Blessed Be, and don't have a drink in your mouth while watching this.
{You may ruin your keyboard & screen.}
Dr. Strangelove.
Well, Patriots, what was once a carefree time of year has been co-opted into a season of skwerlien debauchery. For, as many of you know, the second week in October was declared National Squirrel Awareness week in 2000 (England proceeded the States with its own National Red Squirrel Week in 1998).
We're not quite sure who to blame for this commemoration. Also note that the starting date varies from year-to-year, place-to-place. For example, there's seems to be disagreement as to when the second week in October starts. Some say it begins on the Sunday after the first full week. Others begin festivities on the first Sunday of the month (unless the first Sunday is the first day of the month...). It's confusing, but the week's timing and who's responsible for it isn't as important as what to do about it.
Sure, we could intiate a campaign to do away with this national embarrassment. Or, perhaps we should promote Skwerl Awareness Week as a time to drive the bushytails back into their forest hovels where they can gambol around with all their skwerlvert eco-terrorist friends. Then we could release an army of famished wolves into the forest and... well, you can see where we're going with this...HEY! THE NEXT NAT'L SQUIRREL AWARENESS WEEK BEGINS:
Blessed Be our furry little friends!
Dr. S
Listen up, singletons. If you've given up on the dating scene and resigned yourself to a lifetime of solitude culminating in a fatal fall in the shower and subsequent consumption by starving house pets, here's something else to fret about:
You're a member of the only minority subject to officially sanctioned discrimination--call it singlism.
As one of our nation's 90 million unmarried citizens, I've become inured to the social pressure to couple up--the backhanded insults and armchair psychoanalysis meted out by friends, co-workers, and well-meaning strangers at the bus stop whenever my marital status comes under scrutiny. And, believe me, I've heard it all. Selfish? Check. Immature? Check. Emotionally unstable? Check. Too picky for my own good? Check, check, and check.
But I've never bought into the prevailing notion that a perfectly fulfilling singular existence is little more than a karmic consolation prize. As far as I'm concerned, there's no more unfulfilling existence than one spent trapped with the wrong person. Take my word for it--a loveless marriage will sap your spirit and your sanity a lot more quickly than a lifetime of dateless Saturday nights. For me, then, and for many of the 41% of adults in this country who are single, singlehood is not merely the right choice. It is the responsible choice.
That's why I'm always so perplexed when confronted with evidence that the rest of the world believes otherwise.
From the workplace to the voting booth to your own backyard, the message to singles is clear, consistent, and omnipresent: Married:good! Single: bad! And, just to be sure you don't miss the point, there's no shortage of folks ready to pile on, just itching to remind you that, no matter how responsible and productive a member of society you think you are, without that "special someone" waiting for you at home, you are but a societal dilettante, unworthy of the rights, privileges and respect extended so enthusiastically to the coupled.
Single people make up a significant portion of the workforce, so you might think their employers would make at least a token effort to keep them happy. You'd be wrong. In their zeal to appear "family friendly," companies often overcompensate at the expense of singles, pressuring unmarried employees to travel more frequently, work more weekends and holidays, stay later during the week and refrain from taking time off during school vacation season, regardless of rank or seniority.
Not that all this extra work translates into a higher salary. A 2004 study by economists Kate Antonovics and Robert Town found that marriage increases men's wages by as much as 27%. All told, when pension, insurance and other benefits are factored in, married workers frequently end up out-earning their single counterparts by thousands of dollars a year.
Corporate America isn't any friendlier to singles on the consumer side of the equation, opting instead to shower their discounts on the wedded in the form of preferred insurance rates and "family" memberships at gyms and country clubs. And if you're considering a solo cruise or vacation to a posh resort or spa, make sure you've saved up enough to cover the "singles supplement" you'll be charged for daring to occupy an entire room by yourself. Happy trails!
Unfair, you cry? Don't look to the government for any redress, because they're in on it too. Anti-discrimination laws cover race, religion, gender and age--but singles go woefully unprotected at the federal level. In fact, when it comes to singlism, the government is one of the worst offenders, waving the tax code like a magical fairy wand of approval over married couples.
As a single homeowner, you can pay the same sale price, down payment, mortgage interest and property tax as that lovely couple in the identical house down the street--but should you choose to sell your home, you are entitled to only half the maximum capital gains exemption they will receive.
And, whatever you do, don't die--at least not if you have loved ones and want to leave stuff to them. A married couple can leave each other as much property, retirement savings and Social Security benefits as the surviving spouse can carry off, tax free. A single person's property, however, can be subject to all manner of taxes, or, in the case of Social Security payments, funneled back into the Federal trough in their entirety, regardless of total lifetime contributions.
For the record, I don't begrudge married people their due. And I will gladly pony up my share of the cost to keep the playgrounds open and public schools afloat. Contributing to the common good is the price we all pay for living in a civilized world, and if I can make someone else's life a little easier in the process, then, hey, more power to me. Besides, I'd rather have your children sitting in class perfecting their spitball skills than screaming in the restaurant booth beside me.
But I refuse to accept the idea that marriage alone should call for entitlements. After all, if single really is so bad, why are there so many of us? Why are we the fastest-growing demographic in the country today? And why, for every single deemed "unlucky in love," do I know a half-dozen more who deem themselves "lucky to have gotten out of that last nightmare relationship in one piece?"
The fact is, more and more Americans are deciding to marry when it's right and if it's right--not whether or not it's right. That's a state of affairs worth being thankful for. Now, if we could just get the singlists off our backs.
Leslie Talbot is the author of Singular Existence: Because It's Better to Be Alone Than to Wish You Were!

