This week’s verses are both animal-focused (or “-focussed,” as the New Yorker would insist on spelling it): one about a darling li’l critter who, in immense numbers, has become a weapon of mass destruction — and the other portraying something considered frightening as a mere individual but, in this case, in need of some TLC.
Slip ‘Em a Mickey (Mouse) (May 28, 2021)
Mice are all cute and cartoon-y, even if they make you jump up on a chair — but an invasion of them has caused quite a tumult in Australia:
Vast tracts of land in Australia’s New South Wales state are being threatened by a mouse plague that the state government describes as “absolutely unprecedented.” Just how many millions of rodents have infested the agricultural plains across the state is guesswork.
“We’re at a critical point now where if we don’t significantly reduce the number of mice that are in plague proportions by spring, we are facing an absolute economic and social crisis in rural and regional New South Wales,” Agriculture Minister Adam Marshall said this month…
NSW Farmers, the state’s top agricultural association, predicts the plague will wipe more than 1 billion Australian dollars ($775 million) from the value of the winter crop.
[Read more here: https://bit.ly/3uxIiWW]
My university roomie Jim and I lived in an apartment that had mice — not an infestation, but a dependable stream of them. We didn’t want to kill them, so we rigged a trap in one of the kitchen cabinets that proved remarkably effective at humanely capturing them, one after the other. We would then release them back into the outdoors… Come to think of it — it might have been just the one mouse, who kept paying us a return visit.
Marsh Conditions (May 29, 2021)
Do you know the difference between an alligator and a crocodile? It’s important to understand the distinction in case you’re ever attacked by one or the other, so the cause of death can be accurately reported in your obituary.
An exhausted alligator (the best kind to encounter, in my opinion) was recently found in a most peculiar location:
When members of the National Park Service's (NPS) turtle patrol were scouting the South Texas shore for sea turtles, they spotted an unusual visitor -- an American alligator.
The alligator was discovered on the sandy Malaquite Beach on the Padre Island National Seashore in Corpus Christi on Monday. The reptile is thought to have floated across the Gulf of Mexico from Louisiana, as indicated by the notch of its tail and tag on its foot, according to park officials.
"We are kind of speculating that perhaps it was washed out during one of the flooding events in Louisiana," Kelly Taylor, Padre Island National Seashore public information officer, told CNN on Wednesday. "It had a significant amount of algae on it's back that leads us to speculate that it was floating in the Gulf for a while."
[Read more here: https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/26/us/alligator-found-south-texas-beach-trnd/index.html]
In the renowned Hindu fable “The Jackal and the Alligator,” a wily jackal repeatedly outsmarts a rather dim-witted alligator, eventually trapping his amphibious nemesis and murdering him via arson. This is allegedly a children’s bedtime story, so I guess the moral is, “Don’t play with matches.”
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Enjoy the Memorial Day weekend and unofficial kickoff to summer! Back at you soon.
JB
(BTW — I wonder if that Padre Island National Seashore public information officer knows she misspoke when she said “it’s” instead of “its.”)
The sound of a misplaced apostrophe is like nail's on a chalkboard to my ears'. Also, my college roomies and I had one mouse in our apt. who acted more like a party guest than an uninvited pest. My roommate was pulling an all-nighter, studying for a final, and dozed off on the couch. She was awakened by the sound of gentle crunching and opened her eyes to find a mouse sitting on our fireplace hearth, sampling our dish of Christmas candy. I think the peppermint ones were a bit hit.