Cartoons by Mark Anderson
What’s the Story on this Headless Dinosur Abandoned Beside a Floida Backroad?
Drivers heading along the backroads in Hernando County, Florida might spot this strange figure on the side of the road and do a double-take.
It’s a large, headless sculpture of a brontosaurus, with its interior exposed to the elements.
But it has a name: “The Lake Lindsey Dinosaur.”
It can be found along Lake Lindsey Road near U.S. Highway 41, though there are no signs or markers nearby to indicate why such a large decoration is just sitting out in the open like this.
However, local lore explains that the sculpture stems back to 1966, when artist August Herwede began its construction.
Herwede was reportedly inspired to build the dinosaur thanks to the Dinoland exhibit at the 1964 New York World’s Fair, and he set out to create a statue to scale with the prehistoric brontosaurus — meaning it would have stretched around 60 feet long and over 30 feet tall. Herwede crafted the beast with a wooden frame and wire-reinforced concrete shell.
“It would be hollow, with access to the inside from a hole in the beast’s belly,” says one source – the Nature Coaster website “He dug a pit to be its swamp home at the curve on State Road 476 and began construction.”
But disaster struck in 1967 while Herwede was building the statue. He fell from the creature’s shoulders, breaking his neck and ultimately dying from the accident.
Herwede was buried in the nearby Lake Lindsay Cemetery, and many of the other small sculptures on his property were sold off. However, his family left the brontosaurus as-is to commemorate Herwede.
That’s not where the story ends, though.
Nowadays, the dinosaur is owned by Steve Eaton, who lives just up the hill on his 5-acre property.
Eaton’s brother Kevin regularly decks out the statue for the holidays, putting up garlands, lights, and other festive decorations.
“For fifty years, this dinosaur sat untouched,” says Eaton. “I thought something should be done with it. It would be nice if someone would finish the front half — if they know how to do that — but I decided to decorate it.”
The statue is reportedly equipped with a security camera, too, helping to safeguard the strange attraction from vandals and looters.
But Mom, There Was a Sale
BEDFORD, Ohio –
Police in Ohio reported they found an 8-year-old girl shopping at a Target store after she took a car and drove there on busy roads.
One Sunday morning, Bedford police took a call for a missing child. As they began to investigate, police also took a call “concerning a small child driving east on Rockside Road.”
Officers eventually found the car in the parking lot of a Target store in Bainbridge, Ohio. Police then searched for and found the child in the store.
Although the exact route the girl took is unclear, Google Maps shows the store is more than 10 miles from where she was reported missing, and about a 20-25-minute drive down busy streets and highways..
The girl was not hurt, but she told officers she “struck a mailbox” during heradventure.
A Police spokesman familiar with the incident says that the girl is too young to be charged criminally, and that they are grateful no one was injured.
The child spent a reported $150 during her shopping excursion. It’s not known if she was allowed to keep it– but you better lock up your keys, Mom.
Burglary Suspect Arested After Asking Deputy to “Test His Meth”
LAKE COUNTY, Florida –
A man accused of burglarizing a home in Paisley, Florida last month was arrested after presenting a deputy with a bag of meth and asking him to test it, according to the Lake County Sheriff’s Office.
The deputy was patrolling around noon Aug. 27 on Highway 42 when he was flagged down by victims of the alleged burglary, the sheriff’s office said on social media. One of the victims described the suspect, identified as Timothy Gunter, 34, and pointed in his direction further up the road, telling the deputy that Gunter had just burglarized their home while their family members were inside. After catching up to Gunter, the deputy said the suspect spontaneously uttered that he had received some “bad” narcotics and presented a plastic baggie filled with a clear, crystal-like substance, according to the sheriff’s office. Gunter then told the deputy that something was wrong with the substance and requested that it be tested, the post states, adding he otherwise allegedly admitted to entering the victim’s residence because he heard dogs barking inside.
The substance was tested after all, producing a presumptive positive result for methamphetamine, the post states.
Mr. Gunter was booked at the Lake County Jail to face charges of criminal mischief with damage to property of less than $200, possession of a controlled substance without a prescription and unarmed burglary of an occupied dwelling. He’s being held on $18,000 bond, records show.
How to Lose Your Mind in Five Easy Steps
Sam Venable
Department of Irony
My wife and I are doing our part to boost the American economy.
How?
By wearing the hide off our Visa card in a game called “Finding Lost Items by Purchasing Their Replacements.”
This is not a game in the relaxing, recreational sense. Quite the opposite. It is a maddening experience that plays out in five steps.
Step One. You have an item.
Any kind of item. A wristwatch, knitting needle, hammer, hairbrush, fishing lure, serving spoon, necktie, magazine or any of 10-kajillion others. It can be expensive — a diamond ring, perhaps. Or inexpensive — say, a favorite cereal bowl.
Step Two. You lose the item.
You’re holding it one moment, and it’s gone the next. Poof! Just like that.
Conversely, the time factor can stretch much further than a minute. Hours, days, weeks, months, even years could elapse between usages. All that matters is that the item is now AWOL.
Rarely is it truly lost, with no hope of recovery. Most of the time, it simply has been misplaced, either through boneheaded absentmindedness or first-degree stupidity. You’ve set it down somewhere, anywhere, and when you reach for it again, it has disappeared.
Step Three. You start looking for the item. You retrace steps to where you remember having it last. No luck. You check, double-check and triple-check the place it’s supposed to stay when not in use. Could be a bracket on the garage pegboard, the medicine cabinet, your catch-all drawer or a shelf in the hall closet. No matter how many times you look, it’s just as gone as when you first launched your investigation.
During this step, your sense of humor wanes and your vocabulary coarsens. A jovial “reckon it sprouted legs, ha ha, and walked off?” soon morphs into “where in the (bleep) could I have put that rotten, no-good (bleepidity-bleep)?”
Step Four. After days or weeks of failed searches, you abandon the quest, buy a replacement, and write off the tribulation as “one of those nutty things that happens to everybody.”
Which brings us to Step Five, and you know what it is even before I type another word: The hateful AWOL item magically reappears, like nothing ever happened.
Over the past three months — I swear on a stack blood pressure charts — Mary Ann and I have lost/replaced/found a set of heavy-duty knee pads, a level, a packet of hose washers, a medical test kit and a framed photograph of wildflowers in bloom at our house.
Still AWOL, as of this writing, is an alarm clock. We finally ordered a replacement, which arrived in the mail a little over two weeks ago.
I double-dog guarantee the original clock will have surfaced long before the words you’re reading right now roll off the Slippery Rock Gazette’s printing press.
Sam Venable is an author, comedic entertainer, and humor columnist for the Knoxville (TN) News Sentinel. His latest book is “The Joke’s on YOU! (All I Did Was Clean Out My Files).” He may be reached at sam.venable@outlook.com.