James Abram Garfield (November 19, 1831 – September 19, 1881) was the 20th president of the United States,
Posted on 04/01/2019 3:32:17 AM PDT by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
For more than 30 years, pieces of Garfield telephones kept washing ashore on the beaches of northwestern France, and no one quite knew why. Where was the lasagna-loving cartoon cat coming from?
The mystery would puzzle the locals for years. His plastic body parts, first appearing in a crevice of the Brittany coast in the mid-1980s, kept returning no matter how many times beach cleaners recovered them. Sometimes they would find only his lazy bulging eyes, or just his smug face, or his entire fat-cat body, always splayed out in the sand in a very Garfield fashion.
From the stray curly wires and the occasional dial pad, it was clear that the pieces came from the once-popular Garfield telephone, which hit the shelves in the early 1980s, several years after Jim Davis first colored the famously lazy cat into his hit comic strip. The phone parts were in remarkable condition, considering they had been belched from the ocean, Claire Simonin-Le Meur, president of the environmental group Ar Viltansoù, told The Washington Post. Even Garfield’s black stripes were still painted onto his back, where the phone hooked.
She had been searching for the origin of Garfield for years, she said, out of concern for the damage the plastic phones may be doing to the ocean — and this month, after a chance encounter on the beach, she was about to get answers.
Simonin-Le Meur said the common belief among locals was that the phones came from a wayward shipping container that must have sunk to the bottom of the ocean, leaving environmentalists to fear Garfield’s plastic toxicity would continue to pollute the ocean indefinitely. In 2018 alone, at least 200 pieces of Garfield had been found on beaches in northwestern France, FranceInfo reported.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Please see #20.
Thank you.
We still track a million or so yellow rubber ducks that pepper the oceans, from a lost container, 1992. They are helpful in tracking global sea surface currents.
If you find one on a beach, you can report it. There are sites still actively tracking.
If you are part of that we, you must be very busy.
The scientific use of them makes sense. Maybe they should have runs of different colors of ducks and drop them in other places in the ocean. If it is called an environmental experiment, maybe Gaia will be pleased with the offering of the ducks, rather than offended by the pollution.
This thing really is a religion for many.
Just open www.outline.com and paste the link into the blank and it will open the page. Has worked every time I’ve tried it.
Sometimes I use it just to get a ‘cleaner’ page even when I’m not denied access.
Learned it here on Free Republic.
I have a friend who grew up an army brat and lived over in Germany.
When he was out playing he was in War areas, trenches, and what have you, and he found lots if war junk... a couple of mortar shells included... and he took them home and put them in his room because... kind of a little decoration.
So... when they went to move the movers came to pack them out to transfer their household goods back stateside and they saw the mortar shells and immediately called the EOD who showed up and disposed of them properly.
So he had live mortar shells in his room because “it was cool stuff that you found laying around.”
So he had live mortar shells in his room because “it was cool stuff that you found laying around.”
While soccer Mom’s might not approve, and are right that occasionally there were casualties from mothering techniques in previous generations—we mostly survived. And we have better stories. And we learned how to do stuff.
Ok, the shipping container was in a Cave. How did a shipping container find its way into a cave? And how did it take 30 years for the locals to find the cave? It seems like the locals would have known that the cave was already there?!
Good for you. Same here.
I wouldn’t call it polluted. I would call it changed and dangerous due to unexploded ordinance. But it seems like nature has adapted and is doing quite well.
Thx much.
It’s just more acute disconnected narcissism.
Plastics are toxic? Thank goodness they don't make baby teething toys out of it.
While the ordinance is the big problem for humans, the lead, arsenic, mercury and other chemicals is the problem for everything else. There are places where plants cannot grow.
I agree that a container of Garfields is just an annoyance. Asia and Africa need to tackle their problem with pollution and stop dumping it into the ocean.
Won’t let me read the article.
Where did they come from?.............
James Abram Garfield (November 19, 1831 – September 19, 1881) was the 20th president of the United States,
Fascinating. I read up on that.
Thank you!
Plastic is largely inert. It will eventually degrade in sunlight and salt water, but hardly constitues pollution in any meaningful sense.
Not that that will matter to the environazis.
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