Giant Middle Finger Greets Visitors To Westford, Vermont

Ted Pelkey's middle finger lights up the
skyline of Westford, Vermont 

Vermonters by and large have a reputation for civility. We might not be the warmest people on the planet- we're New Englanders, after all. But we tend to shy away from big public confrontations here in the Green Mountain State.

For the most part, anyway. One exception is in Westford, Vermont, where a giant wooden middle finger on a 16-foot pole greets travelers passing through this pleasant northwestern Vermont town.

As Boston.com and numerous other media outlets have noted, the middle finger along Route 128 in Westford is not meant for you. Unless you are on the town's Selectboard or Development Review Board or a few of the other town's leaders.

The owner of the property with the middle finger, Ted Pelkey, says he put up the 700-pound wooden middle finger because he's fought a ten-year battle to get permits so he can build a garage on his property. He wants to move his truck repair and monofilament recycling business from Swanton to his Westford property.

The town says no. He can't do that.  Westford officials say he hasn't give them enough detail on what he plans to do with the garage, how big it will be, and other details. Pelkey says some town officials have a vendetta against him. He apparently has a pretty negative history with at least one member of Westford's Development Review Board.

"I've been put through the wringer by all these people, and it's just not right....I haven't been treated fairly at all,"  Pelkey said.

Fed up, Pelkey and his wife commiserated in a bar one night. He said, "Hey, I want to get a statue made of a middle finger, and I'm going to put it up on the lawn," he told Boston.com

And so he did. The whole thing cost Pelkey about $4,000, but he thinks it's worth it.

There's not much anyone can legally do to make Pelkey take the middle finger down. There's a strict billboard law in Vermont, which seeks to get rid of visual clutter along highways by banning businesses from putting up billboards along highways to advertise their services.

But Pelkey's middle finger is not advertising a business, which means it does not fall under the billboard law.  Towns like Westford can enact sign laws more stringent than state law, but Westford has nothing like that. On top of all that, Pelkey's middle finger is political speech, which falls under First Amendment protections.

So the big middle finger remains up in Westford, glowing in the nighttime floodlights along Route 128.

If you ever drive through Westford, just remember it's notbing personal toward you. It's just somebody in town really has an axe to grind.

Looney Tunes Tasmanian Devil Causes Family Crisis In Staten Island

A phobia of Looney Tunes' Tasmanian
Devil is at the center of a weird New
York family dispute 

The holidays are finally over, and most of us have headed home after spending time with our families.

Many of our extended families have a few eccentrics among them, but one Staten Island family takes the cake for oddness and discord.

According to the New York Post, Mazem Dayem, 36, has had a lifelong phobia of the Tasmanian Devil, the ill-mannered angry and inept Looney Tunes charactor.

Dayem's father in law, Yunes Doleh, 62, has been tormenting Dayem by menacing him with a toupee that supposedly looks like the Tasmanian Devil.

This all came to a head at a funeral in November, when Doleh waved his toupee at Dayem and grimaced, snarled, grunted and gesticulated toward him.

Which is odd behavior anyway, but especially at a funeral, but maybe that's just me. There's a chatge of criminal contempt against Doleh, lawsuits and general bad blood. I'd love to hear conversations in this family.

And how were your holidays?

Officer In Trouble For NOT Summarily Executing Two Bear Cubs

A conservation officer in Canada was
 suspended from his job for not
killing these two bear cubs.  

A female bear kept getting into the freezer of a remote camp in British Columbia recently.

When bears become a problem like that, they sometimes have to be put down, and that, sadly was the case with this bear.

Even worse, this bear had two cubs. Conservation officer Bryce Casavant was ordered by his supervisors to kill the bear cubs, too.

He refused and took them to the North Island Wildlife Recovery Association near Vancouver, British Columbia.

For Casavant was suspended for his job without pay, says the Canadian broadcaster CBC. 

The situation, first reported in the North Island Gazette in British Columbia, set off a HUGE erupton on social media, especially in Canada erupted at the news of the conservation officer's suspension.

Nothing like an order to kill two cute little black bear cubs to get people riled up.

It's true if bear cubs are conditioned to cause trouble, they, too have to be put down, say wildlife experts. But the CBC quoted the recovery center's manager as saying he is perplexed by the order to kill the cubs.

"(The mother bear) was a problem, but these cubs did nothing," said the manager, Robin Campbell.

Campbell said the cubs were not habituated to humans and could be successful re-introduced to the wild. Casavant, the conservation officer, did the right thing by bringing the cubs to the wildlive recovery center, Campbell said.

"In 30 years, this is the first time we've ever had an issue like this," Campbell said, as quoted by the CBC. "There has to be some kind of misunderstanding... hopefully somebody will come to their senses." 

It's unclear if that will happen. Certainly the shoot to kill the cubs order sounds sadistic, but we haven't heard yet from the guy who ordered the deaths. British Columbian environmental authorities haven't decided what to do about the cubs yet.

Casavant is still suspended from his job, but now it's with pay, because of the public outcry over this.

Even if more information comes out and it turns out the cubs were misbehaving and habituated to humans, why the rush to kill them? And why the rush to suspend Casavant? As one commenter pointed out on the North Island Gazette Facebook page, let's let animals be innocent until proven guilty, too.

Others point out that Casavant's job title is Conservation Officer, so let him conserve, in this case the life of these bears, if at all possible.

Still others took a big picture look at this and said it is humans invading the habitat of bears, and not bears invading the habitat of humans that's the real problem here.

Of course, when you look at the big picture, that's when things really get sticky. Us humans are ruining the habitat of countless species, and we're spawning a great wildlife extinction.

The simple solution to the bear cubs in British Columbia is to reinstate Casavant, release the cubs to the wild if possible and move on.

As far as the big picture goes, I don't think anybody has a good solution to us humans and our environmentally dangerous ways. We're all guilty, this writer included.

It's fine and absolutely correct to be upset over the callousness some people had toward these bear cubs. But this makes me wonder how many innocent wild animals I might have unwittingly harmed.