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A longtime San Francisco barber, Shorty Maniace, has never been the type to ruffle anyone's feathers. But when faced with unsightly graffiti next to his beloved barbershop J.P. Kempt, rather than duck responsibility, Maniace hatched a plan. "This was just me messing around and having fun and it turned out to be something great," Maniace said His weapon of choice? Rubber duckies. Hundreds of them. "I see a lot of people smile and I smile every time I look at it," he said. It all started innocently enough, Maniace had some rubber ducks left over from a Halloween party and...

Oct. 13 (UPI) -- A Seattle woman with a collection of 5,631 rubber ducks said she originally intended to quit collecting with only seven of the toys. Charlotte Lee, 54, said she bought her first rubber ducks in 1996 to decorate her bathroom. "I thought I would quit after I had seven but then friends would come over and see them," Lee told Guinness World Records. "Soon, I was getting them as gifts for my birthday, Christmas, whenever really!" Lee now has 5,631 duckies, earning her the Guinness World Record for the largest collection of rubber ducks. She said...

WASHINGTON, - In an effort to disrespect and mock the Islamic State, members of the Reddit group 4chan have been editing recruitment photos to recast the terrorist group as a gang of rogue rubber ducks armed with toilet brushes. The effort, informally referred to "Allahu Quackbar," has 4chan "fighting terrorism with memes," according to one member who posted in a Reddit forum that has taken the edited images to a wider audience. "How about castrating the image of Isis by replacing the faces on ALL the propaganda photos with bath ducks?," wrote one 4chan member as the effort began to...

The American space agency NASA has made an appeal for public help with one of its stranger experiments. It wants information on the fate of 90 rubber ducks deployed on a special mission to pinpoint where melt waters go under the Greenland ice shelf in summer months. The bathroom toys were put into one of the crevasses which drain vast amounts of Greenland's melt waters in the hope they would pop out eventually and reveal the route taken by the water. Nothing has been seen or heard of the ducks since.

THE first of 29,000 rubber ducks circling the oceans may have landed in Britain. Retired teacher Penny Harris, 60, found this toy while walking her dog on a North Devon beach. She hopes it will be identified as one of the ducks which have gone on a 17,000-mile odyssey since falling off a container ship during a Pacific storm in 1992. Penny said last night: “It’s covered in brown algae and has got barnacles on it.” The yellow ducks, which began life in a Chinese factory, have created global interest. Two children’s books have been written about them and scientists...

from the July 31, 2003 edition - http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0731/p01s04-woeu.html Drifting rubber duckies chart oceans of plasticBy Peter Ford | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor PARIS - Theirs is an epic tale of resilience and pluck, a seafarer's yarn of high-seas adventure that has seen them brave some of the world's wildest waters in their 11-year odyssey from the Pacific Ocean toward landfall in Europe.They have bobbed through storms that would have wrecked larger vessels, to drift deliberately down the Bering Strait. They have patiently borne a four-year spell trapped in Arctic ice packs, to float freely into the...

BOSTON - Being thrown from a container ship, drifting for more than a decade, bobbing through three oceans — it's enough to turn a rubber duckie white.   A floating flock of the bathtub toys — along with beavers, turtles and frogs — is believed to be washing ashore somewhere along the New England coast, bleached and battered from a trans-Arctic journey. Oceanographers say the trip has taught them valuable lessons about the ocean's currents. The toys have been adrift since 29,000 of them fell from a storm-tossed container ship en route from China to Seattle more than 11 years...