Man Martin's Blog, page 157

Varmints: An Update to Pests and Critters

A, CritterB. VarmintAfter reading yesterday's blog, a science-minded citizen asked, "What about varmints?  You didn't mention varmints."

I omitted this phylum owing to the fact we have no true varmints to speak of where I live.  This, however, is no excuse.

Similar in many respects to a critter, a varmint is typically mammalian, larger than a breadbox, and smaller - thank goodness - than a Great Dane.  While critters are a nuisance, varmints are specifically predatory.  Coyotes, bobcats, IRS agents, wolves, and hyaenas are varmints.  Varmints are the type of animal that will sneak onto your ranch and steal one of your dogies, or run off with one of your chickens in the night while you shake your fist uselessly from the bedroom window.

As I said, we have very few varmints in our area, and those we do have, are only varmints part-time.  We have a little fox, but until the day he gets one of my chickens or the neighbor's pet morkie, he's only a critter, not a varmint.  Years ago, some animals - either raccoons or possums - got into the coop and ate my chickens.  At the time they were varmints, but they haven't done so in a while, and they've been relegated back to critters.

Becoming a varmint is a crime of opportunity for many critters, and just being a varmint justifies being shot on sight.  Seeing a varmint and saying, "Poor little critter," is the equivalent of saying, "Bless his heart."

The menace of varmints as opposed to critters and pests is evidenced by the fact there actually is a varmint rifle, but there is no such thing as a critter rifle.  The concept of a pest rifle doesn't even make sense.

The relative lack of varmints in the modern world has led to a new kind of menace.  For hundreds of thousands of years, humans went varmint hunting, which not only helped reduce the varmint population, it provided a constructive outlet for violent tendencies that would otherwise do harm.  Now, genuine varmints have largely died out, but the taste for the hunt dies more slowly.  If you can believe it, full grown men sometimes patrol gated neighborhoods by night, armed and eager.

Watch out.

Pests, Critters, and Animals: A Field Guide

A. PestB. CritterC. ElephantI mentioned having to deal with critters to a friend recently, and she rolled her eyes.  I therefore feel called upon to explain and justify the use of this idiom.

Every animal is not a critter.  My dog, for example, is not a critter.  Nor is my chicken.  No domesticated animal is rightly a critter.  Nor are insects and spiders critters unless they are unusually large.  A ladybug is a bug.  A praying mantis is sometimes a critter, and certain beetles, especially the ones with antlers.

Deer are not critters, either.  Critters are generally, although not necessarily mammalian, bigger than your pinky tip and smaller than a... well, deer.
Foxes, skunks, squirrels, chipmunks, voles, moles, possums, raccoons, armadillos, bats, very large bugs, and certain turtles are critters.
Birds and fish are not critters, although crows and hawks come very close.
The word critter also implies destructive or nuisance properties.  But bears, mountain lions, buffalo, and anacondas are not critters.  They are too large.  Calling a twelve-foot anaconda a critter would be like calling it a pest.
Pests are smaller, more ubiquitous, and harder to get rid of than critters.  Ants are pests as are baby brothers.
Critter and pest both imply fungibility among species or indifference of the speaker to the identity of the animal.  Someone calling the exterminator is unlikely to specify, "The place is crawling with formicidae and we need you right away!"  Instead they'll just say, "Ants!"  The truck that pulls up will say "Pest Control" and bear a composite picture of a general arthropod lying on its back, a tongue sticking out of its mandibles.  No entomologist will quibble, "There's no species on earth that looks like that!"  We all know that pests have between six and a dozen legs, jointed body parts, sometimes wings, and usually stingers.  The lolling tongue we accept as artistic license.
When you discover something has gone through your garbage, and you've determined it's not the neighborhood dogs, you ascribe it to critters.  You do not know if a raccoon has been there or a possum, neither do you care.  If something is digging up your roses, you're less concerned with whether its a vole, mole, or armadillo than how you can stop it.
Likewise, no one who has ever been trampled by a rogue elephant would say they'd run up against a critter.  Calling an elephant a critter is flatly contemptuous of elephants.  It suggests, "I don't know the identity of that massive, gray, tusked animal with its prehensile proboscis that trampled me, and I don't care."  Such a dismissive attitude is likely to pique the sensitivity of an elephant and make him trample you all over again. 
To recap.  Pests are small, numerous, and hard to identify because you usually only get a good look at them after they're squashed.  Critters are larger, usually four-legged, wild, and undesirable.  Everything else is either an elephant or a buffalo.

