Sunday Rerun: Put A Stamp On It

 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!