5 May—Today is the biennial local election day in eight of the nine Connecticut boroughs (Naugatuck borough is coextensive with the town, so the local election is in November), one town (Union), and one city (Groton). The local elections in Litchfield and Bantam are uncontested, with slates of pre-registered write-in candidates (required by a fairly recent anti-democratic, stupid, pain-in-the-ass state law) provided to be copied onto the ballots. Or not.

Tomorrow is the big Region 20 budget and bonding referendum in Goshen, Litchfield, Morris, and Warren. The cause or causes of the egregious and unacceptable budget deficit won’t be available until 12 May. So it’s not unreasonable to vote NO on the referendum questions tomorrow and reconsider the issues after all the information is in. And the budget is reduced, of course.

It hasn’t been publicized that the members of the Region 20 Board of Education have been given $250 backpacks in appreciation of their service. Certainly those volunteers, who probably do more work and certainly take more crap than any other volunteer board members, deserve recognition and thanks. But $250 backpacks when the region is running an indefensible deficit?

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Going on, then, pictured below is Antie Mame. She’s a Black carpenter ant who was scouting out a free meal around the cat bowls on the kitchen counter yesterday. She was good enough to pose—or at least stand still long enough—for a portrait, the first macrophoto ever taken with The Monitor’s cellphone. Then she got antsy and scooted off to who knows where. Don’t fail to notice her cute little mandibles on the left and hairy ass on the right.

We assume that Antie Mame is a female of the species Camponotus pennsylvanicus because she’s a worker. As with many species, including Homo sapiens, females do the work while too many males just screw around. Unlike in human society, however, in ant society workers live longer than studs (a.k.a. drones), who drop dead after they do the only thing they’re good for.

Antie Mame is at least a couple of months old and may live several more months if she watches her diet and is lucky enough to forage in formicophilic venues. (Don’t bother looking up the word. You won’t find it. But it means ant-friendly. And you saw it here first.)

It’s interesting to note that a distant cousin of Antie Mame’s from Southeast Asia, Colobopsis saundersi (a.k.a. Camponotus saundersi), the Malaysian exploding ant (a.k.a. suicide ant), is one of the few insect species whose workers can actually explode aggressively—and of course suicidally—as an ultimate act in defense of their respective homelands.

The ultimate sacrifice is true patriotism, not the type that Dr. Johnson called “the last refuge of scoundrels” and politicians of all persuasions blather about . . .