You Are What You Watch

Now I expect Ron Howard to provide
sardonic voice-over commentaryEach generation watches TV differently, did you know that?  For example, my mother's generation.  They'd watch TV sitting around in a circle, their ears cocked to the set.  That's because they weren't watching TV but radio.  My brother's generation was the first to grow up with television.  They'd turn on the set and watch squiggly gray lines accompanied by hisses and buzzes.  Basically, it was radio without the sound.

During my formative years, television was something you had to wait for.  "Normal" TV was news shows and movies where people did a lot of talking and acting.  You had to wait for the "Good" shows to come on, which was a signal to your parents to send you to bed.  Then there was a brief perplexing time when you'd be watching a show in black and white, and it would proudly announce it was "In Color."  The words "In Color" were in black and white.

Then came cable TV and with it, the zillions of shows we know today.  People learned to channel surf.  You couldn't afford to spend too much time watching Pet Psychic because you'd miss championship poker on ESPN, and by the way, there was a new music video every two minutes.  So you'd sit, remote in your sweaty fist, clicking back and forth between channels.  In a single thirty-minute period, a skilled surfer could watch about four hours of television.

And we used to watch commercials.  Does anybody remember commercials?  I used to love them.  We'd always laugh when the elderly deaf lady complained about her hamburger.  Ha-ha!  There were songs about it.  There were a series of ATT commercials that made me sob.  I honestly think I am a better and more compassionate person because of those commercials.  Thank you, Giant Multi-Billion-Dollar Company!  And patriotism: there were some Miller Beer commercials, that just made you proud to be an American.  I believe the Miller Brewing Company was directly responsible for the election of Ronald Reagan.

Now, of course, I can watch any program I want, any time I want.  The result is, I watch all my favorite programs back to back.  We'll store up about six Modern Families and watch them all in a row, zipping through the commercials.  Ditto for Mad Men and Breaking Bad.  This method of watching has begun to affect our minds.  I watched the complete run of Arrested Development from start to finish, including the new episodes produced by Netflix.  Now when I'm walking the dog, I keep expecting Ron Howard to give a sardonic voice-over narration. Talk to someone who watches a lot of Law and Order, and notice a sort of breathless quiet that falls over them.  They're waiting for the Da-dunk! musical cue that says time to cut to another scene.  Little by little, we become less like ourselves and transmogrify into versions of people we spend so many consecutive hours watching.

I believe this may explain the weirdest of our weird shows - things like Honey Boo-Boo and Jersey Shore.  Where do these despicable people come from?  How could anyone turn out like that?

Answer: by watching television.

Dog TV

Direct TV, and I promise I am not making this up, has created a new channel: Dog TV,  The channel will run eight hours a day and air programming exclusively targeted to dogs: trees, other dogs, other dogs' butts, squirrels, etcetera.  The idea is, when you're away at work, Bowser will have something more entertaining to watch than Live! With Kelly and Michael.  The channel is commercial free, but trust me, as soon as they can figure out how to get dogs to buy something, there will be plenty of commercials.  The first trick is to get them to watch.

