A drunk raccoon passed out in the bathroom of a Virginia liquor store
(NYT) — A raccoon entered a liquor store the other day and drank his fill: rum, moonshine, even peanut butter whiskey. Then it passed out on the floor of the bathroom.
The raccoon entered the ABC liquor store in Ashland, Virginia, through the ceiling early Saturday. “It wreaked havoc,” said Carol Mawyer, the public relations manager for Virginia ABC. “It broke several bottles and consumed the spirits.”
In addition to the rum, moonshine and peanut butter whiskey, the raccoon also got into some vodka and — seasonally appropriate! — eggnog.
Its entrance triggered the security system, which led the police and animal control to respond. An animal control officer found the raccoon facedown on the bathroom floor, placed it in a carrier and took it to a shelter.
Its hangover lasted about an hour and a half, said Chief Jeff Parker of Hanover County Animal Protection and Shelter. The raccoon awoke and had no apparent injuries. Except perhaps remorse.
It was safely released back into the wild.
Parker said his department frequently deals with sick and injured raccoons, but this was something different.
“It was a little good humor,” he said. “I thought we ought to put that on social media. I had no idea it would go national or even worldwide. It’s fantastic. It’s cool.”
Raccoons can be troublemakers. They are such the bane of householders on garbage day that they have earned the nickname trash pandas.
But that’s nothing to the woman in Washington state who made the mistake last year of feeding a few friendly raccoons. More arrived until she was menaced by a mob of about 100 that aggressively demanded food.
A prized Fabergé egg is sold at auction for more than $30 million
(NYT) — A crystal Fabergé egg laced with platinum snowflakes and encrusted with thousands of tiny diamonds sold in London on Tuesday for more than $30 million, an auction record for a creation by the famed Russian jeweler.
The Winter Egg was created in 1913 for Czar Nicholas II of Russia, four years before the Romanov empire collapsed in the Russian Revolution. It was one of 50 Easter eggs that Fabergé is known to have created for the Russian imperial family between 1885 and 1917.
The eggs, with their intricate motifs, enameling and fine jewelry work, came to symbolize the wealth and the extravagance of the Romanovs. And more than a century after their fall, the extraordinary workmanship and scarcity of these eggs still inspire collectors to shell out millions of dollars for a single piece.
A few years later, after Nicholas II abdicated, the egg was among the Romanov valuables that came into the possession of Russia’s new communist rulers. The Soviet government sold many of the items to raise funds. The Winter Egg ended up with the Wartski Gallery in London in the late 1920s, according to Christie’s.
The egg was considered lost since the 1970s, but was rediscovered in the 1990s. It was auctioned twice after that, first in 1994 and then in 2002, each time breaking the auction record for a Fabergé item. It broke that record again on Tuesday with the $30.2 million sale to an unnamed buyer, according to Christie’s.