CapeCodOnline.com – My heart goes out to the Dutra family, whose beloved dog, Sophie, was killed by hunters.

This tragedy, coupled with the recent shooting of a jogger, underscores the urgent need to ban hunting on Cape Cod. Although most hunters are responsible, many are not. And hunting regulations are not enforced. It’s asking for more tragedies to allow hunting in Cape Cod’s postage stamp wooded areas, which are ringed by development and intensively used for recreation — often by visitors who aren’t aware of the danger of being outdoors during hunting season.

Hunting belongs in the vast wildernesses in New Hampshire and Maine, not in Cape Cod’s little conservation patches.

Marsha Finley

Note: I do not hunt, I am not biased, I have no horse in this race, I just have a little thing called a brain

So let’s get this straight. A few irresponsible people acted like idiots which resulted in a couple of recent hunting accidents and this lady wants to completely ban hunting on Cape Cod? Seems legit.

Hey Lady, do you know how many people are hurt and killed in car accidents on Cape Cod every day because of irresponsible people? By your logic we should have banned roads and cars a long time ago because driving is obviously much too dangerous for Cape Codders to be trusted to do it.

I’m thinking we might need to ban swimming as well, there’s always a few irresponsible people who do it too soon after eating and they end up with cramps. Cape Cod is no place for cramps! Ban swimming now! And eating too (just in case)! BAN EVERYTHING!

P.S. For all of you bleeding hearts, hunting is a way for individuals to provide food for their families while not supporting factory farming, adding to pollution and reducing our dependency on fossil fuels, so put that in your Whole Foods pipe and smoke it. Should we outlaw small scale organic gardening as well? How about knitting?

WL – A six-month investigation by Bourne police culminated Dec. 22 with a Cataumet businessman being arraigned at Falmouth District Court; he faces a malicious destruction of property count and charge of contributing to the delinquency of local teens who worked for him.

Police allege David Ariagno supplied alcohol and marijuana to teenagers in his employ earlier this year, urging them as well to carry out vandalism attacks at a competing ice cream business in Cataumet and at a Shore Road restaurant at Back River.

Police say Ariagno, owner of Lazy Sundaes Ice Cream at County Road and Route 28A, Cataumet, asked his teen workers to break windows at the competing nearby Somerset Creamery Ice Cream Store at Route 28A and Scraggy Neck Road Extension.

Bourne Detectives John Doble and Ken Gelson said the vandalism occurred at the ice cream business. But their report says that an Ariagno request to punch holes in the tires of staff and patrons at the Lobster Trap restaurant at Shore Road was not carried out because the teenagers refused.

Looks like we’ve got our very own Tyler Durden on our hands in Cataumet. Except instead of building an army to cause mayhem and take down credit card companies in order to bring the finance industry to its knees, this guy is (allegedly) getting his teenage employees drunk and high in order to manipulate them into vandalizing locally owned businesses and people’s cars. Don’t sleep on the Lazy Sundaes Fight Club!

Who are we to judge though? Some people feel oppressed by predatory lending coupled with burdensome interest rates, other people feel oppressed by Somerset Creamery and The Lobster Trap Restaurant. Sometimes as a prominent businessman you just need to get some high school kids shitfaced and make them throw rocks through your competitions windows. Don’t judge, you can’t possibly know the ugliness in the deep recesses of the ice cream parlor industry on Cape Cod until you’ve lived it. This ice cream turf war is sure to bring dark days to Cape Cod, and it wouldn’t surprise me if things got much worse before they get better.

Boston.com – Boston College, the MBTA’s B-Line, Cape Cod, and Martha’s Vineyard are among the places that can now boast the enviable status of having a personalized Snapchat geofilter.

Snapchat, the messaging app of quickly-disappearing photos, first unveiled geofilters in July. Those filters — essentially location-based illustrations that can be placed on top of photos taken in the app — could only be used for photos taken in Los Angeles and New York. By swiping right on a photo snapped in specific neighborhoods, users could put a drawing of the Manhattan skyline, Disneyland, Venice Beach, or some other nearby landmark on top of the image. It was a nice way to show friends your location on the limited space of your phone screen.