I conducted a scientific experiment by looking up a clip of Dog TV on You Tube.  It featured a desert-like environment, soft music like at the end of a yoga class, and scenes such as another dog, a tree, the same dog again, the tree again, and then back to the dog, who by this time was sleeping.  I put the computer on the floor and tried to get Zoe interested.  Then, for the purposes of comparison, I played a clip from Live! With Kelly and Michael in which Tyler Perry appears.  Zoe did not seem to enjoy either one, and actually refused to look at the computer screen when Tyler Perry came on the set.  Personally, I found the dessert scene with the sleeping dog slightly more intriguing.

My scientific research confirms my initial hypothesis, which is that Dog TV is a bone-headed idea of the highest magnitude.

What we need is Dog Radio.

I wish I could claim credit for this idea, but Nancy came up with it.  I, however, instantly recognized its genius.  For best results, you'd need a quadraphonic stereo system with speakers placed strategically around the house, but there'd be plenty of entertainment value in good old mono.  Dog Radio would feature random playlists of ringing doorbells, car engines starting, and a voice saying, "Come here, here's a treat!  Who wants a treat?"  Sometimes there'd be a sound like a chipmunk scurrying for cover, and it would be digitally mixed so the noise would move from speaker to speaker.  (This is where a quadraphonic system would come in handy.)  Once in a while, for a change of pace, BOOM!  A really loud thunderclap.  Then back to ringing doorbells and chipmunks.

I believe Dog Radio would be wildly entertaining to dogs and to certain very odd people.  I'd probably listen myself.  In the fullness of time, you could probably sell commercials.

Raisin Hell

My pal David Gardner has brought to my attention that Marvin Horne, 68, owes the Federal Government 1.2 million pounds in back raisins.  "How is this possible?" you ask.  "Seven hundred thousand pounds of raisins, sure.  Maybe even nine-hundred fifty.  But 1.2 million?"  The reason is that this scofflaw has refused to pay raisins to the National Raisin Reserve for the past eleven years.Now, it's all making sense, isn't it?Every schoolchild learns about the National Raisin Reserve, a federal program created during the Truman administration whereby the government confiscates a certain amount of the raisin crop each year to stabilize the raisin market, which is one of the bulwarks of the economy.  And once an economy starts losing its bulwarks, you've had it.  Many trace the real estate collapse to a the raisin bran shortage of 2004.  A constipated banker, is a reckless banker.Clearly Mr Horne (Pictured above.  He looks a little like a raisin himself, doesn't he?)  has to pay up.  Let the raisin growers run amok, and next it'll be apricots and prunes; before you know it, it'll be the wild west out there as far as dried fruits go.  And yet, we fellow citizens should feel some sympathy.  I myself have run afoul of the Federal Manuscript Reserve, when federal agents demanded I pay up one third of the manuscript pages I'd produced that year.  The worst part is, those were the pages with all the sex scenes.  What I propose we do, therefore, is pay Mr. Horne's debt for him.  There are 315 million people in the US; if we each left just one box of raisins on the steps to the Capitol, there'd be enough raisins to satisfy the Raisin Reserve for years.  The economy's bulwarks will be safe, and we can rest easy knowing we have done our part.

