#the mysterious garfield phone fissure

[mbrainspaz]

I saw your tag that your mom has the Garfield phone, does she know about the cargo ship that got lost? does she know about the mysterious Garfield phones that kept washing up on shore?

No and neither did I.

"local officials say they will continue to harvest Garfields from the coastline" is a hell of a way to end an article.

[kenyatta]

A French coastal community has finally cracked the mystery behind the Garfield telephones that have plagued its picturesque beaches for decades.

Since the 1980s, the Iroise coast in Brittany has received a supply of bright orange landline novelty phones shaped like the famous cartoon cat.

Anti-litter campaigners have been collecting fragments of the feline for years as they clean the beaches.

But now, the source of the problem has been found - a lost shipping container.

Last year, campaigners from the Ar Vilantsou anti-litter group made the novelty phone a symbol of the plastic pollution on the beaches of the Finistère region - part of which is a designated marine park.

The media attention on the new campaign, however, drew the eye of a local farmer who remembered the first téléphone Garfield appearing after a storm in the early 1980s, when he was a young man. He also knew the location of the container - in a secluded sea cave accessible only at low tide.

[...]

Inside the rock fissure, they found orange plastic poking out from beneath the rocks. The container appeared to remain somewhat buried after three decades.

The challenge of plastic pollution - a hot-button political issue over the last year - is not necessarily reduced by solving the mystery.

The container remains inaccessible and it is not known how much of its cargo is sealed within it. Another issue is that the novelty items that escaped and continue to wash up on Brittany's beaches will not decompose in a human lifetime.

Once a common household item, its eyes open when the landline receiver is picked up, and thousands were made and sold during the 1980s. Collectors still buy and sell the vintage Garfield phone online today.

[takiki16]

SO THEY STILL DON’T KNOW THE ORIGIN OF THE GARFIELD PHONES:

"We found this incredible fissure that is 30 metres deep and at the very bottom, there were the remains of a container.""Under the boulders in front of the entrance, we found 23 complete handsets with electronics and wires. They were everywhere," she added.

But the mystery is not fully solved. "We have no idea what happened at the time: we do not know where it came from, what boat," said Fabien Boileau, director of the Iroise Marine Nature Park in Finistere."And we don't know if several containers fell into the water, or only one."

Sometimes you think you have an idea of how weird life is in the world and then you find out that people in one area in France just… got used to the fact that Garfield phones were washing up on the beach. For thirty years. Just a normal thing. 

[kansascityhappenings]

For 35 years, Garfield phones kept washing ashore in France. Now the mystery has been solved.

For 35 years, parts of Garfield novelty telephones have been washing up on the shores of the Brittany region of France, and no one knew why.

Now the mystery has been solved: The cat-shaped phones are coming from a long-lost shipping container, reports the BBC.

Renewed attention to the weird phenomenon prompted a local farmer to come forward to say that decades ago, he had seen the shipping container lodged in a cave by the sea. He led a group of environmentalists to the site at low tide, and voila—there was the container, along with telltale orange plastic phones and parts.

“We found this incredible fissure that is (100 feet) deep and at the very bottom, there were the remains of a container,” says the leader of a local beach-cleaning group, per AFP.

“Under the boulders in front of the entrance, we found 23 complete handsets with electronics and wires. They were everywhere.”

The phones were hot items back in the 1980s, notes Gizmodo, and they remain collectors’ items to this day. (Read more Garfield stories.)

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from FOX 4 Kansas City WDAF-TV | News, Weather, Sports https://fox4kc.com/2019/03/29/for-35-years-garfield-phones-kept-washing-ashore-in-france-now-the-mystery-has-been-solved/

from Kansas City Happenings https://kansascityhappenings.wordpress.com/2019/03/29/for-35-years-garfield-phones-kept-washing-ashore-in-france-now-the-mystery-has-been-solved/