Lileks discusses, unknowingly, the herbicide I picked up on Saturday:

… today I bought some stuff that kills them all dead. […] The warning labels said, in essence, do not use this stuff on the Planet Earth. Prolonged exposure to the text of this warning label may cause seizures. Wash mouth after discussing product with clerk. And so on.

Yeah. That summarizes Roundup in a nutshell — the kind of crap you want to put on a Hazmat suit to use. I’ll be spraying that on any number of Evil Weeds very soon now. The fact that being a home owner promises me nothing if not continued exposure to this crap is one reason I’d like to conceive children before my DNA starts looking like Marvel Universe backstory.

In the Plant Biotechnology class I took in college, the professors allowed as how glyphosate (the active ingredient in Roundup, right?) was actually, as herbicides go, not too bad. Not like atrazine, the farm pesticide that turns male frogs into hermaphrodite frogs... (Isn't there a problem of low sperm counts in the midwest?) Anyway, one of the professors had even been to a demonstration once where a guy from Monsanto drank a glass of glyphosate to demonstrate it was harmless to humans. So, some second-hand, fuzzed-by-years-passed comfort there...

Yeah, Round-Up is actually pretty damned innocuous compared to a lot of other crap on the market (eschewing of which is one reason why my lawn looks like crap -- not the only reason, but one of them).

I've been out spraying the stuff of my weeds for days now and the weeds are still flourishing, and I am 7 months pregnant, so you should be safe. But if you want to use Round up as an excuse to convince Jackie to start the procreation process... more power to ya.

Roundup is the cherry koolaid of pesticides.

Now Paraquat, that's some hazmat pesticide.