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Baseball cards bring windfall to church

PHILADELPHIA, July 3 (UPI) -- A Pennsylvania man who donated a box of old baseball cards to an inner-city church in Philadelphia learned later they were worth about $35,000.

The Rev. Kevin Lawrence of St. Malachy Church gave David Smith, who lives in suburban Berwyn, the chance to take the cards back. But Smith declined, The Philadelphia Inquirer said.

Smith gave the cards, collected by his father, to be auctioned as part of a baseball-themed fundraiser on Opening Day for the Philadelphia Phillies. St. Malachy is trying to raise $350,000 to repair the pipe organ.

The collection -- including 70 cards of members of the Baseball Hall of Fame like Cy Young, Walter Johnson and Tris Speaker -- are to be sold in a live auction during the All-Star break.

Smith, a retired university administrator who worked at Villanova and LaSalle, got involved with St. Malachy by chance because his home parish had twinned with the church. He discovered when he spotted a clock at St. Malachy identical to one he had at home that his grandfather had been awarded the clock as the head of the St. Malachy Young Men's Benevolent Association from 1894 to 1930.

'Rock of Ages' breaks air guitar record

NEW YORK, July 3 (UPI) -- Fans, audience members, cast and crew of the Broadway musical "Rock of Ages" set a world record in New York for the largest air guitar jam session.

The event Wednesday, which directly followed a matinee performance of the five-time Tony Award nominated musical, involved 810 people "strumming" along to music on imaginary guitars. That beat the previous record of 440 people simultaneously playing air guitar, Broadwayworld.com reported.

The record attempt was organized by the musical and US Air Guitar, the official body responsible for the yearly US Air Guitar Championships.

Conn. 'Sasquatch' a costumed teen

FAIRFIELD, Conn., July 3 (UPI) -- Police in Connecticut said a Sasquatch sighting reported by a motorist turned out to be a teenager in a gorilla costume.

Authorities said a woman driving on Unquowa Road in Fairfield called police at about 10:30 p.m. Tuesday and reported she "almost hit Sasquatch," the Connecticut Post of Bridgeport reported.

The woman described the creature she spotted on the road as 8 feet tall, hairy and with "legs like tree trunks." She said the creature covered its eyes and ran into the woods after she switched on her high beams.

Police said they searched the area and instead of discovering the legendary creature, they found a 16-year-old boy in a gorilla costume. They said the teenager admitted standing at the side of the road and waving to cars.

Experts disagree on YouTube organism ID

RALEIGH, N.C., July 3 (UPI) -- Experts said a popular YouTube video of a moving, slimy mass in a Raleigh, N.C., sewer depicts a colony of tubifex worms or invertebrates called byrozoan.

Ed Buchan, an environmental coordinator with the Raleigh Public Utilities Department, said the video -- which was posted to YouTube in April and was chosen Wednesday as the top viral video on the Internet by TV Week -- depicts a colony of tubifex worms, which can form clusters of up to 1 inch in diameter, WRAL-TV, Raleigh, reported.

However, Thomas Kwak, a biology professor at North Carolina State University's Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit, identified the creatures as a cluster of byrozoan, invertebrates found in both fresh and salt water.

While the two men disagreed about exactly what the organisms in the video are, they agreed that no danger is posed to the public from their presence in the sewer.

"These organisms are completely harmless," Kwak said. "It's another interesting aspect of nature that we don't get to see every day."