Officials in Berlin reported an overly aggressive squirrel brutally savaging three people in a town before a 72-year-old man was able to bravely wield of its attacks with his wooden old-man cane.
The attacks began like so many others we have reported. An innocent 70-year-old lady sat quietly in her house, likely sewing or baking pie. Unbeknownst to her, a squirrel tenderly sneaked into her house, stalking her every move.
At the opportune moment, it sprung to life and before she could even react, it sank its teeth into her hand. Overwhelmed by the ferocity of the attack, the woman ran into the street, frantically trying to shake off the squirrel, according to police.
With the taste of human flesh fresh in its mouth, the squirrel continued its attacks. On a building site, a grizzled construction worker was simply tending to tasks in a building. With the blinding speed and raw power of an Olympian, reports indicate the squirrel leapt up onto the worker and attacked his harm. Shaken, and desperate, the construction worker lunged for a weapon -a measuring pole- and wielded it to try to ward the beast away from him.
Not phased after taking down two humans, the squirrel decided to go for the Hat Trick. He wanted a third victim.
Running on a 2-0 win streak versus humans, the squirrel spotted what he thought would be his next victim -a 72-year-old man- in a garden.
Not wasting a second, the squirrel lunged at the man and began its attack. A spokesman had this to say;
“…the squirrel went into the 72-year-old man’s garden and massively attacked him on the arms, hand and thigh.”
Somewhere, somehow, this man was able to overcome the initial injuries and reach for his cane, well, crutch and fight back against the squirrel. He reached deep and was able to deliver an ultimate dose of ownage in the name of mankind. The man managed to kill the squirrel with his crutch.
Make no mistake, however, that spring is just starting and with this squirrel now being a martyr, this is likely the first of a new string of animal attacks on humans.
Blessed Be, and keep The Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch handy.
Dr. S.
April 2, 2007 issue - Four 11- and 12-year-old girls stood in front of my open pantry, mouths gaping wide. "Look! Fruit Roll-Ups!" "Oh, my God! Chocolate-chip cookies!" "You have regular potato chips? We only get the soy kind!"
After 14 years and four kids, I thought I'd feel comfortable as a mother. Instead, I'm increasingly aware of a prickly new sensation: that I'm some kind of renegade. Who knew that buying potato chips would become a radical act? Or that letting my daughters walk home from school alone would require administration approval? How did I, a middle-of-the-road mom, become a social deviant?
Fear is the new fuel of the American mom. If it's not fear of her child becoming obese, it's the fear of falling behind, missing out on a sports scholarship or winding up with a thin college-rejection envelope.
Apparently I'm not nervous enough. Last summer while I was loafing in front of the TV with my kids, the most benign things morphed into menaces. For example, the sun: long-sleeved, UV-protective swimsuits were all the rage at my neighborhood pool, while I could barely remember to bring the year-old sunscreen. The water wasn't safe either: at the beach I saw tots dressed in flotation belts and water wings—for shelling along the shore. And goodbye, cotton candy and hot dogs! At a major-league game I saw moms and dads nix the stuff as if they'd never eaten the occasional ballpark treat. As if their children would balloon into juvenile-diabetes statistics if a single swig of sugary soda passed their lips.
Half my kids' friends—who already make A's and B's—had summer tutors in order to "keep it fresh." I thought vacation was for relaxing and recharging. What would our pioneer foremoms think? (You want something to worry about, let me show you frostbite, typhoid and bears!) Heck, what must our own mothers think? (Snap out of it! Go worry about something truly scary, like how you're going to pay for retirement!)
I thought that once the kids were back in school, things would calm down. Instead, a fresh seasonal crop of anxiety sprouted, this time over corruptive candy fund-raisers and insufficient use of hand sanitizer. I know one mom who wants to change her son's schedule because he doesn't know anyone in his classes; she's worried he'll be "socially traumatized" all year. Another is afraid of a learning disability she just read about, though her child seems bright and charming to me.
And then there's playground panic. I had to laugh when an Australian study recently found that playground injuries continue to rise despite safety improvements. One of the suspected reasons: the safe new play structures are so boring that kids are taking more risks in order to have fun.
The fears are as irrational as they are rampant. Recently my children's elementary school failed to meet adequate yearly progress goals for a particular minority's reading progress under the No Child Left Behind Act and was placed on a warning list. This meant parents might gain the right to transfer their children to another school in the district. Never mind that this very same school sent more kids to the district's gifted program than any other, or that this entire district has the highest SAT scores in the state. The day the news broke, six different moms (none in the affected minority) asked me if I was planning to transfer my kids. From neighborhood pride and joy to threat to child's future overnight.
It's not that I think parents shouldn't worry about anything. I'm personally petrified of SUV drivers on cell phones. I fret as much as the next mom about how to pay for college. I pray my kids won't wander onto MySpace and post something dumb.
But you can't go around afraid of everything. It's too exhausting! No matter how careful you are, bad stuff happens (diaper rash, stitches, all your friends assigned to another class). And it's seldom the end of the world.
Watching my daughter's friends ogle my pantry, I realized there's one big, legitimate fear that I haven't heard anybody mention: what's the effect of our collective paranoia on the kids? Yes, these very kids we want to be so self-sufficient, responsible, confident, happy and creative (not to mention not food-obsessed). They're growing up thinking these weirdly weenie views are healthy and normal.
Walking out my front door that day, each girl happily clutched a plastic baggie stuffed with the exotic kid snacks that my daughter had doled out in pity. I may be a rebel mom, but at least I'm not afraid of a chocolate-chip cookie.
Spencer lives in Chapel Hill, N. C.
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17770831/site/newsweek/page/2/