“A mystery wrapped in an engima” and “You can’t make this shit up, folks” converged in the City of Orange recently.
A Public Works Department employee on cleanup duty after recent El Nino rains made a citrusicious discovery that prompted the city to post the following on Facebook Thursday:
Owner Wanted
Did you lose a rather large artificial orange about the size of a toddler? We have good news! We found your missing “fruit” in one of our creek-beds.
Last week during the heavy rains, your fruit came floating down the creek. To claim your missing property, please email us at
as*******@ci**********.org
. Do not use the comments section of this post.Please include some sort of proof that you are the owner of this magnificent citrus. We’ll accept a photo of you with the orange, a proof of purchase document, or the artificial tree it came from.
A day later came this …
Mystery Solved
The case of the orphaned Orange has been solved. We would like to thank everyone who offered to give our mystery orange a new home.
One of our Facebook followers, JW, identified it as part of a set that he had recently painted. They were used to decorate the YMCA BMX Bike track, which is located near Yorba Park alongside Santiago Creek. The one we found had gone missing a short while ago.
At JW’s urging, we contacted a representative of the track, who asked us to deliver it to a bike shop on Chapman Ave, “Bike Alley.”
We are pleased to report that the Orange has been returned, and is resting comfortably.
Jeez, wonder how you pedal that thing?
Here are the photos that accompanied each post:
Orange you glad it wasn’t a banana?
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.