a year ago, I was out with my grandmother at the Pasadena Humane Society looking into getting her another dog after her sheltie passed on.

I was expecting to see lots of dogs and cats, and some birds here and there (they do have an aviary afterall).

What I wasn’t expecting to see was a 5-6 foot American Alligator named Tina.

Tina, of course, was not for adoption. Tina’s been a permanent resident of the Pasadena Humane Society since 1998, when she was abandoned after the wildlife company she was at went out of business. So now she’s part of the PHS’ educational program. Over the years, Tina has become accustomed to humans, and therefore even if released in the wild, she would never be able to survive.

But a 15 year old, 7 foot-long gator needs space. When I saw Tina a year ago, she didn’t have much room at all, considering her size. There was a bit of water there to swim in, but she was just laying still, half in water, half out. I honestly thought at first that she wasn’t real because there wasn’t any movement! Of course, with so little room and such a big body, I would imagine it’d be kinda rough to move.

Thankfully her confines have been given an upgrade; double the size it originally was. Tina now has a 20′ x 18′ living area, half of which is a filtered pond, donated by Ray Stewart; the owner of Waterworks Ponds in Glendale.

[From Pasadena Star News]