Oh no. CNN is reporting a worldwide Sriracha shortage. I am afraid that the climate conditions that have led to this shortage may also lead to shortages of other hot sauces. Life is looking bleak. I need my hot sauces. I need my ground cayenne peppers, my ground ghost peppers, my Spanish hot paprika. I need my hot sauces. If my supplies end, I will die a thousand deaths before I die the last one.
I discovered around 2003 or 2004 that mosquitos won’t bite me. At all. At the time, I assumed it was because of my diet of hot sauces, yellow onions and raw garlic. Mosquitos, I reasoned, are tiny little vampires and wouldn’t want to suck my blood because of all that.
Later, I made scientific inquiries on Facebook and came to a surprising discovery. Not only were there other people like me who are shunned by mosquitos, but also the one thing we all had in common was not hot sauce, onion or garlic consumption. It was that we didn’t eat sweets.
There’s a correlation between not eating sweets and instead eating those other things, of course. If I don’t eat chocolate-covered donuts I’m going to want to eat something else to console me, to fill that hole in my diet. I am also going to eat a lot of cheese. But the cheese doesn’t discourage the mosquitos. What they don’t like is relatively sugar-free blood. I don’t eat sweets; therefore, my veins run salty-sour. They don’t even try to taste me. They can tell I’m “off” from 3 inches away and won’t so much as land on me. I could walk around in clouds of mosquitos and have a mosquito-less halo around me, about 3 inches wide.
Speaking of pests that are hard to get away from, the big news this week is that Jan. 6, 2021, is not over yet. As long as it isn’t over — by which I mean: as long as it doesn’t end in a conviction at the top — we’ll be stuck with the Trump pest.
I never thought it would be possible for an American politician to be worse than Trump, but now there is a candidate for a Republican seat in the U.S. House who has called Hitler “inspirational” and says he’s the kind of leader America needs today. I guess this guy, Carl Paladino, passed over Trump for the mention because he thinks of Trump as more of a Mussolini than a Hitler. Hitler-lite. I can kind of see that.
I mean, Trump only wanted a mob to lynch his own vice president and maybe a handful of Democratic congresspersons and senators. He showed remarkable restraint of murderous intent during his four years in office when compared to Hitler’s record. It’s only natural for a guy like Paladino to want more.
“We need someone that’s a doer,” he said. Not like Trump, who just watched his doers do on TV.
That Paladino is able to run for Congress at all shows how bad Trump has been for this country. I remember when the only politicians who could declare their admiration for Hitler were people like Idi Amin, the former president of Uganda — people who didn’t need Americans backing them.
Trump has moved the normal setting in American politics so far toward dictatorship that American politicians can get away with praising Hitler and still have American supporters.
I expect to see more of another fascist supporter of white nationalism, Milo Yiannopoulos, now that he has become a summer intern for Marjorie Taylor Greene, also a spawn of Trump.
All three — Paladino, Yiannopoulos, Greene — make my skin crawl in ways that even Trump couldn’t. Jewish space-lasers, indeed. And “Maus” is banned from some schools now? It’s hard for me to maintain a civil tongue in the face of all this. Too much sucking. Blood sucking. Paladino sucking, Yiannopoulos sucking, Marjorie Taylor Greene sucking. All kinds of sucking.
In the excellent and prophetic words of Danny Elfman and the band Oingo Boingo:
“Insects make me scream and shout
They don’t know what life’s about
They don’t have blood
They’ve got too many legs
They don’t have brains in their heads
They know they’ll rule the world some day
They bite and sting me anyway
They bite and sting and suck
They bite and sting and suck suck suck.”
Etc.
Dr. Wes is the Real Change Circulation Specialist, but, in addition to his skills with a spreadsheet, he writes this weekly column about whatever recent going-ons caught his attention. Dr. Wes has contributed to the paper since 1994. Curious about his process or have a response to one of his columns? Connect with him at [email protected].
Read more of the Jun 15-21, 2022 issue.