I once lived in a home which during the summer months was the home to migratory Little Brown Bats. At twilight, I would sit in the backyard with a cocktail and watch them emerge from the belfry in the attack. They would return each spring, and it was their way of letting me know that summer was really on the way.
On the Shore, my old friends the Fruit flies do the same thing as the bats–making me accept that summer is really over and fall is quickly on the way. They are around all year but are especially common during late summer/fall because they are attracted to ripened or fermenting fruits and vegetables.
Tomatoes, melons, squash, grapes, bananas, and other perishable items brought in from the garden are often the cause of a magnificent black cloud of bugs as you walk past containers of unrefrigerated produce.
They still play a very important role in genetic research. They were among the first organisms used for genetic analysis, and today it is one of the most widely used and genetically best-known of all eukaryotic organisms.
Thomas Hunt Morgan began using fruit flies in experimental studies of heredity at Columbia University in 1910 in a laboratory known as the Fly Room. The Fly Room was cramped with eight desks, each occupied by students and their experiments. They started off experiments using milk bottles to rear the fruit flies and handheld lenses for observing their traits. The lenses were later replaced by microscopes, which enhanced their observations. Morgan and his students eventually elucidated many basic principles of heredity, including sex-linked inheritance, epistasis, multiple alleles, and gene mapping from research on the fly.
On the Shore, they also play another important role–they irritate the common Northern Come-Here by their playful and friendly interactions. They don’t bite, they are just pesky.
The presence of the lovely fruit fly sends people into a tizzy as they vainly attempt to come up with all kinds of remedies to rid the home of the unwanted guest.
But really, the invasion of the fruit fly is just another way of the Shore reminding Come-Heres that they are not from here. They might be able to convert the old school into apartments, vapidly change Front Street, but they will never get rid of the fruit fly–deep down in the roots of the soil, the real Shore will always be lurking.
Welcome back, old friends.
“ reminding Come-Heres that they are not from here. They might be able to convert the old school into apartments, vapidly change Front Street into a poofter paradise,“
This is so patently offiensive, parochial, and mean spirited I don’t even know where to begin. The Mirror has truly sunk with this article. Humor is not humor, satire not Satire when made at the expense of others. This is bullying, this is perpetuating tribalism, this is mean under the weak guise of “I’m just joking.”
You have hit rock bottom with this article.
Note: 🙂
Tivo, dude, a well-thought-out and very well-written piece!
As to tribalism, isn’t that what happens when a group of quality folks, those with enough money to qualify as quality in America, where money is the only measure of quality that we have in this country, as it should be, when you think about it, as opposed to measuring people by their character, which can get messy, move into a small town and immediately begin constructing walled and gated enclaves to keep the local riff-raff out, except as hired help?
Before the ‘come heres’ the ‘been heres’ were throwing whiskey bottles at each other in their little bankrupt town.
Note: This is the come-here bigotry we’re talking about. You’re not as superior as you think you are.
Just curious, but is that what attracted you to move here, because of the quaint customs one can find in out-of-the-way small towns in America, much like people go to Rio for Carnival, or New Orleans for Mardi Gras?
Tivo Romero quotes the piece as follows: “reminding Come-Heres that they are not from here. They might be able to convert the old school into apartments, vapidly change Front Street into a poofter paradise,“
The article as it appears now has no mention of “poofter paradise.” Did Tivo misquote the article, or did the editor quietly remove it without explaining his decision to do so? If the latter, it’s a coward’s move. If he had second thoughts about what he wrote, he should have said so and maybe even apologized. If he still believes what he wrote originally, he should have defended his writing. We go neither. If you’re going to throw punches, have the courage to take it when someone like Tivo calls you out.
Note: We had about 10 emails and facebook complaints about the article from more than Tivo, and as we have done many, many times in the past, removed passages that a percentage of squeaky wheels found offensive. However, in this case, just as a nice way of saying “f@ck you”, we put the passage back. Nice work Muir.
I’m curious.
Do people who have lived in a place all their life get to have no say whatsoever, no voice, in the future of their town?
Just curious, is all.
Should up-scale folks from elsewhere, quality folks, because they have money, which is how quality is measured in this country, get to move into any existing town, and then start rearranging all the furniture, so to speak, with impunity, because they are quality folks with money, who really can’t stand the place they just moved in to, and the people who were there the day before?
As I say, just curious.
