AUGUST REARVIEW

The unemployment rate was little changed in June, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor recently reported. Both the unemployment rate (4.5 percent) and the number of unemployed (6.4 million) remained steady in June.

In each of the past three months, the jobless rate has been either 4.4 or 4.5 percent; its most recent low was 3.9 percent in October 2000. The rates for all the major worker groups — adult men (4.0 percent), adult women (3.8 percent), teenagers (14.3 percent), whites (4.0 percent), blacks (8.4 percent) and Hispanics (6.6 percent) — showed little or no change over the month.

At a New Smyrna Beach, Fla., house in June, an Orkin Pest Control employee discovered more than the typical Florida pests most PCOs encounter — he found a 10-foot long, 400-pound alligator. The technician found the alligator laying in the shade in the back yard of the house in a 100- by 60-foot area that is enclosed with a 3-foot fence, according to WKMG News.

According to news reports, no one knows where the alligator came from — the closest body of water is the Indian River about two blocks away. Trappers believe that the alligator climbed the fence to get into the yard. No one was home at the time the gator was found, and the homeowner said that she thought the alligator was a tree when she looked out her window before leaving the home.

Because of the size of the alligator, trappers decided to kill it rather than attempt to capture it, reports said.

Imagine that you and some friends are sitting down to play a typical "party"-type game, such as Trivial Pursuit®. Your team is down to the last question, which reads, "What type of vermin did exterminator Bruce Tennenbaum glue a bar-coded tag to and release, offering $1 million for its return?" Good for you if you know the answer: a cockroach. So how did Tennenbaum come to be an answer in Trivial Pursuit?

"I don’t know how they found out about me. My nephew in Boston was playing the game with his friend and the question came up. So he called me and told me. I went out and bought the game and sure enough, on card 787, there it was," Tennenbaum said. "I called Trivial Pursuit and asked how they heard about me. They said that with recent newspaper articles that my name was public knowledge. But they did send me a free game!"

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