Word: pests
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Rolling Hills Estates has an urban pest problem. The varmint travels in packs, digs holes in lawns, eats flower gardens, poops around pools and spas and, worst of all, starts screeching as early as 4 a.m. For sheer irritation, rats, raccoons, skunks, pigeons and possums are no match for the more than 150 wild peacocks that infest this otherwise tranquil, posh Southern California community. The flock -- often 30 to 40 birds roosting in a single tree -- descends from six Indian peafowl released on the Palos Verdes Peninsula...
...trouble inhaling and eventually had to wear masks. Not since the Mediterranean fruit-fly scares of the early and late 1980s has California's $18 billion agriculture industry, which during winter supplies close to 90% of the fresh produce in the continental U.S., been so alarmed by a pest...
...secret of much murder and evildoing is to dehumanize the victim, to make him alien, to make him Other, a different species. When we have done that, we have prepared ourselves to kill him, for to kill the Other, to kill a snake, a roach, a pest, a Jew, a scorpion, a black, a centipede, a Palestinian, a hyena, an Iraqi, a wild dog, an Israeli...
...armpits, piercing nasal voice and snorting laugh, he's the nerd who came to dinner. When he isn't rattling off irrelevant factoids ("Did you know there are 99.3 million cows in the U.S.?") or speaking Japanese with the high school principal, he is making a general pest of himself with the family down the block. He is especially smitten with their 15-year-old daughter Laura, whom he showers with pet names ("Hi, my little Jell-O mold") to no avail. One night he even shows up outside her bedroom window to woo her with an accordion serenade...
Unknown in North America until 1988, the zebra mussel has become a pest whose exploding population has prompted alarming predictions of millions of dollars' worth of damage to water-supply systems and the ruination of the sport-fishing industry. A year ago, the city of Monroe, Mich., lost its water supply for two full days because intake lines were plugged with zebra mussels. Earlier, Ford Motor's casting plant in Windsor, Ont., found the creatures choking off the flow of cooling water to its furnaces. Boaters, meanwhile, have watched their hulls and engines become encrusted with mussels...