They say that life follows nature, or nature follows life, like a cat follows a fish truck.
Our estimable Congressman Ruppersberger is demanding an audit of some local post offices that are not delivering mail. And we're not talking about "they missed our delivery last Wednesday" or "my birthday card from Aunt Eliza was a day late." There are neighborhoods in and around Baltimore where people just don't get mail for weeks on end, and they finally go to the post office to pick up their letters and magazines and prescriptions and what-have-you, only to be told "it's out for delivery." And they go home and nothing is delivered. It's infuriating that the efforts of a twice-impeached loser trying to thwart mail-in voting has dismantled a postal system that used to be the best in the world, but there you have it.
What you don't have is your mail. But intelligent people are going to get it back to normal again.
The only thing slower than getting your birthday card from Aunt Eliza is sending a message in a bottle. This story fascinates me. Natalia Kunowska is a Polish woman who was a student at Krakow's AGH University of Science and Technology in 2011. During a trip to Russia that year, she wrote out a message, put it in a bottle, and tossed it into the Gulf of Finland.
Natalia was part of an international student exchange at the time, and as she put it on Facebook, "I was with my friend at the beach and we came up with the idea to write a letter and throw it into the water." She put a 10-ruble note in the bottle as well, but don't get all excited...10 Russian rubles in 2011 had a value of 17 American cents.
And look here! In just ten short years, she got a reply!
She said she finally heard last week from a man named Maksim who reported he had found the bottle near where it had been launched a decade earlier.
So, it didn't travel far, but what do you want for 17¢?
"I just got a message with a picture of a bottle and a question asking if I recognized it. I was really shocked," Kunowska said.
It turns out, Maksim is an ecologist, but he said he didn't mind Natalia littering.
I hope they get to be friends or something. I sense a Russian Hallmark movie in this!
5 comments:
“But what do you want for 17 cents” - lol!
Hallmark? Plot: They were each "unlucky" in love until they found each other. A stunningly beautiful young woman actor plays Natalia, a hunk plays Maksim. Cue wedding bells!
One wonders what the Information Age equivalent of a message in a bottle is. I suppose that the Internet standards authority could create a new electronic message address type, defined as "route this message around randomly, for an indefinite amount of time, then deliver it to a randomly chosen recipient." But then the physical analog of that may have, as you point out, already been created in the form of our sabotaged postal service.
Richard - some years ago, I forwarded pictures of a young woman at work holding her new baby to several others at the office. via text message. But one of the texts did not go through until two days later at 5 AM. The unlucky recipient was mad as can be about being awakened for a baby picture. How did everyone else get theirs right away?
Claritza - don't forget that the beautiful young actors in Hallmark movies have to go back to their home town, giving up lives of wealth and comfort, to help dear old Dad sort things out at the apple cider factory after his broken leg. Maksim would be the guy from her class in high school whom she spurned at the Homecoming Dance, but now looks much more suitable.
Andy - we remember when 17 cents was good for a soda and two pretzel sticks, right?
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