How do you keep deer from eating rare plants? Gary Horn, a volunteer steward at Salt Creek Prairie in western Cook County and an employee of Brookfield Zoo, tried scattering human hair around the plants, then lion hair, and finally succeeded with his “ultimate weapon,” reports Natural Area Notes (February 1988)–leopard droppings. “According to Gary, leopard dung has a smell beyond imagining. He reports that his rare plants flowered and set seed with little disturbance from hungry deer.”
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“Chicago’s leading tourist attraction,” according to its president and director, Dr. James S. Kahn, is the Museum of Science and Industry, which broke its all-time attendance record last year, when 4,383,474 people visited it.
“Your environment can’t drop 500 points,” advises the Vassa View, so spend–on a Vassa Group redesign of your home, of course. “I don’t know how many people ‘held off’ on the design work they really wanted in their homes or offices because their money was ‘working’ for them in the stock market . . . but it’s more than a few. What I do know is that those families and business people who didn’t wait, who understood the 24-hour-a-day pleasure, the seven-day-a-week pride and the 12-months-a-year of efficiency and comfort that the proper furnishings and design can provide, well, those individuals have and will continue to benefit from something the market can’t take away.”
“Casimir Pulaski is not someone we need a holiday from school and work for,” writes Michael H. Brownstein in a letter to Substance (February 1988). “I will assign a report on Pulaski to my sixth grade class like I do for every holiday . . . [But] he is not a George Washington, Abe Lincoln, or a Martin Luther King. Yes, he fought in a war to free our country. Yes, he knew George Washington. So did Benjamin Franklin. Should we have a day for Benjamin Franklin? Of course not. . . . I don’t know about my fellow public school teachers, but it sure is hard for me to keep a straight face when I explain [this holiday] to my classroom.”
