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 ...
DANG!
Can’t read the story unless I pay them a buck.......
It won’t let me see the article unless I turn off my ad-blocker.
What was the punch-line?
How ‘bout telling those of us who can’t access WaPo what the source of these Garfield phones is.
“What was the punch-line?”
That this Frenchman has far too much time on his hands.
L
Click bait teaser.
Garfield, in ANY sense, is pollution, a blight on society.
Bottomline:
Garfield phones kept washing up in France. People figured there was a shipping container in the ocean slowly releasing a cache of Garfield phones.
Then, they found the shipping container that had been slowly releasing a cache of Garfield phones.
But it was pretty much empty.
And it was in a cave affected by tides, not exactly in the ocean.
Pretty anti-climactic.
Gaia is not amused by your attitude.
..the French
Click bait stories like this one from the compost usually are anti-climatic but they get the clicks so they can charge the advertiser more for the space on their website.
I never click on the compost’s website.
JoMa
If I’d been finding Garfield parts I think the thing to Be looking for would be the Litter box.
Sea Catfish were producing them, but just couldn’t find a suitable distribution method?
“Search “Zone Rouge”. These are areas so polluted during WWI that are still No-go today. “
While you are right about the no-go zones I don’t think seeding an area with mines and artillery shells is the kind of “pollution” that a shipping container of plastic phones, or burning oil tankers or cities brings to mind. Active munitions are intended to kill. Oil and plastic is not. People still die every year from ordinance expended in the Franko-Prussian war. People occasionally die in the US from munitions dating to the American Civil War. A device intended to kill is not “pollution;” at least not the kind of pollution we normally think of in that word’s context.
“hysterical writers”
Nice. With your permission I’d like to borrow that please.
Stranded, busted-open shipping container in a low-lying cave on a beach somewhere in northwestern France. Presumably, the tide would come in and pluck Garfield pieces out of the container from time to time.
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