An extreme right-wing conspiracy theory purveyor and online trolling and disinformation movement, QAnon constantly provides us with stories so far-fetched and outrageous they should be hilarious.

Fundamental to QAnon orthodoxy is the belief that Democrats, Jews and others comprise an evil global cabal of pedaphiles intent on genocide of “the white race” who will someday be defeated by Donald Trump.

The Comet Ping Pong pizzeria in Washington, D.C., a restaurant with a very promising name for humor, is the center of the QAnon Pizzagate conspiracy theory, which turned out to be fake news, but not funny. QAnon is dangerous.

QAnon’s prophet is a man so mysterious that he may well be nonexistent. Or, conversely, he may be Ron Watkins, an Arizona politician planning to run in the Republican primary for Arizona’s 2nd Congressional District this August.

Elise Stefanik is your representative to the US Congress if you vote in New York’s 21st Congressional District, which comprises Clinton, Franklin, St. Lawrence, Jefferson, Lewis, Hamilton, Essex, Warren, Washington, Fulton, and parts of Saratoga and Herkimer counties and encompasses the Adirondack Park. It disturbs me that my representative apparently feels comfortable throwing around QAnon terms like “pedo grifters” on Twitter. It’s not funny.

Some things in the North Country are disturbing, although on a lesser scale, and kind of funny. Like deer eating the tulips.

After buying tulip bulbs, planting them in the fall, waiting through the long slog of an Adirondack winter and thrilling to see the first leaf tips of the tulips poking up out of the earth, after the tulip plants survive an April blizzard … then come the deer. They are so graceful, aren’t they, bounding across a field to your garden, a place they know well. They gnaw your tulip plants down to the ground; or perhaps they wait awhile, until the buds have swollen. You go to bed thinking, “Tomorrow my tulips will bloom.” But in the morning you find the deer have nipped off every flower bud. Sometimes, they leave one. If they could talk, would they say thank you? No.

A couple of years ago my sister gave me a small collapsible plastic greenhouse. Thinking that I could beat the deer at their own game, I planted tulip bulbs last fall and then in early spring erected the greenhouse over them. The greenhouse has four net-covered windows that can be zipped shut or left open to let in air and rain.

A week or so ago, just as the tulips were beginning to bloom, I noticed that several of them toward the back had been decapitated. But how? On closer inspection, I saw that one of the net windows had been ripped, making an opening just the right size for a deer to get its head through and eat all of the tulips in reach.

From then on, I had to keep the window flaps zipped shut. Unseasonably hot weather caused the temperature inside the greenhouse to grow steamy, wilting the stems of some of the remaining tulips just as they were opening.

All right, chalk one up for the deer. What tactics will I use next year, I wonder.

I was thinking that if anyone wanted to really mess with the Dutch they could introduce deer to their tulip fields. After doing some research, however, I found that the Netherlands already has 40 different species of deer! I couldn’t find any information about their depredations in the tulip fields. No, it was not deer but COVID that has done the damage. In March of 2020, 140 million tulip stems were destroyed due to lack of demand, according to Fred van Tol, manager of international sales for Royal FloraHolland, the largest cooperation of flower and plant producers in the Netherlands.

Well, I don’t need to worry that my grandson, Jack, now 8, has lost touch with his family’s Motor City roots. Voicemail message from car-enthusiast Jack yesterday: “Grandma, answer the phone or your car will be taken away and replaced with the Chevy Chevelle that you HATED!” Yes, I did hate that car, but how would Jack know? That was long before he was born. As his great grandfather Joe Henderson used to say, “Damn cheap Chevy!”

Have a good week.

(Martha Allen lives in Keene Valley. She has been writing for the News for more than 20 years.)