Word: vermin
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...living as small populations off the natural fat of the land. Taking food production into our own hands, we stepped outside the local ecosystem. All but a few cultivated plants became weeds, and all but a few domesticated herds, pets and game animals became pests and vermin...
...help make ends meet, Penn threw open its doors to vermin like me, admitting 4,491 students, a thousand more than in 1970. I wasn't aware of this either, but Penn clearly was and no doubt looked upon my class the way a bankrupt duchess might view the tourists using her castle as a bed-and-breakfast. Universities may lack the profit imperative that drives corporations, but they are just as fiercely competitive, always striving to get the best students, the best scholars, the best grants in order to attain the most prestige. Like every other top-tier institution...
...their antennae and affix a tiny backpack of electric circuits and batteries to their carapace. The electrodes prod them to turn left and right, go backward and forward. The plan is to equip them with minicameras or other sensory devices so that they can crawl into pipes to track vermin or, in a more heroic endeavor, be sent into earthquake rubble to locate survivors. Sewage inspection should suit them just fine: cockroaches are scavengers that eat their own. A spokesman for Combat Insect Control Systems, which makes household insecticides, says there is no shortage of roaches for such duties (more...
What if we discovered beings millions of years more advanced than us? We may be no more than raw material, food or vermin standing in the way of their exploiting our resources. Why should we expect them to be benign and kinder to us than we were to the now extinct dodo? Perhaps the vast distances of space and the limits of relativity are a blessing. We might be better advised to listen more and broadcast less. RICHARD MARSHALL Tongaat, South Africa...
Irritating. Endlessly irritating. The increasingly unintelligible, high-pitched whine of these wretched bugs cavorting in toilets and a jock strap is enough to cure anyone complaining of sanity. Sure, a barber shop quartet starring disease-carrying vermin rates high on anyone's cuteness scale, but after a funk number, or a gospel number, or the film's opening chorus...one just wants to crawl under a carpet and take a quiet...