November 2021

It's incredibly important to get rid of an invasive species. They wreak havoc on a habitat, resulting in death and destruction for many other species that they impact. It is completely understandable for the Maui Invasive Species Committee to work hard at eliminating all of the non-native coqui frogs from the area in order to stop the damage already occurring and prevent further damage. That doesn't mean I can't still be saddened by the loss of these frogs.

As a cranberry cocktail lover who tries to avoid extra sugar, November cocktails get complicated for me. Once in a while you find a diet flavor but it's usually pretty terrible. I saw that Skinny Syrups is selling cranberry flavored syrup without sugar this year so I may try that out and see how it works, especially in my favorite, cranberry lemon-lime soda.

A man is getting a lot of heat for swapping his cat in secret, without telling his wife, in order to get a better-behaved pet in the mix. Six years ago, he got rid of his wife's hissing, scratching cat, brought home an "identical" one and they've since gotten married without her even knowing. He swears it was because the previous cat wasn't one that could be tamed any better but most people don't think it was a very kind thing to do, to say the least.

Do your pets do weird things around you? Sometimes it feels like it's just their quirky personalities. Sometimes it seems like they just want attention, which is often the case! Pets do their best to communicate their needs to us and frankly it's impressive that they can do that with another species at all.

It seems like every year a variety of stories about misogyny circle around the web, including tales of women's pain being scoffed at or ignored by doctors, and not much seems to come out of it. We worry over people not trusting the medical community lately, but they have good reason. Women, especially Black and indigenous women, have been experimented on without anesthesia because doctors actually believed that they didn't feel pain. We continue to use the tools developed in these experiments today, and the medical community hasn't evolved much from that mindset, either.

When it comes to adult animation, everyone has their favorite episodes. Over Halloween I re-watched some of my old favorite Halloween South Park episodes only to realize that I don't like much of them anymore. Some of the jokes are still funny but most were just annoying. Has Family Guy gone the same way over the years?