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Roadside News: June 3, 2009
June 3, 2009
• Metal Otter, Dead Indians: The Lions Club of Ottertail, Minnesota, wants to move the town’s 14-foot-long steel otter to a more visible location — like a nearby hilltop — but it can’t because the hill may be an ancient Indian burial mound. Also, the statue is starting to rust. Ottertail might be better off melting it and building a bigger otter to rival the 40-footer in nearby Fergus Falls.
• Great Hunt Clean-Up: Utah has its share of shutterbug-worthy rock art. One named The Great Hunt Panel, however, has been looking too photogenic of late. According to KSL-TV, state authorities have just given companies permission to drill for natural gas in the area, but the drilling trucks kick up lots of dust, and someone may be going out to the Panel and blasting it with a pressure washer to “clean up the image of the energy industry.” The state authorities, questioned by KSL-TV, attributed the Panel’s spic-and-spanness to rain.
• Accordion Due Respect: Reno, Nevada, wants to erect a ten-foot-tall concrete statue of an accordion player in a local park because “many people who visit the park are Hispanic” according to the artist, who is not Hispanic and who lives in Pennsylvania. One critic quoted by the Reno Gazette-Journal mocked the proposed statue at a city meeting, calling its over-sized head “extremely disfigured” and pointing out that the legs are half the size that they should be. “Are we making fun of dwarfs?” Wonder what the opinionated Mr. Accordion would have thought of it….
• Bat About Face: Only two years ago, San Antonio, Texas, rudely banished its bridge-roosting bats because the city didn’t want the bats’ sunset swarms to become a San Antonio tourist attraction. The bats, however, found another nearby bridge, and tourists continued to enjoy watching them. Now, with tough economic times and less anti-bat snobbery, city officials appear to have flip-flopped. “It is something fun to talk about,” said one commissioner to WOAI-TV. “It’s part of San Antonio. It’s almost like a tourist attraction.”
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