Hunt for missing wedding rings in trash
A CELERY stalk sighting and a little luck came together to help a New Hampshire man find his wife’s wedding rings in a 20-tonne trash trailer, the jewelry wrapped in a napkin he had accidentally thrown away.
Kevin Butler had taken the trash to a transfer station in Windham last Wednesday. Unwittingly, he had tossed the napkin into the white trash bag, not realising his wife had cleaned the rings and wrapped them in the napkin to dry.
Several hours later, he returned and asked for help in finding the rings amid the piles of garbage.
“I’m pretty sure I threw the rings out,” Dennis Senibaldi
Senibaldi and his crew reviewed surveillance video to see what time Butler first showed up at the transfer station and where he threw it out. They used an excavator to start scooping up trash from the trailer.
After about five or six scoops, they saw a white bag with a telltale clue.
“One of the things he said was (inside) was celery stalks, and I could see a celery stalk sticking out the side of the bag,” Senibaldi said.
They started going through the bag, but there was no sign of the rings. But at the very bottom, underneath some carrot or sweet potato peelings, there was a napkin.
“Literally, I opened up the napkin, there were the two rings,” Senibaldi said.
“I wouldn’t recommend doing that,” Butler told WMUR-TV.
“But to get the rings back, I would do it a thousand times over.”
Baguette gets UN world heritage
status
THE humble baguette — the crunchy ambassador for French baking around the world — is being added to the UN’s list of intangible cultural heritage as a cherished tradition to be preserved by humanity.
UNESCO experts gathering in Morocco this week decided that the simple French flute — made only of flour, water, salt, and yeast — deserved United Nations recognition, after France’s culture ministry warned of a “continuous decline” in the number of traditional bakeries, with some 400 closing every year over the past half-century.
The UN cultural agency’s chief, Audrey Azoulay, said the decision honours more than just bread; it recognises the “savoirfaire of artisanal bakers” and “a daily ritual.”
“It is important that such craft knowledge and social practices can continue to exist in the future,” added Azoulay, a former French culture minister.
The agency defines intangible cultural heritage as “traditions or living expressions inherited from our ancestors and passed on to our descendants.”
With the bread’s new status, the French government said it planned to create an artisanal baguette day, called the “Open Bakehouse Day,” to connect the French better with their heritage.
“Of course, it should be on the list because the baguette symbolises the world. It’s universal,” said Asma Farhat, baker at Julien’s Bakery near Paris’ Champs-Elysees avenue.
“If there’s no baguette, you can’t have a proper meal. In the morning you can toast it, for lunch it’s a sandwich, and then it accompanies dinner.”
Although it seems like the quintessential French product, the baguette was said to have been invented by Vienna-born baker August Zang in 1839. Zang put in place France’s steam oven, making it possible to produce bread with a brittle crust yet fluffy interior.
The product’s zenith did not come until the 1920s, with the advent of a French law preventing bakers from working before 4am The baguette’s long, thin shape meant it could be made more quickly than its stodgy cousins, so it was the only bread that bakers could make in time for breakfast.
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