Grand theft fruit
Theft is relatively rare in Japan, but that’s not to say that the police never come across stockpiles of stolen goods. One man hadn’t gone on a shoplifting spree, though. In fact, he didn’t even go into a shop, but has been arrested for the theft of roughly 3,000 pears. The Ibaraki Prefectural Police received information about a man who was living inside an out-of-business hotel in the town of Kasama. When investigators went to search the hotel on August 6, they found an unemployed 31-year-old Vietnamese man, and also 1,800 pears of the kosui variety in plastic crates, in addition to a scale, cardboard shipping boxes, and shipping receipts. When questioned, the man admitted to stealing the fruit from orchards near the town. With pear season approaching, many varieties are already edible, but most aren’t at their peak deliciousness quite yet, so farmers are leaving them on the tree to ripen just a little more. That window allowed the man to steal, he said, a total of around 3,000 pears between the early morning hours of August 1 and the early morning of August 2 with the intent to resell them. While pilfering pears may not sound as heist-movie glamourous as targeting diamonds or works of fine art, steal enough of them, like, oh, say, 3,000, and you’re talking some money. Investigators are also looking into the possibility that the man wasn’t the only person involved in the robbery (picking 3,000 pieces of fruit in a day’s time quickly enough to not get spotted does seem like more than a one-person job), as well as whether or not there’s a connection to pear thefts that also took place at farms in other cities.
But wait, there’s more!
This farmer didn’t bother to lock the door to his storehouse, because who steals sweet potatoes? But a thief, or group of thieves, in Japan’s Ibaraki Prefecture has decided to ditch those time-tested crime guidelines, and instead just steal a whole bunch of sweet potatoes. On Monday morning a 53-year-old farmer in the town of Oarai walked into his warehouse, located next to his sweet potato field, and noticed that sometime over the weekend someone had helped themselves to the harvested crops which had been stored inside the building. Are you imagining someone stealing a couple spuds to munch on? Think again, because the thieves made off with 15 metric tons 33,000 pounds of them. The farmer had bagged his crop each holding roughly 45 pounds of potatoes, and though he’d had 1,000 of them inside the warehouse at the end of the workday on Saturday, on Monday morning approximately 750 of them were missing. The farmer says he hadn’t bothered locking the door to his warehouse when he left on Saturday, and while that may be a touching example of how safe he feels his rural community is, it was an ill-advised decision, especially since less than two months have passed since an earlier massive sweet potato theft in the prefecture. It might be hard to imagine what a criminal would want with nearly 18 metric tons of sweet potatoes, but the root vegetables apparently can be stored for a very long time.
Be careful, If the eaten’ is too good in your neighborhood.
Farm funnies
Plant scientists have used genetic engineering to create a new variety of orange.
The Novel Navel.
What did the green grape say to the purple grape?
“Breath baby Breath.”
If the tomato is technically a fruit,
Does that mean ketchup is a smoothie?
Thieves broke into my shop and stole 15 cases of Red Bull
I don’t know how these people sleep at night.
October 4th Birthdays
1989 – Melissa Benoist, 1990 – Dakota Johnson, 1977 – Alicia Silverstone, 1997 – Ella Balinska
1989 – Derek Rose, 1958 – Bill Faggerbakke, 1998 – Dale Whibley, 1987 – Michael Roman