Khalid Makes a Vacuum

WASHINGTON -- Confined to the basement of a CIA secret prison in Romania about a decade ago, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the admitted mastermind of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, asked his jailers whether he could embark on an unusual project: Would the spy agency allow Mohammed, who had earned his bachelor's in mechanical engineering, to design a vacuum cleaner? - Adam Goldman, API really appreciate you fellows letting me work on this,  The whole time I was being waterboarded, you know what I kept thinking about.  Vacuum cleaners.  That's right.  You know why vacuum cleaners suck?  Because they don't.  Ha-ha-ha.  I know I'll have to stand trial for all the damage I did to those buildings and wrecking those two airplanes, not to mention the people, but I want to repay in some small way for all the damage I have done.  I'm ready to declare jihad against dust bunnies.  Are you with me?So I'm going to need some parts.  First of all, I need K-Type Vacuum bags.  I believe these are available at any WallMart, and about three feet of three-inch flexible rubber hosing.Also, I'll need a global positioning system and some gyroscopes.  This is going to be a state of the art, fully automatic vacuum.  Like a Roomba, only this one will really suck!  Ha-ha.  Oh, I already used that joke.  And I'll need dorsal fins, these are very important for steering and stability.  The whole body, by the way, in case I didn't mention, needs to be made of titanium alloy.  Except for the "nose cone" itself, which needs to be a durable nonmetallic material that can act like a window for radar or heat-seeking devices inside the vacuum.  Do you think you can get your hands on something like that for me?Also the beater bar.  Nylon bristles, high-gauge plastic.  And extensions for getting the drapes and those little cobwebs out of the ceiling corners.  Also, have you ever noticed how hard it is to vacuum into corners.  Well, if you'd ever vacuumed, you would have.  You can almost get right up into the corner, but not quite.  It drives me almost as crazy as being kept awake a thousand hours in a row.  Just kidding.  No hard feelings.  Anyway, I have a solution for the getting-into-corners thing.  I won't tell.  It's a surprise.  First of all, though, I'll need some conventional chemical explosives.  I know what you're thinking, "So what?  All vacuum cleaners have conventional chemical explosives," right?  But here's the secret part, and I can't tell you how it works, because it's a secret.  Fissible plutonium.  Enriched uranium if that's all you can get, but the plutonium would work best.  Plutonium-239.Okay, to recap, here's what I need to start work on my vacuum cleaner: K-Type Vacuum Bags, GPS and guidance system, titanium alloy, radome, dorsal fins, flexible hose, chemical explosives, plutonium-239.Oh, and a phillips screwdriver.

What's On TV

My buddy David told me about a bizarre reality TV show - I won't tell you which one for reasons that will become clear - and it set me thinking.  Everyone ridicules (but evidently continues to watch) reality shows, but are they really a harbinger that American civilization is done for, and it's time to start stocking up on powdered milk and ammunition?  How bad are reality shows, really?  Read through the descriptions of TV shows below, and see if you can guess which TV shows are genuine and which one I made up.

Naked and Afraid: A man and a woman are deposited in the wilds of the Costa Rican rain forest to face poisonous critters and nasty weather, similar to Survivor.  The twist?  Both are completely bare-ass naked.

Amish in the City: Five Amish young people are transported to the city to be confronted with worldly temptations from para-sailing to buttons.

The Littlest Groom: Like The Bachelor, except with little people.  One normal-sized girl competes against several dwarfs to win the love of a 4'5" bachelor.

So which of the above reality shows is the real deal?  Answer: they all are!

Break out the powdered milk and ammo, Ma.

(Oh, PS - Thanks to David for sending me Naked and Afraid, which inspired this whole mess.)

The Anti-Dictionary

I propose we publish an Anti-Dictionary. No one out there has a problem using words.  The problem is they don't know when not to use them.  Here are a few sample entries.

differential: (n) Does NOT mean difference.  It is part of the power train of a car.  When a sportscaster asks, "What is the differential of these two teams?" he is curious about the ability of all the players to rotate independently.

disinterested: (adj) Does NOT mean uninterested.  It is impartial.  If you tell someone you're disinterested in the story of her gall bladder, you mean that you're willing to give her a full, fair, unbiased hearing of the entire tedious episode.

epicenter: (n) Is NOT a fancy synonym for center but the edge or verge of the center.  The epicenter of an earthquake is the point of the earth directly above the center, which may be miles underground.  If you say, "New York is the epicenter of fashion," you're implying the center is somewhere in Newark.

literally: (adv) Is NOT an intensifier for an exaggerated or figurative statement.  It means in actually, as in an actual event.  If your coworker says, "I literally worked my ass off," call an ambulance.

problematic: (adj) Does NOT refer to any unpleasant or disagreeable situation.  It means uncertain or complex.  When someone says his  irritable bowels are problematic, he's elevating doo-doo to the level of quantum physics.

transpire: (verb): Does NOT mean occur, but to be disclosed.  A phrase such as "after World War II transpired," implies nobody knew it had happened until they were told about it.

