MONKEY POLITICS

I am pleased to announce that the monkeys - whom I haven't actually seen in my garden since they hired a shrewd new PR manager - came by some time during the last couple of days while I was at the office (the PR guy has my schedule on his Blueberry), sampled my radishes, went Ptah! Ptooey!, pulled up some more and threw them around to register their disgust and disappointment, as well as their puzzlement over why one of their generally reliable providers would purposely plant such a revolting item in blatant violation of our unspoken contract their ancestors drew up unilaterally about a million years ago, when we humans left the beastly path and began climbing the precipitous road to higher intelligence and its attendant burdens of honesty, integrity etc., qualities still too heavy for monkeys and politics.

When I went out this morning to get some radishes and saw the mini-chaos the disappointed absentee landlords had left, I noted with satisfaction that the token radishes they had pulled up and bitten bitterly to register their extreme disapproval of my gardening behavior were mostly small ones (strike one against the new manager), leaving the larger and ready-to-eat ones for me to harvest (strike two) and making room for the smaller ones to grow. They had helped thin out my radishes! (Strike three.) I think the axe is about to fall, and a new PR manager soon to be hired from among those who answer the ad in Monkey BusinessWatch. There are mental rumors that the ousted PR guy will go into politics.

Next year I'll plant some red peppers where this year's radishes were, see what happens to the new guy.