A bad apple spoils the bunch, but an unbad apple can brighten a day and keep you out of the waiting room. A smoke alarm makes a piercingly awful noise, but you’ll be glad it did. So here’s to these two little-sung inanimate-yet-not Heroes.

Smoke Alarm words:

SHRIEK! & so begins a drama
Manic panic all asnarl
Out the door go babe & mama
Knocking shut-up life ajar
Enervation but no harm

Unbad Apple words:

Useful crispbit snack for gal or fella
Untold myth unwrit by Ray Kinsella
Nature’s firework: round & red, with pop
Buy, compare: our manmade food is glop
Ah, the pectin’d über-treat bodes well
Diminishing one’s load to ‘bag’atelle

NOTE: Ray Kinsella is the author of Field of Dreams. He kind of played fast&loose with J. D. Salinger’s privacy in the novel, perhaps trying to achieve the coup of bringing Mr. Salinger back to the public light. Note that in the movie Salinger has been replaced by the fictitious Terence Mann, magnificently played by James Earl Jones. All of that reminded me that the Garden of Eden story does NOT mention an apple; apples, as Harlan Ellison pointed out, are not indigenous to the Mideast. (See Ellison’s “The Deathbird” for story-springboard use of that.)