Around the State in Seven Days

Cabin Fever, Anyone? Everybody has to be good at something, however useless, and Putney native Bill Kathan, Jr. performed 5365 nonstop jumping jacks on January 1, 2000. His goal was to beat the previous record of 5103 held by West Coast jumping jack champion Steve Sokol.

But Kathan didn’t stop there. He has since broken his own record by doing 5671 jumping jacks in a row and then went on to blow away the 24-hour jumping-jack record with 46,243. After this, he set the record for the most jumping jacks in 15 minutes — 1454 — and bested his old record again with a whopping 11,229 consecutive calisthenics.

Kathan claims to be writing an autobiography called Wild Bill’s True Story from the Beginning, but how he will ever get it done is a mystery. Books take time, and he can’t have much of it, since Kathan is also competitive about push-ups — he does 2020 in an hour — and is working on a six-minute mile, run backwards.

More Hobbies of Highly Effective People And you thought shoveling the driveway was challenging. David Frary of Royalton recently liberated a horse from deep powder. The Tennessee Walker-Quarter Horse cross had wandered into soft snow and got hung up on its belly with its feet no longer touching the ground. The intrepid Frary waded out to the beast and dug a path, and the horse was eventually able to wallow free and get into some nearby woods where the snow was shallower.

After catching his breath, Frary explained that two years ago he rescued a different horse that had somehow rolled from the road, over a bank, into snow man’s land. It landed with its four feet sticking into the air, suffering serious equine indignity. He grabbed his shovel and dug that one out, too.

This Mud’s for You The Barton Select Board recently learned that someone has been mud-bogging on May Pond Road — this is an indigenous sport that requires a pickup, a wet spot and nothing else to do. Other signs of the season include a Spring Mud Fling Festival, an Earth Day-Mud Season Film Fest, a Mudseason Makeover and the squishily descriptive Step Into Spring. Which we all will, since there’s no way around it, but we can at least keep our laces tight so we don’t lose our shoes between the house and the car.

Or something even bigger. Ken Lay of West Dover reports that he was walking his Rottweiler, Bruiser, on Route 100 recently when the dog fell into a pothole and disappeared. “I haven’t seen him since,” he says. “I borrowed a 12-foot ladder to retrieve him from the pothole, but the ladder couldn’t reach down to the bottom.”

If Peters inherits, he would essentially be paying himself $200,000 for a crime he committed, a situation that the victim’s children find exasperating. These same children also think Peters was their mother’s murderer, though they could not get a wrongful death conviction in civil court because the two-year statute of limitations has expired.

Criminal charges against Peters for sexual assault are working their way through the legal system, and the murder is still being investigated. The hearing to determine whether Peters can be a beneficiary of the court judgment against him will unwind later this month. In the meantime, he is suing his attorney.

To Hell with Headlines Headlines have turned curiously listless and world weary: “Another Pancake Breakfast Sunday,” reads one; “Rockingham Library Auctions Birdhouses Again,” another reports dutifully. “In Praise of Percolation” at least seems to indicate that someone’s medication is finally kicking in, while in the starved-for-novelty category we have two winners: “David Clark Began Collecting Sap When He Was Five Years Old” and “Don Nicoll’s Head To Be Shaved.”

Soap Opera, Part II In a melodrama of a more Hitchcockian kind, police in Bristol fielded a call from a Church Street resident who reported a “suspicious person” walking around in her neighbor’s house. Police went to the scene and questioned the perpetrator, who turned out to be the owner. He explained that he had arrived home “sooner than expected.” Sooner, apparently, is not always better. The neighbor who made the complaint call was his daughter. Unresolved issues anybody?