In this week’s ‘strange but true’: Snoopy is headed to space, the volcanic eruption that just won’t go away, a joyriding python, devout deer, and, there’s no other way to describe it: the world’s biggest mutant potato!

TRASH TALK

Instead of a message in a bottle, it was the decals on a barnacle-covered trash barrel that shows just how far it travelled, from the southeastern US coast to a beach in Ireland, more than 5,633 km from home. The City of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina reported that a waste barrel had somehow washed up in County Mayo, on the emerald isle’s northwestern coast. According to the city, Keith McGreal of Ireland wrote them and shared pictures of the bright blue barrel with city stickers on it.

The city posted the photos online, showing that the barrel’s Atlantic crossing took enough time for it to be encrusted with shells and surmising that the bin must have been carried away in the Gulf Stream during a major wind or storm event. “We typically remove trash containers from the beach before a hurricane, but this one apparently had a mind of its own,” they said, adding that they’d “already had a city employee volunteer to come fetch it.” Rumours have it that The Police want to write a song about it.

SEEKING SANCTUARY

A 10-point buck sought sanctuary inside a southern Michigan church on opening day of the state’s firearm deer hunting season. Pastors at Grace Sturgis encountered the buck inside the church’s auditorium before it leapt through a window and back into the wild. A Facebook video shows the buck wandering around the church and at one point, it climbed stairs to a balcony. The buck didn’t appear to have any gunshot wounds and was bleeding just a bit from what appeared to be cuts from the glass.

SNOOPY IN SPACE

A new rocket designed to launch humans to the moon, Mars, and beyond will launch next year from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. On board, will be a familiar fuzzy figure – Snoopy. A five-ounce plush toy version of the daydreaming beagle – wearing a space suit designed according to NASA’s strict specifications – has an important job for the Artemis I unmanned mission: NASA uses stuffed animals on flights because when the little guys start to float, it indicates that the spacecraft has entered space’s zero gravity. Since the toys are soft and light, they won’t break anything or accidentally strike a button.

The Artemis I mission is scheduled to circle the moon and then return to Earth in February as a dry run without astronauts, making sure all systems are working for future crewed missions. Also, aboard will be two Lego figurines, part of an educational series. The upcoming mission announcement coincides with the recent release of the second season of “Snoopy in Space,” the Emmy-nominated animated series on Apple TV+. Season one saw Snoopy become an astronaut and land on the moon. Season two sees him go further in what showrunner Mark Evestaff calls an “epic road trip.”

WHAT ARE THE ODDS?

A man who travelled to space with William Shatner last month was killed along with another person when the small plane they were in crashed in a wooded area of northern New Jersey. Glen M. de Vries, 49, of New York City, was aboard a single-engine Cessna 172 that went down Nov. 11. The tech company co-founder had taken a 10-minute flight to the edge of space on Oct. 13 aboard Blue Origin’s New Shepard spacecraft with Shatner and two others.

IN OTHER PLUSH TOY NEWS

A little girl who lost a special teddy bear she’d had since being adopted from an Ethiopian orphanage thought it was gone forever when she forgot it along a trail in Glacier National Park last year. But thanks to a social media plea the teddy bear is back in the arms of six-year-old Naomi Pascal in Jackson, Wyoming.

Ranger Tom Mazzarisi had found the toy sitting in melting snow near the Hidden Lake Trail while he and two others were doing some end-of-season work. He was unaware the stuffed animal had been reported lost, but for some reason couldn’t bring himself to dump it in the trash; instead, it went into “hibernation” in his cabin in St. Mary over the winter and when Mazzarisi returned to work in April he put it on the dash of his patrol truck where it was spotted by a park visitor who was looking for it, leading to the eventual reunion with Naomi.

SNAKES ALIVE!

A python looking for a joyride snuck aboard a sailboat in the Florida Keys ended up staying until the boat finished its nearly 160 km-voyage. The crew found the 2.1-m. snake in the boat’s shower after docking in Marco Island on southwest Florida’s Gulf Coast after the trip from Indian Key, around the southern tip of the peninsula. Police quickly responded and transferred the invasive snake to a local wildlife handler. Pythons believed to be descended from pets freed from captivity over past decades are now overrunning the Everglades. The US Geological Survey says there is no evidence of pythons swimming from the Everglades to the Keys, but they didn’t rule it out entirely.

MUTANT POTATO MAY BE WORLD’S BIGGEST
Colin and Donna Craig-Brown were weeding their garden in New Zealand when Colin’s hoe struck something huge just beneath the soil’s surface. After Colin pried it out with his garden fork, he scratched away a bit of the skin and tasted it. A potato. “We couldn’t believe it,” Donna said. “It was just huge.” And not exactly pretty. Donna describes its appearance as more of an ugly, mutant look.

But it’s quite possibly the largest potato on record, weighing in at a remarkable 7.8 kg. – equal to a couple of sacks of regular potatoes, or one small dog. The Guinness World Records entry for the heaviest potato is a 2011 monster from Britain that weighed in at just under 5 kg. The couple say they’ve applied to Guinness to have the potato, which they named Doug, recognized and are waiting to hear back. After which, an amateur brewer said he’s keen to turn Doug into a nice drop of potato vodka.

ASH WEDNESDAY

Volcano scientists issued an alert Wednesday, warning that a cloud of ash – from an eruption more than century ago – was headed toward Alaska’s Kodiak Island. The ash is from the powerful 1912 eruption of Novarupta, a volcano on the Alaska Peninsula that dropped volcanic ash that is still visible today. Strong northwesterly winds in the vicinity of Katmai National Park and Preserve and Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes kicked up the loose volcano ash.

The three-day Novarupta eruption, which ranks amongst the largest in history, began June 6, 1912, and sent ash as high as 30,480 m. above the Katmai region, located about 402 km. southwest of Anchorage. The US Geological Survey estimates 15 cubic km. of magma erupted, about 30 times what spewed from Mount St. Helens in Washington state 40 years ago.