Postcards
Banning the boom
Bennington, Vt., residents grew tired of rude awakenings on stormy mornings from nearby Southern Vermont Orchards’ use of a “hail cannon.” Orchard owner Harold Albinder swears the cannon’s sound waves disrupt the formation of crop-damaging hail, according to The Associated Press (AP). “When my wife and I first heard it, we thought it was a battle re-enactment,” Bennington Town Manager Stuart Hurd told AP. Police cited Albinder three times for violating the town’s noise ordinance until the farmer relented in mid-summer. Albinder plans to ask the state legislature to override the ordinance.
County trashes King bags
Civil rights icon the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s image appears on any number of objects as the official King County, Wash., logo. But, this summer, officials quietly removed King’s image from the county’s trash bags. “It seemed unseemly to have an icon like Dr. King, to have his image on something like a waste bin in a park,” King County Executive Ron Sims told AP. Councilmember Larry Gossett, who led the change to the new county logo in 2006, disagreed and said it should appear anywhere the old logo, a crown, appeared.