Like any dedicated mail carrier who slogs through inclement weather to deliver your Amazon order, Tammie McGrath will stop at nothing to get a parcel to its rightful owner.But when a package came in addressed to “Kay and Philip” located “on a farm situated up a long drive with cows, opposite Cust pub or thereabouts,” the Cust, New Zealand, mail carrier was a bit stumped.  “The usual protocol would be to return it,” McGrath who runs the Cust Service Centre, told As it Happens host Carol Off. “I thought, ‘I’ll just hang on to it for a couple of days and see if I can track down the owner.'” Tammie McGrath was determined to find the package’s rightful owner.

At 95 years old, Gus is slow-moving. But that’s in his nature, seeing as he’s a gopher tortoise.And although he’s often sitting idle in his enclosure, Gus has been captivating visitors to the Nova Scotia Museum of Natural History for more than seven decades. “As time has gone on, he’s become more and more of a fixture here at the museum,” said Jeff Gray, curator of visitor experiences and exhibits. “His life and his legend grows with the years.” Having lived there for more than 75 years, Gus has become a mascot of sorts for the popular museum in central Halifax. He emerged from a golf-ball-sized egg in the southern United States in the 1920s. Some 20 years later, former museum director Don Crowdis purchased the sand-coloured tortoise for $5 from a roadside reptile vendor in Florida and brought him back to Nova Scotia. Gus, a 95-year-old gopher tortoise, his mouth stained from eating berries, is seen at the Nova Scotia Museum of Natural History in Halifax on Friday.

It turns out a small black box with a dangling red wire and little blue light investigated by Windsor’s bomb squad Tuesday isn’t actually dangerous — at least to the living. The Windsor Police Explosives Disposal Unit were called to Mackenzie Hall around 7:15 p.m. to investigate a suspicious package. Police determined the package was “safe” and that there was no evidence of explosive material. Const. Andy Drouillard would not confirm whether a suspicious package in question was actually a ghost-hunting device that had been left behind. But the spokesperson for the Listowel Paranormal Society said that little black box belonged to them. I got some pretty weird feelings and chills, cold spots and goose bumps of course.-  Listowel  Paranormal Society spokesperson He said he didn’t even realize the EMF detector — short for electromagnetic field sensor — was missing after the society completed a sweep for spirits at the hall last Friday. Then the police showed up at his door. Electromagnetic Field Sensor used to detect energy.

It’s not often people want to hang onto winter, but a Summerside, P.E.I., woman has kept a piece of it in her freezer for over a decade: a snowball in a Ziploc bag.The snowball isn’t just any old ball of ice, however, it was a gift from her granddaughter 11 years ago. “It’s very special,” says Mae Arsenault. “Knowing that they think about you enough to bring you something, it doesn’t matter what it is, but a snowball is great for me.” Kept carefully for years Her granddaughter, Alecia Arsenault, is 16 years old now and had forgotten about the gift until recently when the pair stumbled upon an old photo of five-year-old Alecia presenting it to her. At that point, vague memories of making a snowball weeks ahead of her grandmother’s birthday, and keeping it for her until the end of May, started to come back to her. “I’m not sure what was going on in my five-year-old mind that I decided that a snowball would be a perfect gift,” Alecia said. When she was five years old, Alecia Arsenault gave her grandmother a snowball as a gift.

An idea that began when a classicist went to a brewery to sip beers and ponder the history of hops has brought to life an ancient ale.It took hours of translating, milling and baking, but ale experimenters in Winnipeg have finally sipped a beer created from a fourth-century Egyptian alchemist’s recipe. “If you expect this to taste like a modern beer, you are not going to find that,” said Matt Gibbs, chair of the University of Winnipeg’s Department of Classics. “This beer is very, very sour. It’s good. It’s much better than I thought it was when we first did it, I will say that much, but it’s different.” Gibbs got the idea while sitting at a bar talking about old beers with a pair of brewmasters. The original recipe was found in the book, The Barbarian’s Beverage: A History of Beer in Ancient Europe, by Max Nelson at the University of Windsor. It was chosen because Gibbs figured he could stay close to the original process and, unlike some of the other recipes, the ingredients were available and legal. Beer made an old-fashioned way is shown at Barn Hammer Brewing Company in Winnipeg on Tuesday.

A potentially record-breaking walleye got the break of its life last weekend. On March 10, Robert Monty of Vermilion Bay, Ont., caught and released a giant walleye that he said was record-book calibre. The experienced angler had no idea when he started on the water near the northwestern Ontario city that day, it would end with such a bang. “We went for crappies in the morning,” said Monty. “We never had too much luck, so we headed her back to the walleye spot.” Monty was fishing with his wife Donnalee, his friend Gilbert Grandbois and Grandbois’ partner, Sheila Sjodin. Monty said the spot they fish is near a creek mouth and is known to hold walleye in March. He said the walleye fishing is usually best in the evening. “We got there about 3 o’clock,” Monty said of their hot spot. “It was about eight feet of water, and we set up our lines.” He added that when the sun started “heading down the trees,” he began to work his two jigging rods. Both were baited with a jig and a minnow. Monty said he had just left one hole and was going to another one when Sheila cried “Robert, you’ve got a fish!” The angler then grabbed the rod and set the hook. “It ran about two or three times on me,” Monty said. “My friend was looking at me and I said ‘I think we have something big here.'” Monty said he could hear the eight pound test line rubbing on the ice and feared a break-off. “I said ‘I can’t get his head up,'” he said. That’s when Monty said he realized this was no normal walleye. Grandbois quickly came to help. He grabbed the fishing line as Monty battled the fish just under the hole with his short jigging rod.Robert Monty of Dryden, Ont., says his eyes “popped out” when he saw this giant walleye come through the ice hole on March 10, 2018.

