Aim High

You know when it's coming time for soccer matches by the sound of shotguns. Nobody knows who actually released the first breeding pairs of kindergeier on American shores. The surviving urban left blames it on some fringe right-wing "get off my lawn" types, and the right blames it on the left's "we need to return to mother gaia" types (given they were behind the wolf reintroduction and effectively banned wolf hunting until it was irrefutable that the Northern Dire Wolf was indeed neither natural nor sticking to their mad scientist's lair far away from jogging trails.) I personally suspect it was some mad scientist who either didn't live long enough to take the credit, or was too ashamed of the real results of releasing fifteen-foot flying predators on American suburbia and rural habitats.

You see, they were beautiful and scary predators when in Africa (and who was the very drunk Afrikaner who confused one with a lammergeier, anyway? They're clearly mostly pterodacytl.) Once the average suburban mom realized their child was in danger... well, now we hold combined soccer and sporting clays, and every mom encouraging little Johnny or Susie on has a shotgun loaded with depleted uranium. Sure, they're shooting small clay disks - but the real competition is to see which team can bring down a kindergeier attracted by the sound and sight of a lot of children running around an open field. According to the records, soccer games these days are a whole lot more civilized, now that every audience member has a shotgun. I'm not so certain about that - because the ladies don't put their shotguns down when they go indoors for the PTA meetings, under the certainty that "predators are always out there." And you should see some of the, ah, more aggressively run meetings when a new educator or teacher imported from the concrete jungles and their liberal arts schools tries to bring the Old Progressive ideals of Re-Education up...

(We've also lost a couple teachers in our district, over the years, who didn't realize that the juveniles go after children, but the adults will just as happily go after a full-sized human. Lost a lot of ATF agents, too, but not many moonshiners - city folks never look up.)

Leafing out

Kudzu may have been the most successful plant in terms of fast growth that an evil overlord has released on the world, but it is eventually doomed to failure since nobody likes it. His mentor's evil abomination that will take over the world, mint, is far more successful - although the old man, if he hadn't been killed by some vigilantes with torches and pitchforks, would have objected to me calling all his strains by one single "mint."

Sadly, those evil geniuses working on the plant-based domination have to contend with smaller successes than the ones bent on hydrogen bombs or earthquakes tearing California off the continent (even if the latter seems to have a large number of sympathizers who keep smuggling his research notes out to satellite minion labs.) However, they are much longer lasting - while the ability to control the Vile Felines that stalk men didn't quite work out, we're all pretty pleased at "catnip" anyway, as the flowers will draw the 180-pound predators mindlessly into even the most obvious trap, and leave the wooded suburbs and exurban prairies safer for our children to play. (If the city dwellers are too afraid of guns to plant the traps, well, they're welcome to be hunted in their concrete jungles.)

Yeah, that one will work out for generations to come, a positive and lasting legacy for Dr. Menthe. Though personally, I'm even fonder of the chocolate mint - made, I'm told, to try to keep his Chief Assistant happier once a month. Whatever the actual reason (though I'm pretty sure a woman was involved in there somewhere), it's made the supply of something chocolate much steadier, and the female half of the population much easier to get along with - even when the kraken disrupt the flow of coffee and cacao northward.

Still wish he'd gotten a good coffee mint growing before he met his untimely end.