Um… Yeah. When you live by the water you kind of have to expect the smell of rotting marine life. (Fortunately for me, where I live the stench stays several blocks north of my house. Not that I live in an expensive house on Dumas Bay.) You know what? If there’s something unpleasant about where you want to buy a house, you either need to live with it or else don’t buy a house there. Seaweed + Sun = Stench. That’s just the way it is. I agree with the resident who thinks it’s silly for the city to spend almost 100 kilobucks to study the situation. He gets it.
Eh, maybe I’m being too critical. When people with money complain, things get done. Maybe they’ll be able to reduce the amount of agricultural runoff going into the water. If we could do that up here, then maybe our oyster beds would be viable.
Reminds me of the people who move out to farm country and then start complaining about
The smell of fertilizer
Farmers working late with noisy machinery during the harvest
No doubt if these people moved to actual wilderness they’d complain about the screams of little furry and feathered creatures being eaten alive by bigger furry and feathered creatures.
Seems to mark a basic lack of understanding of how the world actually works…
Or the people who buy a house within 2 blocks of a busy airport or AFB and then complain about the noise (when the airport/AFB was built back when the area was miles from town).
Then there’s always the surprise about how roosters start crowing at about 4 a.m. I’m an early bird, so this never bothered me at all. But boy howdy, some city transplants sure get pissed off.
But the city transplants don’t try to keep their kids from trespassing in and stealing from orchards.
Perhaps the tax dollars going to the study to determine where the smell is coming from should include another buck fifty and offer some innovative solutions for this natural process. I wonder if anyone considered taking that seaweed and creating biofuel from it?
The rich people in my city (and many others) are also unaware of the nature of rivers - i.e. like Willie Nelson, they get high occasionally. “Ohmigod, the river is flooding the backyard of my two million dollar riverside home!” Shut up.
One of the other peeves here is the local music fests - condos were built close to where the music fests have been held for decades, and of course the new tenants want the music fests shut down because they’re too loud. Surprise! I hate that my city even entertains complaints from idiots like this - do your homework, fools. These festivals in the park aren’t any kind of secret.
Yeah, I hate that. Around here it’s people who build houses out in the country and then complain about the smelly horses or farming, or else build out by the airport and are then surprised by the airplanes. :rolleyes:
I hate when an old racetrack gets shut down because people gripe about the noise. The track was built in the middle of nowhere 50 years ago. The reason people came to the area was because of the track.
For too many years some people in the most affluent part of an otherwise affluent (aside from, oh, ME…but I do love it here) valley have been feeding said elk too close to their overpriced houses and condos over the winter. Therefore they get elk wandering too close to their houses, followed by wolves who are looking for an elk dinner.
So stop feeding the elk by your house! “But…they’ll STARVE if we don’t feed them!”
Yep, some of them might, but the rest will eventually wander back away from your houses, and the wolves will follow them…AWAY FROM YOU. Win-win.
I have a friend that is always complaining about the wild hogs(and, to a lesser extent, deer)in his yard. Blah blah blah they’re everywhere, they tear up my garden, they charge at my little yap yap dog, etc. It’s really, REALLY annoying. I wish I could just tell him that he shouldn’t have been one of the countless morons that dislikes nature but still wants a big home on a huge lot so they can be antisocial and not have to interact with other humans. The kind of people that don’t have the balls to rough it in actual wilderness so they bring their suburban McMansions into beautiful rural countryside and totally fuck it all to hell.
We have a salt pond that stinks from time to time. Outraged residents complain, the government should do this and that, who cares about the birds etc. But … that’s what salt ponds do. I was given the choice not to live close to a salt pond, and I went with that option. Now and again it floods with fresh water after heavy rains and kills all the fish - more outrage, more stink, more roll eyes from people who love to visit the area, brimming with wildlife, but not suitable for human habitation. In fact if they hadn’t landfilled on the beach side the pond would probably drain better, but there’ll always be times when it stinks.
In my parents’ prior (very suburban) subdivision, it was deer that they were trying to feed. Leading to this series of hilarity:
Put out food to attract deer, so the poor things don’t starve.
Deer find expensive, designer plants (hostas, etc) to be more to their liking, and gobble up everyone’s expensive gardens.
Spend more money re-fixing gardens (to be eaten again), and buying crazy stuff to keep deer from eating gardens (doesn’t work).
Meanwhile, raccoons find that they like the uneaten deer food just fine, thanks.
Raccoon population explosion. Consternation about disease!, children getting bitten, etc.
Deer food still left out – the poor things will starve!
Large numbers of baby raccoons attract hungry coyotes. Turns out that hungry coyotes aren’t too particular about what little critters they eat – and also gobble up kittens and small annoying dogs.
Mind you, my parents still think I’m a bad, bad man for laughing so much about it all.
I used to live in an area rife with prostitution and junkies. But the houses were big late 19th century type buildings and living was cheap.
Then the housing prices went up and all the “newcomers” stupid enough to buy million-euro houses there started complaining about the whores and junkies. So now the prostitutes are somewhere in a god-forsaken place next to the free way, the junkies moved somewhere else, and prices are still rising meaning students can no longer afford to live there.
It’s not like I want the elk to starve. But if some of them do, well, nature’s a bitch sometimes. Sorry, elk.
And when they were in the DC suburbs my stepdad fantasized about getting a bow to take out the deer that would wander through the yard. Nobody would hear, and they would have venison! Win-win, really, apart from the pesky laws about such things.
Peter Mayle, in one of his books about Provence, recounts this story. Probably an invention of Provencal country folk, but it’s believable.
If you’ve ever been to the south of France, or for that matter, anywhere in the Mediterranean, you’d know that cicadas are everywhere in the summer. The very air pulses with their shimmering, pulsing, metallic whir. A Parisian on holiday in Provence called the front desk of the hotel and asked the manager if he couldn’t please do something about the cicadas as they were keeping him from having his nap.
I guess the “clueless city folks unable to cope with country realities” meme is common everywhere.
