Entry 109: Playing Opossum

I believe we have a possum living in our yard. Possibly it's more correct to say we have an opossum living in our yard. The opossum/possum distinction, if you want to get technical, seems to be that an opossum is one from an order of marsupial found in the Western Hemisphere, and a possum is one of various phalangers found in Australia and New Zealand. However, most American dictionaries list "opossum" as the number one definition for "possum", so it appears the term possum has been co-opted in American English to simply mean opossum.

Either way, some large, ugly rodent scurried into the bushes one night a few weeks ago as I opened the door to leave our house. It startled me, so I let out a "what-the-he...?!", which S overheard (she was a bit behind me still inside, so she didn't see it), so she starts asking, "What?! What is it? What did you see?"

Being the quick thinker that I am, knowing that she would be freaked out by a possum living in our yard, I said, "Oh, I just saw a possum... in our neighbor's yard. It ran away."

"It was in our neighbor's yard?"

"Yeah, in our neighbor's yard."

"OK."

Cut to this past weekend, our friends come over for dinner, and what's the first thing one of them says to us? "Just saw a fat possum in your yard as we were walking up here."

"In our yard?" S asks.

"Yeah."

"Oh no!" She turns to me, "Babe, it's in our yard now!"

"Uhh... Well, the funny thing about that," I say, "it was in our yard before. I just said it was in the neighbor's yard, so that you wouldn't freak out."

"Babe!!!"

"Oh...," our friend says, "I mean... I saw it in... uh... your neighbor's yard too... Yeah, um, the, um, neighbor's yard. Yeah."

[Part of a famous Pogo cartoon that is a play on a famous line by Oliver Hazard Perry. Pogo is an opossum.]

So, the next morning I find S Googling ways to get rid of possums, which is exactly why I tried to hide it in the first place. We don't need to get rid of anything. There were two sightings of a completely harmless (albeit ugly) creature in a month. I think we can live with that. I mean, it's a possum. Its nocturnal, it scurries off the instant it sees a human, and its defense mechanism is to, literally, pretend that it's dead. It's not exactly a ferocious beast. It's not like we found a malnourished Kodiak bear living under our house.

But S has an irrational fear of things like this, so she wants to get rid of it. She went so far as to suggest that we hire some sort of exterminator to hunt it down. "Yeah sure, why don't you have him get rid of the squirrels and the birds in our trees while you're at it," I say sarcastically. This prompts a mini-fight, because she says I'm being mean, and that I need to be respectful of her feelings even if I don't understand them. She's right, of course, this is something I need to work on. I'm not exactly the most sensitive person in the world, but I have to be the voice of reason here also. We can't be obsessing over a stupid possum.

Anyway, the whole thing was more or less put to rest, when I showed S a website espousing the virtues of possums. Particularly, she liked the claim that possums eat rats. I find this highly dubious, honestly, but I'm going with it nonetheless.

[Not a huge fan of Rush the band either, but their version of this song frickin' rocks.]

On a different topic, I just want to chime in on the whole Rush-Limbaugh-Sandra-Fluke-slut thing. I alluded to it in my last entry, but didn't go into detail, because I've always thought the most effective way to deal with people like Limbaugh is to universally ignore them. I always thought that it's, by and large, the outrage of their haters that turns them into superstars and gives them a mainstream platform. Although it's natural to want to fight back, it's always seemed counterproductive to me. By tearing them down, you're actually propping them up.

I still mostly feel this way, but my friend RT opened my eyes to the possibility that there might be some value in a public backlash against Limbaugh, since his show is broadcast over public airwaves and on the Armed Forces Network. If his show does indeed suffer from a lack of sponsors or is dropped from AFN, over his comments about Fluke, then this would be some sort of victory, I suppose. But my main point is that normal, knee-jerk, tit-for-tat verbal sparring doesn't work with somebody like Limbaugh. I don't think you can usually hurt him this way. If he insults you, you lose. If you insult him, you still lose, somehow. You can't shame somebody who has no shame. So, why try? Just let him preach to his choir of morons (which although quite large by radio audience standards is still a small percentage of the total U.S. population) and that will be that.

[Random shot of a full moon I took near my office building. My lo-res iPhone camera can't do it justice.]

It's been interesting to see the spate of articles coming out questioning why Limbaugh is chastised by liberals for his misogyny while left-leaning personalities like are Bill Maher, Keith Olbermann, and others are mostly given a pass for theirs. It's a fair point. Charles Barkley once said (I'm paraphrasing), "If you like somebody, you cut them some slack," and I think there is a ton of truth to that. We all have a pretty severe double standard for people we like and people we dislike. With that said, I have yet to read a quote by any "liberals" that was as bad as what Limbaugh said. (By no objective measure is Calling Michele Bachman "bat-shit crazy" or Hiliary Clinton a "she-devil" comparable to calling a birth control-advocating college student, who previously was not a public figure, a "slut", and demanding she release sex tapes.)



Also, in the case of Maher, he's a comedian (at least ostensibly so, he does toe the comedian / political commentator line). If it's understood upfront that somebody is saying something with a primary objective to be funny, just for the sake of entertainment, then I basically give them a pass. If somebody isn't seriously advocating a position and is just trying to crack jokes, then people need to lighten up. The world would be a pretty dull place if all people had to be PC all the time.

Anyway, I've run out of time with this entry. Until next time...