Neff Zone Column -- March 7, 2009

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Print Edition: March 7, 2009

ISN’T THAT ODD?

You can learn a lot if you pay attention to the news. One of the most important things you can learn is that there’s a whole bunch of stuff that qualifies as just plain odd. I’m never quite sure what to do with such information, but I’m drawn to the oddities nonetheless.

For example, officials at the Suwa sewage treatment plant in the Nagano, Japan report they are extracting significant amounts of gold from processed sewage. They recently have been recovering 1,890 grams of gold per ton of incinerated sludge, which is significantly more than most gold mines. The Hishikari Mine in Japan, by comparison, only yields 20-40 grams of gold per ton of ore. Makes you wonder what riches might be in the Wexford County landfill, doesn’t it? There might be gold in ‘them thar hills’ (of garbage).

You might have a hard time striking it rich at the landfill, but if you lived in Florida you might be one of the lucky residents who will be getting some cash due to a recent court case. According to the St. Petersburg Press, the State of Florida sold personal information from its drivers license data base to private marketing companies, including each driving citizen's name, address, and Social Security number. It made $108 million on the sales over a four-year period -- the four years after such sales were made illegal by federal law. When several Floridians sued, the state refused to admit wrongdoing, but agreed to settle for $10.4 million, which will be divided up. The drivers who sued get $3,000 each. Everyone else gets a whopping $1 credit on their next car registration fee. Oh yeah, the five law firms that worked on the suit get $2.85 million. Don’t scoff, that $1 will come in handy when the lawyers register their new BMW’s.

Now, before you chastise the State of Florida for using its citizens’ private information for making a tidy profit, you might be interested to know that they are on the case in protecting its citizenry from another scourge – fish pedicures. Florida has banned the procedure, in which a person sticks their feet in a bowl of water and lets tiny fish nip away the decaying skin. You know, I see an opportunity here. Cadillac has two lakes chock full of bluegills, perch and bass. Floridians have nowhere to go for fish pedicures. Am I the only one connecting the dots here?

Moving along… You know one way to improve yourself during a tight economy is by getting a better education. Well, that might be easier said than done for aboriginal students in the Australian outback. In one remote location, officials have cancelled the ferry service that was used to transport children across a crocodile-infested swamp to school. The reason? They said it’s too dangerous. On the other hand, the students are still expected to attend school, but they must walk through the swamp on their own in order to get there. In a related development, the school can now save even more money by dropping both music and phys. ed., which are now covered as the children run screaming out of the swamps.

Of course, it will all be worth it if the students eventually wind up getting a college degree. That is unless they eventually attend the University of Liverpool in England and sign up for the new degree program called "The Beatles, Popular Music and Society." Geez, how would you like to be a parent who spends hundreds of thousands of dollars on your kid’s education only to find out the degree earned is in Beatles-ology. I’ll just bet all sorts of employers are thinking: "What this company needs is a person with a degree in the Beatles." With a useless degree like this all a person would be qualified for is to be a newspaper columnist or an executive with AIG.

Finally, there has been an explosion of monkeys in Puerto Rico; the little buggers are all over the place. Officials are working to ease the situation by shipping their surplus monkeys to Iraq. (I’m not making this up.) As if Iraq doesn’t have enough challenges, now they’ll have to deal with Puerto Rican monkeys. On the other hand, it probably is about the same as dealing with visiting U.S. Congressmen, so the Iraqis have some expertise in this area.

Jim Neff is a local columnist. Comments to neffzone@gmail.com. Read Neff Zone columns online at www.neffzone.com/cadillacnews.