Posted by Gremlin [24.8.18.225 - c-24-8-18-225.client.comcast.net] on 29 June 2004 at 14.00.20 ZuluTime:

In Reply to: Re: Bleh. posted by Hunter on 29 June 2004 at 00.27.25 ZuluTime:

Why not. I've got half an hour to kill before I can counterattack anyway. Here's the new development....
     Six weeks ago, it started raining in here. The official reason was that the morons upstairs had been evicted and, in retaliation, had turned on all the water along with the airconditioning, creating a glacier; then, the fact that I smoke somehow caused the glacier to melt, resulting in several hundred gallons of water raining through the ceiling in here.
     Of course, the city's engineers worked out that it was actually substandard pipes blowing out when water cooked to about two hundred degrees had nowhere better to go; but that's just a matter of fact, which has little to do with the laughable excuses of criminals.
     Given the general insurmountability of the bullshit here, one of the neighbourhood liasions asked the people running this place why they couldn't just relocate me to another unit. Of course, the reason was that these people tend to rent out all the other units about an hour before bothering to evict the last people they'd rented them out to. So that the place above me, in which a glacier never actually existed [I went up and looked for one] had been rented out to Kristen Taylor at approximately the instant that the last morons had got thrown out.
     Not that I could possibly know that her name is Kristen Taylor, or how to spell it, since Fair Housing laws explcitly forbid this place from letting me read her file. So, until or unless James Randi hears about it, we'll just say I'm psychic. Or that this place is run by criminals. Could be either. Apply Ockham's Razor at will.
     So. Yesterday, when I could have been talking to lawyers about suing this place into extinction, I instead had to deal with this new problem. Which was Taylor, being an organism of more audacity than education, started throwing biohazardous waste off its balcony into my backyard. That, and the branches she'd ripped off my tree because her kids were eating the berries.
     That alone tells me something of interest. This creature moved into an existing place, above an existing place, containing an existing tree. It took the thing until yesterday to notice that trees tend to produce fruit. Then, it solved that unacceptable issue by tearing the tree apart and dropping these rended branches into my yard. Next to this shit she should have redbagged and shot into orbit.
     Now...this isn't me. I've worked with cadavers of several species, including homosapiens. It doesn't bother me. I've had dead rats bloat up to the volume of footballs [the American ones (uh, the American footballs; the rats were Norwegian)] and I was okay with it. I've had pet alligators, who smelled like tyrannosaurs--which is to say that they smelled like walking slaughterhouses...which they kinda were, thinking about it. It doesn't bother me, in moderation.
     The problem is this: the biohazard out back was moderate, in that the sheer megatonnage of stench wafting out of Taylor's place upstairs through its opened windows overpowered this toxic waste with more of the same.
     So, I spent most of the day in the office, waiting for them to get hold of Taylor; when they finally did, the creature confessed to ripping apart the tree, since its larvae were eating it, and throwing the branches down here, but the biohazard wasn't its fault, since...since it said so.
     Which leads to a few neat bits of new information.
     The landlords, being known criminals, have nothing in particular to say about backyards. Which is to say that they can't prevent this Taylor anomaly from destroying my tree and littering my yard with it. Which is also to say, curiously, that they can't prevent me from hitting HomeDepot and buying a plastic sign for my fence, readable from above, onto which I intend to Sharpie out:

NO TRESPASSING
NO DUMPING
NO GOD