Three cheers and a hearty round of applause for everyone and anyone associated with bringing the second annual Lewiston Auburn Film Festival to the Twin Cities last weekend.

More than 1,000 locals and visitors attended the festival, enjoying a top-notch performance by singer/songwriter Don McLean at the Franco-American Heritage Center on April 13, followed Saturday by an opportunity to view more than 100 films from local, American and international filmmakers.

The films were shown at 13 sites around Lewiston and Auburn, and organizers nicely provided convenient shuttle transportation between sites so movie-goers didn’t have to drive to and park at each venue.

There were short films, feature films, documentary films and experimental films.

There were tears and there was laughter.

There was, above all, plenty of entertainment accompanied by good food and healthy community interaction.

If you happen to see Joshua Shea, publisher of Lewiston-Auburn Magazine and current Auburn city councilor, give him a solid pat on the back for conceiving and organizing this event. He deserves it.

*

No good deed goes unpunished, or so it has been said.

Pete Richard and Frances Gagnon of Lewiston would certainly agree.

They live on College Street, next door to a condemned apartment building. Worried that the condition of the abandoned building, with its overgrown lawn and piles of trash, would impact other property values on the street, they started cleaning up the neighboring yard months ago.

We published a story about those efforts on April 2.

One week later, Richard and Gagnon were looking at a fresh heap of trash on the lawn, including a TV, mattresses and dead birds.

They simply do not understand why people consider this vacant yard a dump. It is not.

“It’s getting kind of useless,” Richard said. “You come out and clean it and within a day or a couple days people trash it up all over again.”

Richard, Gagnon and others are trying to be good neighborhood stewards and this is the thanks they get.

That’s just not right.

*

In Defense of Animals, an animal protection organization based in California, publishes an annual list of what it considers to be the Top 10 most ridiculous university-generated research on animals.

All of these research projects are taxpayer-funded through our National Institutes of Health.

Starting with No. 10, the winners and their research sites for 2011 are:

10) Drug-induced arthritis in rats makes exercise harder for the rodents (University of New England);

9) Rats who run around looking for a place to hide appear to be more anxious (Florida State University);

8) Prairie voles study suggest single moms raise less loving children (Emory University);

7) Dieting hamsters choose food over sex (Lehigh University and University of Minnesota);

6) Rat bitter-taste nerves appear to work (Ohio State University);

5) Contagious yawning in chimpanzees is empathetic (Yerkes National Primate Research Center at Emory University);

4) Alligators’ sounds and anatomy differ from humans (University of Utah);

3) Lemon-fresh scent can induce erections in monkeys (University of Wisconsin, the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center, Merck Research Laboratories and Northeastern University);

2) Rats find Miles Davis is better with cocaine (Albany Medical College); and, finally

1) Tulane National Primate Research Center found research labs are stressful places for monkeys.

No kidding.

Labs are probably no party for rats, voles and alligators, either.

[email protected]

The opinions expressed in this column reflect the views of the ownership and the editorial board.