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For years, curiosity seekers visiting the Fort Worth, Texas, grave of Lee Harvey Oswald have wondered about the simple headstone next door, marked Nick Beef.
It turns out Nick Beef is alive and living in New York. The New York Times reported that the 56-year-old man who uses that name bought the cemetery plot next to Oswald’s in 1975 and had the granite marker placed there in 1997. Beef, born Patric Abedin, now lives in Manhattan and calls himself a “non-performing performance artist”.
Beef, then six years old, was in the crowd in Fort Worth on November 21, 1963, when President John F. Kennedy and his wife, Jacqueline, came to visit as part of a two-day Texas tour. Oswald allegedly shot President Kennedy the next day.
Hungry bear’s late-night snack
A black bear in search of a late-night snack broke into an Idaho house and licked left-over Chinese food from a cast-iron pan on the stove.
David Edwards of Ketchum said that his dog’s barking awakened him. When he went to investigate what had upset his Irish setter-Labrador pet he saw the bear on its hind legs, paws on the stove, licking a pan.
Edwards’s wife, Sara, had fallen asleep on the couch and his first instinct was to get his wife away from the kitchen area.
However, he said, “I couldn’t tell her there was a bear in the house because she would have just lost her mind. She gets very upset over spiders.”
So he woke her up and led her into the bedroom without telling her.
Edwards went back to the kitchen to find the bear was gone and the pan was clean.
Mozart’s opera gets a splash
A Mozart opera performed at one of Austria’s premier music festivals has made an unscheduled splash after a boat carrying three singers overturned and dumped them into a lake.
The Bregenz Festival features an open-air stage in Lake Constance, and this year’s production of The Magic Flute has the Queen of the Night and two other characters approaching it by boat. But the vessel flipped during a performance, dumping the three in shallow water.
Nobody was hurt and the opera continued after a short pause.
Queen of the Night Kathryn Lewek made light of things, tweeting: “My Bregenz contract stated I must not be afraid of heights and be physically fit – but nothing about swimming.”
‘Free pass’ for declining eels
Critically endangered eels are getting a ‘free pass’ to England’s largest lake, where they have not been seen in large numbers for 30 years.
Two eel passes, which allow the fish to navigate weirs on the River Leven at Newby Bridge, Cumbria, are being installed by the Co-operative and the South Cumbria Rivers Trust in an attempt to restore the species to Lake Windermere.
The European eel has seen its populations tumble in the past three decades, with numbers of young eels reaching Europe’s shores falling by more than 95 per cent from pre-1980 levels.
It is not known why they are declining, but overfishing, loss of wetland habitat and barriers to migration, such as dams and weirs on rivers and flood defences, are thought to play part.
Lost orthopaedic boots found
A two-year-old girl’s orthopaedic boots have been handed in to police 11 days after they went missing from outside Colchester General Hospital.
The boots, which look like tiny Dr Martens, were made at a specialist unit at the Essex hospital but the family left them in the car park after they stopped to pay for parking after collecting the boots.
After a police appeal, the boots were handed in at Clacton police station by a local woman – to the delight of the little girl, who would have had to wait four months for a replacement pair to be made.
World’s biggest bagpipe event
An event billed to be the world’s biggest bagpipe festival is taking place in Scotland.
Piping Live! Glasgow International Piping Festival is expected to attract an international crowd of 30,000 people this week.
This year the festival celebrates its 10th anniversary with almost 200 events taking place across the city.