It's not been one of my best weekends so far. Thursday's weather couldn't have been much nicer. So the Professional Bad Neighbor drove up at 5:00 a.m. and started spraying poison on the property adjacent to mine. Which poison? Golly. I've been more conscious of reactions I usually have to two other things than reactions to glyphosate or dicamba, but yes, those too. That combination of five different "herbicides" Bayer wants to patent the toxic GMO corn to be full of? I've suffered from "The Lazies," mostly. And the cats, especially Pastel's four kittens whose eyes are just starting to open, have all been bleary-eyed and peevish. And I've done very little on the Internet. A screened porch is not a good place to be on a weekend like this one.
The good news is that the "good," Internet-free computer came back from the shop with a clean bill of health. It has a big old clunky dinosaur of a monitor. In damp weather the screen displays a background of color, sometimes quite dark color, instead of white. I thought the monitor might finally have died, but it seemed to be running, just not showing anything on the screen. The computer itself also seemed to be running, just not showing anything on the screen. When taken into the cool, climate-controlled shop, the wizards of Compuworld said, it behaved perfectly. What was wrong? It changes its background colors for no obvious reason, and apparently it had changed from deep orange to black. When it came back to the not so well controlled climate of my office, it started displaying a background of navy blue, then blinked back to white for one night, and then settled down with a bizarre but not unbearable pink. I kept my watery eyes indoors and did offline writing and computer housekeeping this weekend.
And raised my slim, toned arms and legs above my concave waistline, from time to time, and watched the said waistline disappear and then start to become convex. Not with honest flab, although some of that lingers around the tops of the arms and legs. Not even with gas. With inflammation from a glyphosate reaction. It doesn't feel any more pleasant than it looks.
Anyway, during the short time I was online during these 48 hours, I found a link that everyone, especially every Republican, just must read.
Glyphosate
A French study finds that glyphosate lingers longer in seminal fluid than in other parts of the body, and kills sperm cells, and is the reason why some young married men are not fathers yet. How much damage these men have inadvertently done to their wives, the French didn't want to know. The whole study is available in English, but it'll cost you.
Poetry
Personally, I've never thought that "Thou shalt not murder" applied to rats. And big fat city rats are ugly, nobody can deny, but rural rodents--field mice, deer mice, those tiny trader rats, sassy little shrews, striped-backed chipmunks--are cute; if they hadn't just gnawn holes in your clothes, shredded your legal documents, and filled your upholstered furniture with biomass, you'd want to keep them as pets. But I think Norma Pain's reaction to rats, here, is right on to something beyond our individual reactions to rats. Her theological questions cast rats as the embodiment of the Evil Principle.
I've never seen rats that way. God gave us rats so that social cats would have something to use as treats to train their pet possums. A Professional Bad Neighbor who regularly delivers boxes of mixed rodents, by the half-dozen, is hard to pity; watching it die would be a pleasure. Rats are just dumb animals, to me. The bigger, nastier ones inspire revulsion; not fear.
Anyway, the poem:
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