The National Association of Realtors has compiled a list of the Top 50 Scary Halloween City Names and Michigan is home to two of them. Coming in at Number 23 is Hell (no surprise this made the list) and Number 2 is Bad Axe. I’ve always loved the name – Bad Axe. I vividly remember it when I was in my 8th grade Michigan History class and we had to memorize all of the Michigan counties and county seats. Bad Axe is the county seat for Huron county by the way.

Honorable Mention for the list (in my opinion anyway) would be the following:

Crow Island (The Birds anyone?)
Devils Elbow
Erie
Mohawk
Rattle Run (picturing hordes of skeletons noisily chasing villagers)
Salem
Skookum
Sleepy Hollow
Witch Lake
Wolf Crossing

I was reading this article in the Chicago Reader about Detroit being the “Wild Wild Midwest” and there was a link to a blog, Sweet Juniper! I am SO going back to this blog to read more of the posts as this post led me to the video below of the Belle Isle Children’s Zoo from 1968. The zoo was later redone in 1980 to create a more natural environmental habitat for the animals.

For those who don’t know, the Belle Isle Zoo was closed back in 2002 courtesy of disgraced former mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick.

Once again, Lake Superior State University has delivered their annual Banished Words List. With 2008 being an election year there were a plethora of words available to choose for the 2009 list.

• Green – as in “green” technology, etc.
• Carbon Footprint or Carbon Offsetting
• Maverick
• First Dude
• Bailout
• Wall Street/Main Street
• Monkey – I guess it’s popular to add “monkey” to a word for amusement, I missed out on this one evidently.
• <3 – resembles a heart so you can use even less effort to say “I love you”
• Icon or Iconic
• Game Changer
• Staycation – it’s like a vacation only you don’t go anywhere – ugh.
• Desperate Search
• Not So Much
• Winner of Five Nominations – as in Academy Awards, etc.
• It’s That Time of Year Again

Submit your nomination for the 2010 list. Read all of the comments and leave comments for this list at www.lssu.edu/banished.

Andria Baker made a deal with her dad when she was in the 4th grade. She saw in the paper that an area senior with perfect attendance got a new car when he graduated because he had perfect attendance all through school. She had perfect attendance up to that point and made the deal with her dad, Tim.

Tim Baker made good on the deal and Andria received the new car at her graduation party. Factoring in snow days, she went to school for 2,516 days during her 13 year stint at Constantine Public Schools.

Just for some perspective on the numbers – Baseball Hall of Famer Cal Ripken made headlines when he broke Lou Gehrig’s record and played in 2,632 straight games over sixteen seasons.

From someone who did not have perfect attendance throughout their entire public school career this just boggles my mind. It’s an incredible feat and it’s pretty cool that she got a car out of the deal.

Kudos, Andria!

Read the article at the Sturgis Journal

I have been a big fan of police logs since the time I was attending Western Michigan University. There are multiple instances of hiliarity on a college campus every week.

Once a week or so (usually on Mondays) I take a look at the postings from the Escanaba police log as printed by the Daily Press. You can usually find all sorts of interesting happenings in a police log and today’s was no exception.

Here are the ones that stood out:

10:50 a.m. Altered script, 2500 block of 1st Avenue North – Was the fancy lettering on a sign altered? Perhaps script was shorthand for prescription which would make sense.

1:03 p.m. Unwanted text massages, 200 block of North 12th Street – Now, I don’t claim to know everything about technology, but I never realized you could receive a text massage.

1:47 p.m. E-mail threat, 400 block of 1st Avenue South – We can call the cops when we receive spam? Who knew?

11:30 p.m. Man trying to get hit by car, 1900 block of 5th Avenue South – To increase your odds of winning a game of chicken with a motorized vehicle it is wise to make sure that you, too, are in a motorized vehicle.

Dobber’s Pasties, legendary Escanaba Pasty restaurant, was broken into last week. Two men and one woman, a Dobber’s employee, broke a window which set off the alarm and made off with about $1,200 and some credit card receipts – all of which were recovered upon the suspects arrests.

Dobber’s is an Escanaba and U.P. landmark with pasties to die for. The question on a lot of locals minds is, “Why in the world did they take the money? They should have taken the pasties.”

Via the Escanaba Daily Press

Visit Dobber’s Pasties website where you can order pasties online and within a day or two you can heat up your frozen pasty for a taste of the U.P.

The history books show that former President Richard Nixon did (ahem, Watergate anyone?) and said some peculiar things. A 1974 edition of the Milwaukee Journal was recently uncovered in a wall during a renovation of the DNR’s Pocket Park office with an interesting headline – “Nixon Rules Out $1 Gas or Bread”.

We all know that Nixon was wrong on his pledge that we would never pay more than $1 for bread and gas. Interesting to note is that President Nixon made the comments in the midst of the mid-seventies Oil Crisis when OPEC put the U.S. and other countries under an oil embargo due to their support of Israel in its conflict with Syria and Egypt. The Oil Crisis led to gas shortages and inflated prices.

Via the Daily Press, Escanaba

Steven Remsing has had his fill of bear hunting. The Sterling Heights man is recovering from wounds inflicted by a 430 pound black bear that he tangled with this past weekend. He was in the U.P. hunting black bear and after shooting one out of a tree it attacked his dog so he fought the bear to save the dog.

In the process of saving the dog he had a chunk taken out of his forearm and a bite in his leg. Why fight a 430 pound black bear with your bare hands? As luck would have it, he was out of ammunition.

The DNR will tell you that they do not recommend hand-to-hand combat with a bear. Common sense would tell you that too, but the guy did end up saving his dog. He is currently recovering in the hospital.

Hope the dog will at least bring him the paper everyday or something to say ‘thanks’ .

Read the article in the Detroit News

I recently mentioned a story about a family that discovered a battered orange life preserver with Edmund Fitzgerald stenciled on it. Many wondered if this was a hoax of some kind or if it could possibly be the real deal.

Cynthia Edwards has apparently put to rest any ideas of the ring’s authenticity or chance that it was a hoax. She is quoted in the Marquette Mining Journal as saying –

. . . her father acquired the orange preserver more than 20 years ago and stenciled ‘‘Edmund Fitzgerald’’ on it.

The ring was kept at the family’s cabin along Lake Superior and the Eagle River — not far from where it ultimately was found in the Upper Peninsula’s Keweenaw Peninsula — until it was lost about two years ago.

Her father painted the ship’s name on the ring as kind of a remembrance of the ship.

She also stated that, “It was never to trick anybody or make anybody think it was real.”

You can view the security camera footage from the convenience store where 72 year old ex-Marine Bill Barnes beat up a would-be pickpocket. Man, I hope I am that agile when I am 72.

Mr. Barnes, you can still throw a mean punch.

Watch it at Mlive.com.