In early December, though, Snapchat opened up geofilters to the public to ask for submissions. Bay State Snapchat users now have a few illustrations to play with for their disappearing selfies, a mix of drawings from users and others made by Snapchat’s internal designers.

Now you can overlay a Cape Cod graphic onto your Snap Chat photos? Makes sense I guess, there’s no sexting like vacation sexting. Plus you have a built in excuse if things go south. “No, I didn’t send you an unsolicited dick pic, it’s called a Cape postcard, duh.”

“Greetings from lovely Cape Cod, wish you were here, the weather is beautiful, here’s my junk.” Rolls right off the tongue really.

P.S. Here’s the un-cropped version of the sample photo. It’s such a thinly veiled phallic symbol that if we were in Japan I would’ve had to pixelate the lighthouse.

Sophie’s killers are still at large. If they have a shred of humanity in them this has to be eating them up inside. We can only hope that these “hunters” are brought to justice. Sophie deserves justice.

WL – Move over piping plover. There’s a new federally listed bird on Cape Cod.

On Tuesday the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service designated red knots as threatened. Specifically, just the rufa subspecies was so designated but that happens to be the one subspecies that visits Monomoy Island and nearby towns each summer.

“There’s a staging area Chatham, Orleans, Eastham that’s very important for red knots migrating south, far less important for northern migrants, but very important for southern migration from July to October,” Stephanie Koch, a biologist at the Eastern Massachusetts National Wildlife Refuge, which oversees Monomoy Island. “They have a short breeding season (in northern Canada). The birds we see in July are birds that failed to nest. They’re generally adults first and the juveniles are next to arrive.”

The goal of the designation is to allow biologists to assess and provide for the needs of the species.

I suggest everyone heads down to their favorite beach to say their goodbyes ASAP. The Fish and Wildlife people are probably at Home Depot as we speak buying all the rope they can get their hands on to block off what’s left our beaches. After the miserable failure of the Piping Plover conservation, it wouldn’t even surprise me if they take all of our houses by eminent domain and kick us off the peninsula entirely.

From this day forth December 23rd will be known as Red Knot Tuesday, the first day of the Capeocalypse. We don’t know who struck first, us or the Red Knots. But we do know it was us that scorched the sky. At the time, they were dependent on solar power. It was believed they would be unable to survive without an energy source as abundant as the sun.

Great, here we go again. This list was written by some girl from Chicago who has exactly zero idea what it’s like to be “from Cape Cod”. Cassie Sheets is the author’s name, and apparently she is “from” quite a few places, here are some headlines from a few of her other articles…

• 30 Things People From Atlanta Have To Explain To Out-Of-Towners
• 30 Things You Need To Know About Memphis Before You Move There
• 10 Things Only People From Jacksonville Understand
• 15 Reasons You Should Date Someone From Maryland
• 28 Things People From Dallas Have To Explain To Out-Of-Towners
• 25 Words That Are Interpreted Entirely Different In West Virginia
• 30 Things People From North Carolina Have To Explain To Out-Of-Towners

Holy shit, how many piles of steaming crap disguised as articles can one person write about being “from” somewhere they’ve obviously only Googled once? As with any fake life list we find about Cape Cod, we fixed this one to reflect the thoughts of people that are actually from Cape Cod. Here is the list, with our responses in red.

CCT – A tractor trailer crashed into overhead scaffolding on the Sagamore Bridge Sunday morning closing the bridge for several hours. According to a worker at the scene, a crew was in the process of removing the scaffolding when the incident occurred before noon.

With the Sagamore Bridge closed in both directions, traffic was backed up for miles. On and off Cape traffic was diverted down Sandwich Road to the Bourne Bridge. The bridge as reopened after 3 p.m.

There were no reported injuries as a result of the incident.

How insane would you go if you had to sit in traffic for 3 hours at the Sagamore Bridge on a random Sunday? I’m pretty sure I’d pull some Independence Day shit and get out of the car and walk.

Here’s a little tip for the bridge workers. Next time you are moving the scaffolding, measure the height of a tractor trailer first and make sure the scaffolding is never lower than said height.

P.S. I wonder if our favorite Sagamore bridge painter Elton got any selfie videos that day.