Unfortunately, the alternate option was not “let them stay hostage a while longer”. It was “let the hostages die”. And maybe that would have been the more ethical call. But let’s not delude ourselves that they could have been kept alive any other way.

Does Arizona not have an online free system? Illinois has a very hand-holding guided set of questions and has for years, it’s always been our federal taxes that make my head hurt to fill out via the IRS’s FreeFillableForms site.

Her son died of cancer as a young adult. I have wondered if the abdominal xray while she was pregnant contributed to that.

It’s such a creepy biological characteristic. Bedbugs are mildly social, and prefer to sleep near other bedbugs. But the traumatic insemination seems to be unpleasant for the females, and after enough holes are poked all over their bodies, they will leave the main colony. A single inseminated female hitchhiker is normally how they infest new places.

It has a lot of dissolved water that, if exposed to atmospheric pressure, boils off. So it could be said to have components that are boiling?

Beds predate language. Non-human apes build “nests” - beds in trees - to sleep in.

Haha, but batbugs and birdbugs - bedbug cousins that prefer the blood of bats or birds - are a thing. Bedbugs and their preference for specifically human blood evolved alongside primates starting to build sleeping structures.

Considering the size of the Canadian tomato industry (all greenhouse), it does seem like bananas should also solve. Just bananas can’t pack as densely as tomatoes, but maybe throw one banana tree in every dozen rows of tomatoes or something. A girl can dream.

Ha, poor kitty.

Fun fact, a banana is technically an herb and not a tree.

It’s more likely they ship poorly. Same reason the tastiest tomato or strawberry varieties are not the ones grown commercially.

I live in the Midwest, and had a coworker with a banana plant (I think a Cavendish). He cut it down and dug up the root ball to bring inside every winter. Every few years, the weather was warm enough long enough the thing actually made bananas.

It is sad that while there are so many interesting banana varieties all around the world, only two of them ship for crap. In addition to cool-sounding fruity varieties, one variety is so starchy it used to be the base starch the diet of local people instead of a grain, how neat is that?