When Clayton Pennington first spotted the elaborately adorned secretary desk at the 2015 Winter Antiques Show in New York City, he says he was “absolutely blown away by it.”Priced at $375,000 US, the piece was touted as an 1867 Civil War tribute, decorated by members of the 16th Volunteer Infantry and gifted to veteran Wells Bingham of East Haddam, Conn., in honour of his brother John, who died at the Battle of Antietam in 1862.”It was one of my favourite things in the show,” the Maine Antique Digest reporter told As It Happens guest host Helen Mann.”When you opened the door, it played Yankee Doodle Dandy. It had a piece of a regimental flag on it, Latin sayings, an eagle with a clock on top. I mean, the thing was just absolutely over the top.”Pennington would later go on expose the desk as “one of the best folk art fakes of all time,” created by longtime Massachusetts antiques dealer and craftsman Harold Gordon. It should end up in a museum somewhere as a study piece, because it is a fantastic forgery.- Clayton Pennington, Maine Antique Digest Pennington wasn’t the only one fooled by the desk.Art dealer Allan Katz was so taken by it that he purchased it from Gordon, sang its praises at the New York show, then sold it to the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Conn., at an undisclosed price.’Smoking gun’But shortly after, a digital photograph started to circulate among “a group of concerned antiquarians in the Northeast,” Pennington said. That photo, he said, turned out to be “the smoking gun” that cracked the case wide open.It showed what appeared to be the same desk, standing in the corner of a home, completely unadorned.Clayton Pennington, editor of the Maine Antique Digest, broke the story of a Civil War secretary desk forgery so convincing it fooled professional art dealers.

Story transcriptBy a wharf in Amsterdam, a blob of fat — weighing more than 1,000 kilograms — is floating in the water.While just the thought of that would disgust some people, to Arne Hendriks the “floating island of fat” is “just beautiful.” He has been making Fatberg, along with fellow designer Mike Thompson, since 2014.But don’t think of them as a pair of artists with a quirky idea. Hendriks says they consider themselves “agents” of the fatberg — which could hopefully change some people’s perspectives on fat.Arne Hendriks and his fatberg.

This article was published on March 8, 2018. Read Story Transcript Breathtaking landscapes. Timeless art masterpieces. Big shiny photographs of big shiny humans. You put coffee table books featuring any of the above in your living room and they say: “These giant books I never open reflect my taste.” But do they also say say something else? Do they, perhaps say, “I’m boring”? A new coffee table book by two Italian photographers will definitely not say that. It’s designed solely to showcase the beauty of chickens. As It Happens host Carol Off spoke with Matteo Tranchellini, and his work partner, Moreno Monti, about their unusual book called CHICken, which they funded through a Kickstarter campaign.  Here is part of their conversation. Matteo, why did you decide to photograph these beautiful chickens? This is our passion because we have a studio in Milano with a little garden. We want to have some pets. We decide to buy some chicken, some little chicken, beautiful chicken — a cocincina —​ not a popular chicken. When we buy the chicken, we contact the farmer and the farmer invite us to photograph some chicken in an exhibition. The work start in the exhibition because we start to photograph some chicken and we understand this animal is incredible —​ like model. 

Frank Davis is on a quest to find evidence of his first, and only, encounter with his idol, Johnny Cash. It was Good Friday in 1993 when the musician from St. John’s ran into the Man in Black at the Halifax airport. A stranger with a camera snapped a photo of the pair, but 25 years later, Davis still hasn’t seen the image and he’s hoping the power of social media will reunite him with the mystery photographer. “The woman who took that picture could be living on the next street from me or she could be in Timbuktu. You have no way of knowing,” said Davis, who put a call out on Facebook over the weekend. “I know it’s a long time, that’s 25 years, so the chances are pretty slim, but it’s out there anyway.” Davis is a huge Cash fan, so when The Highwaymen came to Halifax in 1993, it was an opportunity he couldn’t pass up. The day after the concert, Davis had to return home for work, but his wife stayed behind to visit her sister.  “The last thing that she said to me as I left the hotel room was, ‘Leave the camera with me because I want to take a picture of [her sister] Susan’s baby.'” That’s how Davis ended up camera-less in front of Cash at the arrivals terminal.  When Davis noticed him standing alone on the sidewalk, “I just about ran over people getting off the bus,” he said with a laugh.  “When I walked up to him, I said, ‘Man I’ve been waiting a long time to shake your hand.'” Frank Davis said after meeting Johnny Cash at the terminal, he bumped into him again at the airport lounge.