The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

The other day I bought a bag of Frito-Lay potato chips and as is my wont from my early reading days as an 8 year old studying cereal boxes, I read the packaging. These potatoes, I was informed in a tidy paragraph written by public relations specialists who had no doubt conducted extensive customer surveys, were FARM-RAISED. Imagine! I’m guessing grown right in the ground. Tractors, fields, insecticides, migrant labor: farm raised. BOLD TYPE. Major advertising feature. The oils used were ‘natural’ too and this was worth trumpeting.

Holy cow manure, Batman, what’s the NEXT big thing in the food biz? Cheetos raised hydroponically? Personally I’m not sure consumers are really ready for food grown in the wild. Bugs, fungus, bacteria, all that creepy stuff a farmer is ill-equipped to handle outside a laboratory or a petri dish. We can grow meat without legs now, protein on a rope, and rumor has it the burger chains are nearing a breakthrough on cloning buns, with or without sesame seeds, directly on to the meat patty grown in secret underground hermetically sealed bunkers of Monsanto and Dow Chemical. You think they’re going to stick a filthy leaf of lettuce or a listeria riddled tomato on their antiseptically pure chemoWhopper? Get real. Not….

This whole Slow Food movement just flies in the face of 21st century culinary logic. We invented TV dinners so we’d have the time to watch more TV instead of wasting countless hours messing with the cooking of raw potentially contaminated food. These purveyors of old school eating call themselves environmentalists, but what about the damage from a bazillion cookbooks printed on paper from slaughtered trees? Next thing you know, they’ll advocate recipes for bark. A backlash is coming, count on that, the next step beyond vegetarianism. Stop eating plants. Stop the killing of carrots. It’s not only cruel, it’s filthy with germs and dirt. So Frito-Lay, nice try. But I’m afraid the world isn’t ready — we’ve turned the corner on 19th century farm products. Work on synthetic broccoli that tastes like Snickers if you want to stay profitable. Hook the kids and you own the future. Next time you need marketing advice, call me first. Save yourself some embarrassment.

The State of Washington just put out a call for interested owners of beachfront properties to take possession of the many dead grey whales that are washing up on shore this year, 70 or so to date. After hauling a couple onto Island County beaches, apparently they’ve run out of DNR land to dump the carcasses so they’re turning to us private citizens to accept the blubbered beasts. I know if I had a bit of shoreline to spare, first thing I’d want is a decaying whale about 40 feet long weighing tons of rotting fat. If you’ve ever been near one going to goo, you might think twice about letting the State haul one up to your beach home.

Course, if you maybe don’t live at your beach home and maybe if you got a few neighbors you don’t like much, then a dead whale for a high tide monument would send a serious message. Might even draw a few lawsuits from the adjacent property owners and forced removal of the seaside attraction, not, I suspect, a cheap solution. You adopt a rotting seal or sea lion or, god help you, a whale, trust me, you will live to regret it. Forty years ago a sea lion washed up down at our beach. First couple of days, me and my dog Dr. Gonzo studied the dead mammal out of idle curiosity, never having been that close to a sea lion back in Wisconsin where we had emigrated from.

But about the third day in the summer sun the smell became unbearable. Gonzo would wade out into the Sound to avoid getting anywhere near it and by the fourth of fifth day we decided to walk in the woods, just forget about gagging our way past the corpse oozing down on the beach. It is not something you want on your beach or just down the beach or maybe even within a quarter mile if the wind is blowing your way.

It’s good of the State to ask for volunteers to take these deceased cetaceans off their hands. Might even set an example for good citizenry. If it works, maybe we can ask folks with a little acreage if they would consider accepting garbage and save us hauling it to the overflowing landfills. A little here, a little there, spread it around, not pile it all up in one place. I know me and the mizzus could take a little back in the woods. We’re as patriotic as the next South Ender.

Okay, let’s have a show of hands. How many of us have read the Mueller Report? That’s what I thought. Kind of a slog to read, I can tell you first hand. Bob Mueller isn’t going to get a nomination for the Pulitzer in non-fiction, not with the prose in those 350 pages, not exactly a page turner. How many of you have read the summaries? Okay, a little better and probably all you need to get the gist of it. Unless you’re a Republican, in which case all you read was total exoneration, you know, without the caveat that Mueller put in there (more than a few times in the book’s entirety) that if he thought Trump deserved full exoneration he would so state. This is Bob’s straight-laced way of saying the investigation sure isn’t over, but as for his role, gotta wrap it up.

Course, now we have the administration and anybody within pissing distance declaring executive privilege and refusing to cooperate, turn over documents or sit for Congressional interviews. Trump himself, asked to answer a few questions from Mueller, said sure, welcomed the opportunity, but stonewalled for over a year and then finally submitted written answers to written questions. You can read the answers for yourself. But here in capsulated nutshell is what he said, maybe save you some time: Might’ve happened but I can’t recollect. Don’t remember that, other things were pressing. No memory of that, sorry, can’t help you.

What you learn from reading the report is that Mueller was stymied all along the way. He couldn’t prove collusion, but you’ll come away thinking there was plenty of smoke. Like Bob said, Trump sure wanted to collude, but he and the other 3 stooges just weren’t up to the task. As for the obstruction of justice, well, you don’t have to be a Philadelphia lawyer to find our boy guilty guilty guilty. He makes Nixon look honest. Total exoneration? If so, I would so state.

My question to the jury, meaning, the Senators and Representatives of this fine country, is the original one here, how many read the damn report? My guess is very few Republicans bothered themselves. Time to move on, nothing to see here, nothing to read here. Investigate where Mueller left off? See no evil, hear no evil, speak none either. If I were a reporter, my first question to Senator So-and-so would be, you read it? Show of hands, gentlemen, c’mon, put em up if you read it. I bet the Russians did.

Last week a storm front across the Midwest generated 50 plus tornadoes that tore through cities on a stretch of hundreds of miles. In one segment a radio reporter asked the mayor of an Indiana town that had been ravaged the night before if she thought the tornadoes were the result of climate change. This is what the news media considers a fair question these days, point to a hurricane or a flood or a snowstorm or a tornado and ask if we think these were the spawn of global warming. The mayor, probably expecting questions more on the line of emergency response, muttered something to the effect that the weather sure is changing.

Give me a break, hey. If liberal reporters keep asking Chicken Littles if the sky is falling, before long we’ll all start to push back. Was that thunderstorm last night another example of climate change??? Or is this question just the media’s way of making the point that yes, Virginia, climate change is real? It sure isn’t science and it sure isn’t any kind of proof. So why not just ask the mayor, who probably doesn’t have a degree in climatology or even meteorology, what her city is going to do to deal with the devastation on the ground and leave the genesis of tornadic mayhem to the experts.

But I do wonder why the fake news media doesn’t occasionally ask Trump if his tweetstorms might be related to rising temperatures. Not only the frequency but the volatility seem correlated to increasing investigations and accusations. Maybe political scientists don’t have a force rating, but lately they seem like F-5’s that wreak major violence across the internet. Global Warming? I think we know the answer to that.

Every day, every week, every month for the past 30 we’ve witnessed a growing frequency of tweets and rants and fist pounding that is record setting. And as you know, inconvenient truth or not, statistics don’t lie. The White House is heating up at an alarming rate, its own insular bubble of greenhouse toxic gases, spewing more venom than cows fart methane. Who knows when the place will blow sky high. Who knows if the walls will buckle and melt. We’re in uncharted territory and if the scientists are right, there’s very little time to turn this disaster around. Existential crisis? Oh yeah, go ask Chicken Little.