Lead Stories
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
In April in Moncton, New Brunswick, 44-year-old George Pavlovsky, a tree cutter for the city, stalked through his office drunk, carrying a sawed-off shotgun and looking for two supervisors who’d passed him over for promotion; Pavlovsky was fired at once, and in November he was sent to jail for two years. Seven days after his dismissal, though, his union (Canadian Union of Public Employees Local 51) filed a wrongful-firing grievance on his behalf, and he’s said he wants his job back when he gets out. Several of Pavlovsky’s colleagues who witnessed the incident are still on stress leave.
In September a team led by Trevor Cox, professor of acoustic engineering at the University of Salford in England, concluded that (contrary to conventional wisdom) a duck’s quack does indeed have an echo. In October biologist Nette Levermann of the University of Copenhagen, whose group had monitored walruses near Greenland, noted that 89 percent of the animals are “right-handed” (that is, they use their right flippers, not their left, to dig for clams). And in November an aerodynamics expert at Britain’s Open University wrapped up two months of work designing and machine-testing beer coasters and presented the finished product: a model deemed ideal for the popular pub game of coaster flipping.
In September the Rouse Company, a developer and owner of shopping malls, acknowledged that it had forgotten to renew the lease on its own headquarters in Columbia, Maryland. In October the firm avoided eviction by agreeing to buy the building for $11 million.
California author and filmmaker Timothy Treadwell, much of whose work was part of a personal campaign to make people more tolerant of brown bears, was killed and partially eaten by bears in October near Alaska’s Kaflia Bay. Treadwell carried no firearms or bear spray, and was mindful of but unruffled by the huge predators’ potential ferocity. (He liked to ease up close to the animals, chanting “I love you” in a high, soft voice.) He’d told one associate, “I would be honored to end up in bear scat.”
