Lots of weird area news in 2014

Editor’s note: This is one in a series of columns looking back at regional news in 2014. It will continue through Jan. 1.

Sometimes you just have to shake your head.

link David Stevens

Some of the weirdest news we reported in 2014:

• Sin came to Curry County in the fall.

Former Texas high school basketball star Dwight McDonald in June made known his plans to open a strip club near Clovis Community College, outside the city limits.

Facebook pages were launched in protest, about a hundred meetings were held, and, believe it or not, we now have an official definition for “adult entertainment” if anybody ever tries to open such a business in the city limits. (I’d share it here, but it’s too long and some people would be offended by the language.)

Ultimately, the club opened sometime after Halloween with zero fanfare and not many more patrons. A recent Saturday night saw eight cars in the parking lot.

Ob-la-di, ob-la-da ...

• Mostly, they’re just annoying as we try to dodge them on the highway to avoid picking their remains from the grills of our vehicles. But more than once in 2014, we were attacked by tumbleweeds.

One Clovis neighborhood south of Llano Estacado woke up Jan. 27 to find tumbleweed walls more than 20 feet high, preventing some residents from leaving their homes.

City maintenance workers spent more than a week collecting the weeds, crushing them and hauling them to the landfill.

Then in March, several area residents reported rural roads had been closed by tumbleweeds.

“If you see one of them monsters,” Clovis Art Thompson said after a Caterpillar tractor was used to help clear his path at the Cheyenne Trails Apartments, “kill it.”

• The best fish story of the year? That belonged to a retired school custodian who admitted to having 1,600 rainbow trout in his home on Connelly Street in Clovis. That’s about 160 times the legal limit. (Who knew there was a legal limit?)

Bounchanh Bounsombath, 62, said he wanted to make sure his family always had enough to eat. He said he caught most of the fish at Greene Acres Lake and Dennis Chavez pond over about seven months.

Someone reported him anonymously to the game warden. Officials seized the fish.

• The greatest waste of peanut butter in eastern New Mexico history was recorded in March.

Nearly a million jars of peanut butter were crushed at the Clovis landfill, at a cost of about $60,000, to help expedite the sale of bankrupt Sunland Inc. to Golden Boy Foods.

Costco Wholesale owned the jars, but refused to accept shipment, saying the product was not produced, packaged or stored to Costco standards and “therefore was deemed unsuitable.”

• Portales student journalists recognized a “Most Likely to Skinny Dip” couple in their yearbook that came out in August. The winners, both seniors, posed as if nude behind a tree.

When parents complained, school officials vowed more oversight of student publications in the future.

Crazy kids.

• And while we’re on the subject of kids doing stupid stuff, some Clovis middle school students were suspended in November for allegedly snorting candy. Ironically, they were accused of snorting candies called Smarties.

The kids said they were only crushing the candy into powder and blowing it at others. Health experts said inhaling the powder would not cause a “high,” but might hamper breathing.

School officials initially said the incident violated their drug and alcohol policy, but after it was reported by national news organizations, Superintendent Jody Balch issued this statement:

“No student involved in the Smarties incident has a drug possession on their student record.”

One Facebook comment read, “The next thing they will ban is laughing out loud or musing to themselves.”

• Finally, no year can be considered weird unless it featured unusual weather.

So 2014 qualifies.

In addition to the 60-mph winds that inspired the tumbleweed takeover, some of us experienced snow in May.

Residents of Grady woke up the morning of May 13 with snow covering their grass.

A spokesman for the National Weather Service in Albuquerque said the last time the area experienced snow that late in the year was in Tucumcari on May 24, 1954.

So far, there have been no reports of snow-covered tumbleweeds trapping people in their homes, but the year is not over.

David Stevens is editor for Clovis Media Inc. He can be contacted at 1-800-819-9925. His e-mail address is:

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