ants in my pants -- not yet

This morning my daughter goes to eat her Honey Bunches of Oats breakfast cereal and decides to throw out the whole package, upon finding bunches of ants, honey, in the cereal. Cereal killer, those ants. Or us. I thought it was an extreme, um, antic, to discard the whole contents ["contants"??], but, hey, the dog had just thrown up on the kitchen floor. We were under *ant*icipatory duress; she had a bus to catch.

Maybe we should surrender in the sense of simply regarding the ants as food, sans chocolate.

Or live in "peaceable kingdom" harmony with the ants. Let it / them be.

It is futile to crush the happenstance ant crawling into or out of the cabinet and to fight off the low hum of guilt as I rub my fingers together to expunge the dusty insect remains. As with most wars, strategies need to be reconsidered.

Are the ant traps working but more slowly than anticipated?

What about the Ortho Home Defense Indoor Insect Killer ("use with confidence around food, children & pets")? ("Made with pure orange peel extract.") Is the "confidence" noted on the label for the welfare of the food, children, and pets? Or confidence in the death of the ants? I sprayed some on paper towels and rubbed the walls and cabinet doors and edges. Hey, maybe it chased the ants into the cereal boxes and other boxes! By the way, the plastic container with tight lid? -- the one I told spouse and daughter to buy to protect against ants? -- it sits in the cabinet. Empty. Bare. Naked. No cereal or anything else in it.

Stay tuned to see if this blog is crawling with more antie-bellum words next time.

Coin of the Realm

In the U.S., there's talk of Congress (no, not that kind of congress, Puss) changing the rules, so to speak, for the abysmally unsuccessful Sacagawea gold coins. (By unsuccessful, I don't mean lacking in profitable or revenue-producing or collectible attributes. I mean: Dude, does anybody use them? Same goes for the new Presidential coins gimmick.)

Somehow, the Powers-That-Would-Be think and feel that adding ever-changing designs to the coin will work.

Listen up, boys and girls in the Halls of Power:

It ain't going to work unless you end, delete, stop printing, cease from production the paper dollar bill of the same denomination. Nobody will care, not even if you depict sequential scenes from Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee's infamous alleged honeymoon video.

Wake up.

Take a look at what Canada does. They not only don't use paper for singles; they also have no paper for two-dollar currency, instead relying on the "loonie" and "twonie" coins respectively.

Euros? They use coins for one's and two's, not paper.

Certainly not both paper and coins for those denominations.

It is moronic. (And we're not even discussing the lack of variable colors for variable denominations.)

Hey, I love the coins (well, not exactly; some of the artwork is atrocious), but it is hideously stupid to think the coins will work while the paper dollar bills continue.

Idiotic bureaucrats and politicians making idiotic decisions.

Metaphor, anyone?

p.s. I just figured it out. The strippers' and lapdancers' lobbies are so powerful they don't want to phase out US$1 bills because of their popularity for tips [the antecedent for the pronoun "their" is the noun "bills"] (incidentally, did you American folks know there are $2 bills?). C'mon, Strippers and Lapdancers Amalgamated Interest Group: Coins will work just fine. Ca-ching.