When Rebecca Goodwin first saw it, the thing was crawling through the parking lot of Curves in Sabattus.

Brown and small, with claws and a curved tail. The size of an adult’s hand. A crustacean among the cars.

“I thought it was a baby lobster,” she said.

Goodwin put it in a box and took it inside. She started calling the state, local lobster dealers, a friend with a saltwater tank.

Several people agreed it looked like a young lobster. Too small to legally keep. Too far from the ocean to easily save its life. Goodwin’s friend, the one with the saltwater tank, agreed to take the creature and ship it back to the sea when he had a chance.

Until he saw it.

It wasn’t a lobster, he ruled. It was a freshwater crayfish.

But where it came from, and how it ended up in the parking lot of Curves, nobody knew.

Goodwin planned to release the little crayfish into a local stream where her son has caught them before.

“It’s been a weird day,” Goodwin said Friday.

Friday the 13th.

– Lindsay Tice
Baby’s got blue eyes

Jennifer Garrigan never got her beloved mannequin back. The “brown-eyed” beauty disappeared in July when someone swiped her from the back of a truck on Leeds Street. It was heartbreaking. It was an outrage.

Garrigan is over it.

“She’s still missing,” Garrigan said. “But we received a donation of a teenage mannequin, and she’s a blue-eyed beauty.”

Garrigan works with young people with disabilities. Her specialty is preparing Halloween costumes for those who love the holiday but who can’t always afford the best get-ups.

The first mannequin, a kneeling lady with no arms or nose, was meant to be used as a display at A & B Costumes at 155 Center St. in Auburn. When she disappeared early last month, Garrigan sent out an appeal for help.

Enter a kindly local man who had a spare mannequin, this one a blue-eyed teen figurine with most of her body parts in place.

“I didn’t ask the gentleman why he had her,” Garrigan said. “We’re just happy to have her for ourselves.”

Garrigan, who works with Lutheran Social Services, has been working on Halloween costumes for the past nine months. The blue-eyed beauty is expected to be used as a display. She is also expected to be locked up tight if the need arises for travel.

— Mark LaFlamme
Look, up in the sky!

The skies above the midcoast area will host an odd-looking visitor this weekend.

U.S. Marine Corps “Harriers” – those blunt-nosed attack aircraft that can lift off the ground by going straight up – will be landing, refueling and taking off at Brunswick Naval Air Station.

The two Marine squadrons, based in Miramar, Calif., and Cherry Point, N.C., are on their way home from duty in Iraq.

The so-called “jump-jets” have been featured in several movies, including Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “True Lies.”

And they are noisy.

After all, the jet engines have to be powerful enough to push a plane into the sky like a rocket.

– Daniel Hartill
On the edge

Jake Sasseville’s “The Edge” talk show may be gaining some notoriety. But when it began, even Sasseville couldn’t stand it.

“The first one was called Wednesday Night Laughs,'” he said. “It was horrible, actually.”

It was 2001 and Sasseville was a young teenager when he got a couple dozen classmates together to put on the cable access show. Sasseville’s plan: a half-hour Saturday Night Live-type show with skits, jokes and celebrity imitations.

It took the group more than six hours of taping to get a 30-minute show. And looking at it later, they realized it wasn’t any good.

Sasseville and his friends quickly changed the format. Instead of a Saturday Night Live imitation, they turned it into a talk show.

It was renamed “The Edge with Jake Sasseville.”

“The Edge’ just stuck,” said Sasseville, 18. “We’re definitely on the edge of something new.”

– Lindsay Tice