Patriots, how many times has this happened to you: a quiet day in the park is turned into unmitigated mayhem by a horde of marauding bushytails? We reckon more times than you care to recall.

Of course, we blame most chitterbox aggression on Tufty the Traffic Safety Squirrel, his Squirrel Enforcement Army (SEA), and their pursuit of squirrel world domination.

But even Tufty is unable to control all his minions. Thus, we often receive reports of skwerlball aggression that go far beyond the pale of even the worst SEA atrocity.

We're talking about renegade nutzy gangs such as Squirrel Nutkin and His Seven Deadly Squirrels and outlaw skwerlballs such as Stockton Dupres and his Kentucky Squirrel Nation (see links below).

While skwerlien gangs are nothing new, indicators suggest that gang activity is on the rise and its victims are desperate. Consider Patriot Gshuey's report from Stuyvesant Town in New York City...

Stuyvesant Town, ( New advertising slogan: A park runs through it - hmmm) is home to hundreds of well fed, aggressive, mind-controlling nut bandits - in the heart of new york city - Black skwerl gangs and Grey skwerl gangs of new york.

They clearly move in packs, and many of them are quite expert at human-mind-control, and have convinced their human hosts to grovel before them with bags of nuts.

In the core of the residential area, someone in 'management' has seen to it to install larger-than-life statues of skwerls, right outside the children's playgrounds where they loom over the innocents, and all of the convenience stores nearby display bags of nuts prominently near the cash registers for 'impulse buying' as if we had a choice. I'm not kidding.

scenes from the wasteland - click thumbs for large versions

As for the effects on the community, consider my plight.

It started innocently enough. I mean i never really thought about squirrels - oh, sure I'd see one once in a while, they're kind of cute, you know?

Then I started spending more time in Stuyvesant Town and I began noticing them more and more.

Sometimes their furry gamboling was a welcome relief from the hard-edged lifelessness of the urban jungle, and I slipped into actually enjoying their presence.

One day, I don't know why, I bought a bag of peanuts. I've always enjoyed peanuts, and I can stop eating them anytime I want to.

Well, I gave a squirrel one. It came up to me and fixed me with a hungry look, and held its little paws up and I just couldn't help myself...

Then it happened again, and again, and well - what started with me lording the peanut over a sweet little bushytail came to a desperate realization of my powerlessness before them: I went outside one morning, with only a few peanuts in my pocket, and was quickly surrounded by a horde of the busytailed demons - It's almost as though they could sense my fear (click skwerl for hideous chitter). A voice in my head told me that the safe choice would be to always have enough peanuts for my friends. Always.

Now that I've got the nuts, no trouble. But I'm uncomfortable, no, worried. I've got a squirrel on my back. It didn't happen all at once, but I find myself with a two-bags-of-peanuts-a-day habit, and now I can't stop.

The squirrels are everywhere. I hear them in the trees at night, in the mornings when i wake up. They're waiting.

Is there anything I can do to save myself before i descend to new lows of skwerl-hugging depravity?

There's a peanut in my pocket right now.

Patriots, our experts tell us the situation in Stuyvesant Town is not unexpected. Metropolitan Life Insurance Company developed Stuyvesant decades ago as housing for working class families. Back then, the local skwerls were nothing more than fugacious annoyances, fodder for the area's cats, and targets for Red Ryder BB guns.

However, Met Life's committment to providing reasonably priced housing in Stuyvesant took a turn as New York City's over all housing costs skyrocketed.

The company's current strategy is to upgrade the units in Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village, the 11,250-apartment, 110-building rental complexes that run from East 14th Street to 23rd Street as they become vacant. This enables Met Life to legally increase rents beyond what the average wage earner can afford (click skwerl for comment).

As a result, the area is slowly losing its unique character as it "upscales" to a yuppified island of pathetic skwerlhuggery (hence the erection of the bronze idols pictured above). An intolerable situation in our opinion.

As for Patriot Gshuey, he wonders if there's anything he can do to avoid descending "to new lows of skwerl-hugging depravity."

In fact, the answer is in his pocket. It's a known fact that the average chitterbox will trample their own mother to get a delicious nut.

Thus, we suggest that Patriot Gshuey recruit like-minded residents, form a local Anti-Squirrel Coalition brigade, lure the offending bushytails into an ambush with a trail of delicious nuts, and then do the right thing...

A LOCAL SKWERLHUGGER RESPONDS...

I live in Stuytown and I think the squirrels here are beautiful and wonderfully friendly.

You haven't mentioned that residents here are forbidden to have pets, and thus make substitutes of the nearly tame squirrels around us.

MetLife seems, as a landlord, to be dedicated to commercialization that ignores the welfare of the squirrels around us-- chopping down trees, removing the squirrel nests of leaves in the trees, spreading rodent poison around the grounds.

Sometimes, as I am rushing to work in the snow and ice of winter weather, I carry nuts to feed the hungry squirrels here. On several occasions, I have been confronted by people who seem to want the squirrels to starve.

I don't care what those people say to me. But sometimes I wonder if the people who like the squirrels of Stuytown couldn't get together to show their numbers.

~anonymous