Lawyers break the law, doctors all smoke (and hospitals are the most dangerous place to catch something), and people were surprised when they found out that gardeners were actually doing what they claimed? We never said we weren't growing things. We always got the approval of the owners before we did our landscaping. Nurseries happily bought them (and we were so pleased when we realized the translation of "nursery"). I do find the "illegal alien gardeners" jokes in poor taste, but I suppose they were inevitable. And really, it's very important to me for you to understand that only a few of us--the bad apples, as your homily has it--chose to plant child-seeds that would kill you when they hatched.

Inspiration: Thinking about things that do the opposite of what they say, and ended up thinking of one that seems to do exactly what it says.
Story Potential: High.
Notes: Huh. I like this. Something about aliens absorbing information/culture/languages as they grow in plant form, before becoming persons. I don't know if I want this to be just this--told first-person as an alien on a talk-show--or perhaps a longer story with this as a framing device.

The slug wiggled under the barrage of salt. She bent over, curious, to watch it shrivel and die, but it didn't. She scowled. That was not the way it was supposed to go. The slug had turned bright purple where the salt had touched it, but it had stopped wiggling, and it didn't look like it was going to shrivel up and die anytime soon. She lifted the salt and stared at it. Salt killed slugs, simple as that, slugs that would otherwise eat her plants. This hadn't killed the slug. So it wasn't salt. In which case, what the heck was it doing in her table shaker? As if she'd suddenly found a deadly viper coiled around her spaghetti, she held it out at arms-length. It wasn't salt. It was something else. She would take it to the constable, because that is what one did--

Inspiration: I was thinking of slugs, for some reason which I can no longer remember.
Story Potential: High.
Notes: Not from this snippet, but I like the idea of a cozy murder mystery where the investigator would have been the victim. Would need to investigate what poisons would hurt a human but not immediately kill a slug, and how slugs actually react to being salted. Also, a viper coiled around spaghetti? WTF?