Stew Clark, developer of the Deadset Mole Trap and mole expert.

Not that Clark hates moles, necessarily.

"They're very interesting animals," he says. "But if you like your lawn and the moles mess it up, then they're pests."

image via

Watch out, she may be packing an iPhone.

The corporate espionage, it should be made clear, was not on the part of any of the local booksellers. The Grinch who attempted to steal their Christmas was their longtime enemy, Amazon.

Last Saturday the online retailer offered its users a $5 discount if they downloaded a scanning app to their smartphones, went into their local independent bookstores and did price checks on random books. Local booksellers, when they got wind of the promotion, were furious.

"Amazon's culture of corporate sleaze knows no bounds," Jarek Steele, co-owner of Left Bank Books, wrote on his blog, "and it will not rest until it is the only retailer left standing."

(Booksellers weren't the only ones pissed at Amazon. Authors were disgusted as well.)

But on the big day, Steele says, he didn't catch anybody scanning. Nor did Nikki Furrer at Pudd'nhead Books, who adds that she did see people with their phones out, but only because they were checking their Amazon Wish Lists.

Julia Gabbert

Ralph Lindner puts it in park at his O'Fallon Christmas tree farm.

"This is the adventure here," he says.

Lindner moved to his sprawling O'Fallon property in 1973. Seven years later he planted his first Christmas tree -- a Scotch pine. Today Sunbrite is one of the few Christmas tree farms around St. Louis. And it almost came to an end earlier this year when the farmer was in and out of the hospital seven times after mistakenly being prescribed two conflicting medications.

"I had a tough year, but I'm happy again," Lindner says. "You can't find a happier person out of the next 10,000. Nobody has ever challenged me on that."

Jane Henderson, the Post-Dispatch book critic, posted the information on her blog. It didn't take long for the gentle, kindhearted P-D readers to start stirring up a shitstorm.