Marsupials Wreak Revenge on Campus

It started as an odor but quickly turned into a smell. When it ripened into a stench, the nuisance busters from Physical Plant were called in.

The Attack of the Opossums was under way.

Opossums (North America’s only marsupials) are native to the woodsy setting at Torrey Pines that for more than two decades has also housed a campus of the University of California.

For most of that time, the cat-size animals with pointy snouts and scaly tails have been willing to share their surroundings. Then, for reasons that are unclear, the opossums decided recently to come in from the not so cold.

Since then, life has not been the same at the administrative office of Third College. The creatures entered undetected through a trap door in the ceiling and headed toward the heating ducts.

“It was agony for the first week or two trying to convince people that we really smelled something,” said Third College business manager Pat Hansen.

On Physical Plant’s first visit, the wall heating units had to be torn out in search of carcasses. Seven were found, and it was thought the attack had been thwarted.

Several days later, the stink returned. Several offices were closed, more wall insulation was torn out, and more dead opossums were discovered.

Success. Or so it seemed. When the stink returned a week later, it was stronger than ever.

“It was unbearable,” Hansen said. “We just shut the building down and sent everyone home. It became quite a joke at Physical Plant about our Possum Heaven.”

It was a joke not shared at the administrative office of Third College, where the walls and ceilings were torn up and the environs sprayed for fleas. Nerves and noses remain raw.

“We’re all on alert,” Hansen said.

Divorce Her, Dude

Notes from here and there:

* Headline of the week goes to the Beach News of Encinitas: “When Bad Wives Happen to Good Surfers.”

* Competition is good for business, lousy for language.

The San Diego Athletic Club in downtown San Diego offered a facercise . So the BodyWorks gym across the street retaliated with an aerobic healthercise.

It’s enough to make you agonize while you exercise.

* Conventional wisdom says that community newspapers will hold more sway in the era of neighborhood politics brought on by district elections. If so, the reelection chances of San Diego City Councilwoman Abbe Wolfsheimer could be dicey.

In an editorial noting how badly she has alienated her colleagues, the Penasquitos News said: “Being a maverick is all well and good, but individualism doesn’t mean much when you can’t protect your constituents’ best interests.”

It’s not a new argument. Wolfsheimer used it four years ago to unseat incumbent Bill Mitchell.

So Long, Sis?

It’s only a twig in the diplomatic forest, but the sister city relationship between San Diego and Yantai in China’s Shandung province may snap under the weight of the Beijing massacre.

San Diego has been a sister city of Yantai, a seaport city of 2 million in northern China, since 1985. Two delegations of Yantai officials have visited San Diego, interested in community planning and possible high-tech joint ventures.

But now the San Diego-Yantai Friendship Assn. has sent a fax to both the Chinese consulate general in Los Angeles and the Foreign Affairs Office in Yantai decrying the use of guns and tanks in Beijing and warning that further repression could lead to severing sister-city ties.

Harold Pope, the La Jolla attorney who sponsored Yantai as a sister city, said the friendship association is watching to see if the violence and mass arrests reach Yantai.

Even if they do not, Pope said, the association will have to decide whether maintaining the relationship implies a tacit support of the Beijing government.

So far there has been no response to either fax.