The Dentist

Actually my dentist would find it very hard to
identify meI'm off to the dentist this morning, and as I lay awake last night shivering in terror, I began to think of dental records.  If the police needed to identify my body, say, if my snoring woke up Nancy one more time, my dentist is the man they'd go to.  "Do you have Martin's dental records?" they'd ask, and then they'd learn all about the period between 1980 to 1989 when I didn't floss one time, or that one of my bicuspids had gotten a stern talking to from the hygienist, or how I'd once totally missed the spit sink.

Apart from my teeth, however, if my dentist had to identify me, he'd have a pretty hard time.  For all he knows, all I do all day is lie stretched out, my mouth open wide as a wagon wheel, because that's the only way he ever sees me.  I'm not sure he'd recognize me with my mouth closed.  Also, my dentist believes I am extremely interested in sports.  This is because whenever he talks about sports, I'm making gurgles of agreement, like, "Urghh-urghh... gurghh... ayagh."  He thinks I'm saying. "Yes, I definitely agree.  Bynum would be a fool to pass up a $24 million offer from the Cavs."  Actually, I'm just saying, "Urghh-urghh... gurghh... ayagh."  He also thinks I strongly agree with his political views.  Not that I disagree with them, I just don't have political views.  I tried having political views one time; it didn't work out.

So all in all, it'd be pretty easy throwing the cops off track if I ever had to fake my death: they'll be looking for a guy who lies down all the time with his mouth hanging open who's crazy about sports.  Now if I could only get rid of my teeth.

Not flossing should take care of that.

My Eyeglasses

I have more eyeglasses than most rich people.  Seriously.  Like Donald Trump, I bet I have way more glasses than he does.  You say The Donald doesn't wear eyeglasses?  Okay, Warren Buffet, then.  I have more eyeglasses than Warren Buffet and Bill Gates combined.  In fact, I'm wearing a pair of my eyeglasses right now, and from where I sit, I can see a whole nother pair on the coffee table.  And I'm pretty sure there's a pair in my bedroom.  I have so many eyeglasses, I don't know how many eyeglasses I have.

Ask any of my friends, they'll say, "Oh, yeah, I got a pair of Man's eyeglasses.  He left them here last time he visited.  I'm just holding onto them until he returns."

Why, you ask, have I amassed such a fortune in eyeglasses, am I mad?  Or brilliant?  Years ago I had just one pair of eyeglasses.  They were the first pair I'd ever owned.  How proud I was, like a new poppa who's just given birth to black frames and a pair of lenses.  They were prescription, and I'd spent the afternoon having my eyes dilated so I could get them.  I'd also spent sixty-five dollars.  The eye doctor had told me all sorts of fascinating things about my glasses - the frames were a special plastic alloy, the lenses were bullet-proof, stuff like that.  One thing he didn't tell me was don't put your eyeglasses in your back pocket.  This is a thing you'd think eye doctors would be required to say.  You'd think eyeglass labels would have a silhouette of a dumbass putting glasses in his back pocket with a red bar - the international symbol for "Don't do this, dumbass!" going straight through it.

Short story long, I sat down with them in my back pocket.  Do you remember the scene in Gone With the Wind when Scarlet O'Hara holds a turnip up to the sky and vows, "With God as my witness, I'll never go hungry again!"  Well, it was the same thing with me, only with a pair of eyeglasses, and I was swearing I'd never go without eyeglasses again.  Actually, I wasn't swearing anything that specific, I was just swearing.  It was more like *!!##@%&!.

So that's my story.  Every time I go to the Dollar Store, I stand at the little Dollar-Store-Eyechart, and buy four or five more pairs.  And now, Casa Martin is pretty much an Eyeglass-o-Rama, and when I put a pair in my pocket, or step on them, or inadvertently run over them with a steamroller, I just laugh.  Plenty more where those came from, I say, plenty more where those came from.