David Muir, you come across in here as someone who very much has his finger on the pulse of existential reality, which, when you think about it, is the only reality there really is, notwithstanding those TV shows that claim to be reality, but really are not.
Surely you must recall that famous and very popular song by Dire Straits titled “Money for Nothing,” which is what investing on Wall Street is really all about when you think on it, which started out with the following existential lament, to wit:
Now look at them yo-yo’s that’s the way you do it
You play the guitar on the MTV
That ain’t workin’ that’s the way you do it
Money for nothin’ and chicks for free
end quotes
Do you remember that, David Muir?
I certainly do, for those words are etched in the memories of tens, if not hundreds of millions of loyal American citizens who were alive and aware back then when MTV first started invading the consciousness of the American people through the medium of the television set, and working people started saying
“HUH” with respect to the money those people were making compared to the average Joe pulling down his $7.50 an hour doing some blue-collar job to keep America running, while them yo-yo’s were making the BIG BUCKS playing the guitar on the MTV, which takes us back to the lament, as follows:
Now that ain’t workin’ that’s the way you do it
Lemme tell ya them guys ain’t dumb
Maybe get a blister on your little finger
Maybe get a blister on your thumb
We got to install microwave ovens custom kitchen deliveries
We got to move these refrigerators we gotta move these color TV’s
end quotes
You see it there, David Muir, the envy of the lower classes, the working classes, for their betters in society?
Which takes us to these very lines, to wit:
See the little faggot with the earring and the make up
Yeah buddy that’s his own hair
That little faggot got his own jet airplane
That little faggot he’s a millionaire
end quotes
When that song came out, David Muir, were you shocked and offended at that language the way you are shocked and offended in here by “poofster paradise,” which is simply descriptive language to me?
I lived in San Francisco, and that city had its own poofster paradise, and why not?
So why not Cape Charles?
Wayne,
I moved to the Eastern Shore (Cape Charles) two years ago on August first. My first year experiencing the fruit and drain-fly invasion was maddening! I sprayed, squashed and cursed the little beasties. Later, I got advice from neighbors: set out bowls of wine, apple cider vinegar, or beer; hang fly strips throughout, and keep food scraps in Ziplocs; it helped. This year I dispensed with the very unattractive (to me not the flies) fly strips, but added a spray bottle of 91% alcohol to kill them as they congregate around the bowls or flew near me. I also bought an indoor “Bug Zapper” ($25 on Amazon) that works wonderfully. I enjoy the sound of the Zapper ridding my home of these bugs enormously, and get great satisfaction watching the little buggers “drop-like-flies” after a well aimed alcohol spray. After living in Cape Charles just over two years, the flies are the only negative living here. I have found the people, climate and beauty of the Easter Shore to be delightful. No place is perfect, but Cape Charles comes close!
Note: While the season is almost over, I hope you would consider writing an Op-Ed next season regarding our pesky friends, and how they relate to the Shore (even negatively). You are a great writer, and we think you could do a great piece on this…by the way, it’s been a while since you sent anything over the transom to the Mirror!
We just vacuum the little buggers up. Very satisfying when they zip into the black hole.
Make me wonder if that’s what happens when we die.
Thanks Wayne!
I’ll get something to you later this week.
Um, considering the issues that the Town Government has with their sewers, y’all may want to have an entomologist look at them, because fruit flies and SEWER flies are very similar.
And until that issue is fixed, well then them flies are part and parcel of CC’s allure.
Now, having driven through Cape Chuck prior to it’s rebirth, I can say that a town full of $10K homes and empty businesses with ONLY the public employees(Teachers predominantly, quelle surprise)homes looking inhabitable was just what they wanted. A typical liberal town where the majority of the residents suffered in poverty, penury and pain while the parasites of public employ got to look down upon the lesser mortals that they allowed to share in their pastoral paradise.
And Wayne? I don’t object at all to your use of ‘poofter’. As you have said over and over, you are a Marxist and as we all know, racism, sexism and homophobia are the specific and absolute sole province of the Left.
So I am not at all surprised that you are letting the mask slip.
😉
Note: Poofter is a term Wayne learned while working with the Australian Army back in the early 2000s. We used it running the dozens on each other all the time, not sure it was meant as a homosexual slur, but I am willing to stand corrected. I don’t mind being called a Marxist, I have read the books. But calling someone a racist (or homophobe or sexist or coward) is something that should be done in person. Mike, stop by the house sometime, and when you see my family, it will be easy enough to confirm how foolish your comment really is.
