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Jawless human skull padlocked to a dumbbell fished out of New Orleans waterway
A human skull padlocked to an exercise dumbbell has been fished out of a New Orleans waterway, leaving police with a mystery on their hands.
The skull was found earlier this month by a man using a red rope and a magnet the size of a hockey puck on a bridge to pull things out of the water below, police said in a report.
The report was recently released and obtained by The Times-Picayune/The New Orleans Advocate. The fisherman also found a handgun and a gun barrel in the water on May 18, police said.
The 15-pound dumbbell was padlocked around the skull, which was “fully decomposed, lacking a jaw or the top row of teeth,” according to the report.
The magnet fisherman flagged down a passing police officer after making the find off the Bayou St. John Bridge.
New Orleans police did not have any further updates on the case this week, and the coroner did not say whether he had confirmed the victim’s identity, the newspaper reported. A spokesperson told the newspaper identifying the victim could take months.
A police dive team and two cadaver dogs searched the shoreline and the area under the bridge last week, the newspaper reported.
Police have been seeking tips from the public as they investigate the case.
In 2018, kayakers discovered the skull of a missing New Orleans woman in a watery marsh near a boat launch, CBS affiliate WWL-TV reported at the time.
Magnet fishing yields unusual finds
People fishing with magnets across the U.S. have reeled in unexpected items before.
Just last month, someone using a magnet to fish for metal objects in a Georgia creek pulled up a rifle as well as some lost belongings of a couple who were killed in the same area nearly a decade ago.
In March, magnet fishermen pulled an unexploded ordnance from the Charles River in Massachusetts, just a few days after one was found in the same area, CBS Boston reported. The ordnance was given to the Massachusetts State Police Bomb Squad and they safely detonated the explosive.
In 2022, a man and his 11-year-old grandson reeled in two 50-caliber Barrett sniper rifles out of a murky South Florida canal during a magnet fishing trip, CBS Miami reported, and that same year, a magnet fisherman in New Jersey pulled in a 30-pound explosive device from the Passaic River, CBS New York reported.
In Michigan, magnet fishermen have found everything from guns, motorcycles, pipe bombs, pocket knives and World War II artifacts, CBS Detroit reported.
In 2020, magnet fishers in England ended up reeling in a dead body from a canal in Torkshire.
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Pharrell Williams on “Piece by Piece” and his love of joy
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Pharrell Williams on “Piece by Piece” and his love of joy
On a rainy day in Paris, Pharrell Williams was at the headquarters of Louis Vuitton living the dream, at an office he prefers to call “a dream space.”
Last February, Williams was appointed the Men’s Creative Director. He oversees a staff of 200, and has already launched four new collections. His most recent, at UNESCO, paid tribute to the variety of the human race.
Asked what is most satisfying watching his designs come down the runway, Williams said, “You’re gonna hate this answer: All of it!” he laughed. “Come on, man. It’s a dream!”
For more than three decades he’s been helping to make some of pop music’s biggest hits, from Nelly’s “Hot in Herre” to Gwen Stefani’s “Hollaback Girl,” while helping to bridge the gap between pop culture and high fashion.
He says the runway is just another way for him to show people who he is: “I always want to evoke a sense of joy, ’cause I feel like the world, there’s a deficit of joy.”
Sanneh asked, “But I imagine you do still have to pay attention to, ‘Are people buying these clothes that I made?'”
“Sure; that’s when you start questioning the success,” Williams said. “But like, man, you gotta enjoy it. If you enjoy it, nine times out of ten, somebody else gonna enjoy it.”
Now there’s something new to enjoy: “Piece by Piece,” an animated Lego movie about Williams’ life, directed by the award-winning documentarian Morgan Neville. Last month, at the Toronto Film Festival, Williams said he still can’t believe he got to make this film. “I’m from a marginalized community where we often hear the word ‘no’ all the time,” he said. “For whatever reason, [for ‘Piece by Piece’], we got a lot of yeses.”
“This seems like one of your superpowers is getting people to say ‘yes’ to things they might otherwise say ‘no’ to,” said Sanneh.
“It wasn’t that hard; it’s just harder for people who look like me,” Williams replied. “But when we tell it in Lego, now it’s universal. Replace Black with LGBTQIA, or Indian, or Asian, or short, or plus size, or anything. LEGO is the great equalizer.”
To watch a trailer for “Piece by Piece,” click on the video player below:
As a boy growing up in a Virginia Beach apartment complex, Williams, a self-described misfit, saw and heard the world differently than most people, through a condition called synesthesia, by which he “sees” the colors of sound: “For me, sight and sound are still connected, so they send ghost images to each other. It’s a condition, but also at the same time it’s a gift, because I don’t know how I would make music if I couldn’t see it. That’s the way that I conceptualize it.”
With his childhood friend Chad Hugo, he formed a duo called The Neptunes. They were discovered by the music producer Teddy Riley, who saw them perform at a high school talent show. In 1992, around the time of his 19th birthday, Williams helped Riley write a hit single called “Rump Shaker,” recorded by the hip-hop group Wreckx-N-Effect.
Williams said, “If it wasn’t for Teddy Riley, I wouldn’t be sitting here right now. ‘Cause I was in Virginia Beach, Virginia, where there was no music studio or music industry or anything like that.”
The Neptunes produced a string of hits, and then Williams branched out on his own, becoming a real pop star. His voice was everywhere, although Williams himself had mixed feelings about it: “I had a song called ‘Beautiful’ with Snoop, right? Girls heard me singing that; I heard Mickey Mouse! I swear to you, when you just get a moment and you just listen, you’ll never be able to un-hear it again. But that’s what I hear.”
“Sexy Mickey Mouse?” asked Sanneh.
“No, not sexy, just Mickey Mouse. It was wild for me.”
By the early 2000s, Williams says he felt lost: “I had moved away from being a student, and things became too formulaic. And that was troubling to my spirit, and I could no longer feel what I was doing.”
He rebounded by being a bit more open to new ideas – working with Daft Punk on “Get Lucky,” and Robin Thicke on “Blurred Lines.”
“Get Lucky” by Daft Punk featuring Pharrell Williams and Nile Rodgers:
The producers of “Despicable Me 2” asked him to write a song for the soundtrack … something happy. “I would’ve never written a song called ‘Happy,'” he said. “It was commissioned for me to do. And on top of that, I didn’t think I was gonna have any more, like, hit records. The universe was like, ‘Well, not only are you wrong about that, but I’m gonna have three different commissions come from three different places, and these are gonna be the biggest records for you.’ It just humbled me because it was like, I couldn’t be pompous. I couldn’t be arrogant.”
“Happy” by Pharrell Williams:
Naturally, Williams, now 51, created the theme song for the new movie “Piece by Piece”:
He’s put a music studio in his office, so he can make songs while simultaneously working on the next Louis Vuitton collection. But he says he never feels as if he’s on the clock.
Asked if the pressure to create takes some of the joy out of it, Williams replied, “It’s not a pressure; it’s a privilege. You can’t go wrong when your aim is to enjoy what you do. You can’t go wrong.”
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Story produced by Robbyn McFadden. Editor: Steven Tyler.