The Penguin

  Pictured: about 60lbs of black walnut fruit. Yes, it's that dread time of year...the wind blows...the branches shake...suddenly there's a bump...bump bump...BANG! on the tender roof of your car! What are these divots? What are these round, green things lying everywhere? What are these...these dark stains on the concrete...? You look up. Towering above you is a gigantic, multi-armed, inhuman being, breathing through strange fronds, and in its tentacles you see its eggs, hundreds of them! Thousands of them! Raining down upon your property! You rush to get a rake, a shovel, an axe for God's sake...but it's too late! The lurid green orbs are piling up on the porch! Slamming against the screen door! They break through the glass, bounding like murderous tennis balls, and all you can do is let out one final, despairing SHRIEK...! Yeah they're black walnuts. Everyone I know who owns or rents hates  black walnut trees, at least with the kind of bemusement that comes with t

  Workers strike for safer conditions during the 1918-1919 Spanish Flu pandemic - eerily similar to today! What is Labor Day? It's become a day for sales, vacations, barbecues - a fill-in holiday between July 4th and Halloween. The meaning of Labor Day has been obscured, packed away as a historical event, shuffled under the rug as an inconvenience. Most people know Labor Day as a dumb joke: "Isn't it ironic that you don't "labor" on Labor Day?" But hidden within Labor Day is the long and tortured history of American labor - the workers who, with no rights, near-universal hatred, and in desperate circumstances, literally fought for the right to organize themselves against the all-powerful companies that hired them. Workers faced miniscule pay, long work hours, no benefits, deadly working conditions, harassment and even assault by managers and supervisors, and the fear of being fired or laid off at any time and for any reason. Those who struck - stopped wo