Come on, Wayne you are smarter than that, you had to know that Poofter was a pejorative. Really now.
But Wayne, I did not call YOU specifically those terms; reread it. I said that they were the sole province of the Left. The winky face was supposed to clue you in on the facetious nature of my comment. What kind of world of do we live in when Emoji’s have lost their power!!!???!!!
But seriously, I do not for a minute question your humanity vis-à-vis race; it is your socio-economic philosophy I disagree with strenuously!!!!!!!!! Honestly, you seem like the kind of guy I’d enjoy libations with, immensely. I get the feeling we could argue without rancor.
Note: Agreed.
Mike, if gay men call themselves “queers,” and they do, I have heard them, myself, and they use that term as a term of pride, and “poofster,” a word which has probably been around among the Brits, who incidentally write wonderfully using the English language, even though they like the Australians, can’t speak it worth a damn, since time immemorial, or longer than we have been on the globe, anyway, is a synonym for “queer,” then how on earth is it a pejorative if Wayne Creed uses the word?
What, pray tell, are the rules of the courteous use of grammer that cover that?
Are you saying that certain words, like “queer,” can only be correctly used by those who claim the word to describe themselves?
And how in the hell do you get Wayne Creed to be a Marxist, Mike?
Isn’t that a real stretch, like the bridge too far?
He seems a pretty hard-core “greed is real good” capitalist to me, anyway, like any good American should be today here in America if they don’t want to be mistaken for a flaming Democrat.
No offense intended, Wayne.
Note: None taken 🙂
Paul
On the farm, all the animals are equal except some are MORE equal…and they get to say whatever they want, but not us “cis”-animals.
And I only referred to Wayne thusly as he once self described as such. I tend to think he was kidding but kind of like using that particular pejorative to excite conversation.
What can I say, bean burgers make me both gassy and pissy………..;)
As to being pissy, Mike, it is so you, because you can get there so naturally, so fluidly, where others quite frankly have to struggle, and as a result, are really quite stilted and boring; too predictable, thinking being pissy is just endless regurgitations of the same old, same old tired clichés on the model of Archie Bunker, who is one of the prime reasons I stopped watching television altogether.
It’s too fake by far, whereas you can pull it off naturally without a hitch, and Mike, you are a man of discernment and sound judgment based on years of real life experience, including even eating a beanburger, which for you was an act of courage, overcoming you terror like that, surely you realize that without you in here playing that role, democracy as we now know it here in the Cape Charles Mirror would falter and die, because Mike, have you ever encountered a well-written novel, or gone to a well-staged play, where there was not a protagonist and antagonist both present?
They have to both be there, Mike, or the whole thing simply flops, no matter the plot device employed.
One of the reasons people from literally all over the world, given the global nature of the Cape Charles Mirror, thanks to the wondrous invention of the internet by Al Gore, tune in here like those of us from the frozen north do, is to see what it is that you might say next, Mike, and usually, it is something, anyway, that keeps the people coming back, so well do you play your role of bein g the pissy one in here.
As to poofster, Mike, actually it is a more polite term than calling someone a queer.
Calling someone a queer serves to push them out of civilized society, which it could be argued is not civilized conduct, whereas poofster simply identifies someone as being a member of a distinct segment of civilized society.
The Brits are more tolerant of poofsters than perhaps Americans are of queers because the Brits have actually had royalty over there who have been poofsters, and if they thought their king was queer, it would be a slap at them as a people, since their king is dealt out to them by God.
Consider King James circa 1612, Mike, who replaced his one favourite, Sir Robert Carr, first Earl of Somerset (1587–1645), Viscount Rochester, as secretary of state with the handsome George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham (1592–1628), with whom James was said to have been infatuated.
It wouldn’t do, Mike, to call the king a queer.
“Poof,” or “poofster,” however, was not outside the pale.
See how those things work, Mike?
And what am I saying, of course you do, because you are at least as civilized as some king-loving Brit, if not more so, being an American, as you are.
And Lord Cornbury, who was the royal governor of New Jersey, where you are, and New York, was a poofster, and it didn’t keep him from getting ahead in politics, so poofster, anyway, really can’t be a pejorative for those reasons.
I ignore the flies and have drank many of them as they landed in my beer…once again this is much ado about nothing.