Authorities in Berlin encountered a scene that could have passed as a part of an Alfred Hitchcock horror flick: a two-room apartment stuffed with approximately 1,500 live parakeets. Prompted by the complaints of neighbors, local authorities raided the tiny apartment only to find a home "littered with feces, feathers and leftover food," said city veterinarian Margit Platzer. And birds. According to the city vet, animal control workers took nearly seven hours to net all the parakeets. Moreover, the huge bounty of birds left authorities looking for shelter space in the suburbs when they had exhausted city resources.
Get rich slowly
Blanche Vavra didn't have a get-rich-quick scheme. She didn't need one. Vavra, who never married, had no immediate family, and worked for 32 years in civil service for the U.S. government, died in April at age 90, willing her nest egg—$2.8 million—to 11 different nonprofit groups that received the first checks from Vavra's trust on Dec. 8. According to neighbors and a bank official who helped Vavra with the paperwork over the years, the Minnesota native scrimped and saved her way to her minor fortune—and apparently never spent it on herself. According to the Billings Gazette, neighbor Jerry Dobesh recalled when he had to force the elderly woman to turn on the furnace on a particularly blustery Montana night. Dobesh said she learned during her depression-era childhood to save every penny and reuse everything. Instead of buying a spade for her garden, Vavra sharpened the end of a broomstick with a knife. "All she knew about finance was be conservative," Dobesh told the Gazette. "She lived very plain and very sparsely."
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Issue: "Millions cut down"
January 17, 2009
No pious baloney
