Odds and Ends

HASTINGS, Neb. - When Earl Marian sends birthday wishes to his brother, he can count on getting the same exact birthday wishes from Floyd Marian the next month.

It's a card-swapping tradition that started in 1975, when Floyd first received the birthday card from his brother.

In it, Linus of the Peanuts comic strip tells the reader, "This is the age of ecology! Don't throw this card away. Recycle it to a friend."

Floyd took the advice and sent it back to Earl. Earl followed suit the following year. And so on and so on.

For 29 years the brothers have kept their same-card exchange going, freshening the card up with one-line messages that now have taken up most of the card's open space.

Floyd, 80, receives the card each year around his Dec. 10 birthday, then kicks it back to Earl, 73, in time to acknowledge his birthday on Jan. 31.

"It's getting worn out a little bit," Floyd said.

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GLENWOOD, Minn. - Each year, Mike Field ships anywhere from 200,000 to 300,000 pounds of lutefisk from his small shop here to customers all over the United States.

But his latest order of the stinky fish crosses a new horizon.

One lutefisk-loving soldier has ordered 25 pounds of the pungent lye-soaked fish to be shipped to Afghanistan as a "treat" for the servicemen and women stationed there.

"This is a first for this little outfit," said Field, owner of Mike's Fish and Seafood Inc.

The order came from Mike Lindemoe, a serviceman with the U.S. Army stationed in Afghanistan - and yes, Lindemoe's the one who called it a "treat", Field said.

Field said that Lindemoe told him he wouldn't mind if it costs $50 a plate, he wants the lutefisk, which is a holiday tradition for many with Scandinavian heritage.

Field admits that shipping his product to Afghanistan will require some ingenuity. Because the product must be refrigerated, timing is everything. Field plans to pack the lutefisk with freezer gel packs in an insulated container.

He's also exploring the security issues that might come up. Laughing, he wondered how drug-sniffing dogs might respond to a package of the strong-scented lutefisk.

Field said since Lindemoe will likely serve the lutefisk to fellow soldiers, he's sending it free of charge.

And Field admits he's been teased by some who suggested that the strong-smelling lutefisk might be mistaken as something meant for the enemy.

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ALLENHURST, N.J. - The decades-old message scrawled on the bottom of a dresser drawer was ominous - alluding to a murder and detailing the location of the victim's body.

But after fruitless digging by police in a back yard in the Monmouth County borough Wednesday, the message may prove more useful to a local author than to authorities.

Shovels, a backhoe and ground-penetrating radar failed to unearth any human remains from the yard of Richard Fernicola, a doctor and author who says he might use the detail in his next book.

Fernicola said Thursday it was an easy decision to consent to the search.

"My immediate decision was that we had to resolve this because I didn't want people saying a month or a year or 10 years from now, 'What happened to the body in your backyard?'" he said.

The impetus came from a drawing on the underside of a dresser drawer owned for the last 30 years by Michael and Mary Ryan of Bradley Beach. According to Mary Ryan, her husband acquired the dresser in 1969 from a woman who was moving into the house Fernicola now occupies. Her sister convinced her recently to contact authorities.

"Someone had written, 'Map of the body of the woman I killed,'" Fernicola said.

Fernicola's house is one of several cottages that belonged to a hotel that burned to the ground in the late 1920s. That raises the possibility that the dresser could have come from a different cottage, or that whoever wrote the map was a vacationer from somewhere else.

"Who knows if the furniture was original furniture or not?" said Allenhurst Police Chief Robert Richter. "Loads of people flowed through here as a summer resort."

Local authorities were unable to find any cases of missing persons or unsolved homicides that would have matched the information in the map.

Fernicola is author of "Twelve Days of Terror," a 2001 book recounting a series of shark attacks on the New Jersey shore in the summer of 1916.

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NEW YORK - A man sentenced to five months in jail after pleading guilty to keeping a tiger and an alligator in his apartment was released from jail, and says he would like to open his own zoo.

Antoine Yates, 36, said he was freed Thursday after serving about 3½ months as a result of his guilty plea in July to reckless endangerment. He said the shortened term reflected time off for good behavior.

Yates said that he spent his jail time studying and working out physically and that he plans to apply for a job at the Bronx Zoo.

"I would like to further my education by studying animal science and would like one day to open my own zoo," he said.

Yates, dubbed the Tiger Man after his widely publicized arrest, said he has finished 500 pages of a book about his experiences and hopes they will be the basis of a documentary movie script.

He was arrested Oct. 4, 2003, at a hospital in Philadelphia, where he had gone for treatment of a deep bite on his right leg. The bite had been inflicted by his 400-pound, 2-year-old orange and white Siberian-Bengal tiger named Ming.

Police removed the tiger and an alligator named Al from Yates' Manhattan apartment. The tiger was sent to an animal sanctuary in Ohio; the alligator is at an animal sanctuary in Indiana.

After Yates pleaded guilty, state Supreme Court Justice Budd Goodman sentenced him in October to five months in jail and five years of probation. The judge told him to get a job and not to keep wild animals.

"I'm going to try to get my tiger and my alligator back," he said. "My tiger, Ming, he's my heart."