Time for some squirrel news, as there are two separate incidents involving squirrels, schools, and hazmat teams that I've come across today. First a short one: A teacher at Chesterbrook Academy noticed a squirrel eating a white powdery substance. Soon after, the squirrel got sick. That's almost the entire article right there, but you'll have to read the remainder to discover the full extent of this mystery. The second incident has received much more extensive coverage, with two detailed articles in the Lancaster New Era, starting with this one: Officials have confirmed that neither the jar nor the squirrel came from inside the school ... But exactly who brought the jar to school remains a mystery.'That,' said spokeswoman Kelly Herr, 'is the million-dollar question.' The reader commentary down below this first article is also of interest, particularly as the readers appear to have figured out the answer to the million-dollar question: a gothic kid. And the follow-up article lets this alleged gothic know that he is not all that with this disparaging headline: Squirrel Incident Not Very Original. Which is true; while I've never encountered this specific prank before myself, I can recall several involving dead animals from high school. The first involved some senior throwing a dead beaver through the glass front doors of the school when I was a freshman (wheher the beaver was frozen solid or the glass was first broken with some other implement was never determined), which I think is better than this gothic's lame stunt to begin with, but the second was so much more weird and disgusting and I was unfortunately tangentially involved. On the day before the last day of school, most of the seniors would generally stay up all night drinking and partying at various spots around town, and as the sun was coming up the group I was driving around the countryside with met up with some other classmates driving around in a pickup and I talked us all into going back to the school for some kind of senior prank/vandalism, which I was thinking would involve getting up onto the roof and draping some amusing banner across the front of the building or something. But on our way back into town the guys in the truck, which was following us, came upon a road-killed deer on the side of the road and threw it into the back of their vehicle. In front of our high school was a large silver victory bell (rung when one of our teams won) and it was decided by the drunks with the deer to slice open the carcass and drape it over the bell. This was nasty enough, but it became so much worse when it turned out that the doe was pregnant. I'll just leave it at that, suffice to say that bell looked like the scene of some bizarre and bloody pagan ritual when the final day of school began. I'm not exactly proud of even being in the vicinity when that went down, but you have to admit it puts that gothic squirrel jar to shame.