Oh Rats!

Three things about rats….

First, in New York rat hunting is a sport. The hunting ground is a dim, grimy alley in lower Manhattan where a bunch of dogs go pawing through mounds of garbage in search of rats at their owners’ behest. The group’s organizers claim that sending the dogs scrambling after vermin is viable exercise for the animal’s centuries-old skills, think fox hunting, and they have been doing it for the last ten years. The dogs work together and they do catch and kill rats although there is no official estimate of how many they have rid the city of. The Health Department declined to comment on the hunts.

Next, in China there has been a crackdown on a ring of meat suppliers that are claiming they are selling lamb but instead selling rat meat. I've blogged in the past about horsemeat for human consumption but that doesn't begin to compare to the idea of rat meat for human consumption. My husband and I plan to take a trip to China some day and I think we will be going vegetarian when we do.

Finally, I share one of my own experiences with rats in my chicken coop.  The so called coop that is home to our half a dozen hens is really a large plastic storage shed tall enough for me to stand in with a set of double doors that almost span the front of the shed. When the weather isn't cold I never close those doors but instead let the girls roam free. The perk for me is that I don’t have to get up with the sun the following morning to let the girls out. One night the thermometer was below the 40 degree mark and the doors would need to be closed. In the dark I counted 6 chicken shadows hens huddled on the roost together for warmth. I reached for the galvanized pail that when inverted doubled as a cover for their feeder. I placed it over the feeder and twisted it a little to make sure there was no gap between it and the Rubbermaid floor of the coop. Then I backed out to close the doors. The right door closed easily but the left gathered up leaves and pine needles as it swept to where the doors met in the middle. There was a gap but I pushed and turned the handle secure the door even with the gap. The girls had already been out long after dark in the cold so rather than kick the detritus out of the way I did a poor job of closing the doors. I was tired and my next stop was to be my bed. So I turned from the coop to make my way back to the house when a pounding and trembling began against inside of the coop doors. I turned and stood stunned thinking it seemed like I might have closed an unseen person up in the coop who was now trying desperately to escape. Then just as quickly as that thought popped into my head, a pair of rats squeezed out from the gap in the mostly closed doors. The two rats big as squirrels raced up and across the coop roof jumping nimbly to an overhanging horizontal oak limb where they continued to race into the darkness of the night canopy. By the time I was able to move they’d disappeared into the darkness.

I managed to trap the rats over the weeks that followed. And to his credit, my dog, Fred a rat terrier mix, managed to kill one in a late evening foray. I also moved the chicken feeder out of the coop and ended my practice of scattering chicken scratch on the ground.

Oh rats! You are not my favorite animals. 

Random Acts of Kindness Update

Every time I write these updates I somehow find myself falling behind my own schedule of performing random acts of kindness and I always feel compelled to admit it. Despite this, it is my observation that there are random acts of kindness going on and in this post I intend to highlight the ripple effect that random acts of kindness (performed by others more consistent than I) have and my experiences as such. Anyway it’s been awhile since my last update and I have been the benefactor of multiple random acts, the latest one I will mention here occurred on Sunday. The day of the week is significant because I figure Sundays are probably pretty slow days for waitresses at the Wee Pub, yet a waitress there was very kind to me.

Because of the fact that the last three days, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, of continuous rain felt like 40 days and 40 nights to me, I finally felt compelled by the lack of clothesline drying sunshine (and a looming shortage of clean underwear) to take my washed clothes to the laundromat. Six minute dryer intervals cost 25 cents. I put a dollar in the change machine since I only had one quarter (and I knew 6 minutes wouldn't cut it) and nothing happened. The money went in but no quarters came out. I proceeded to push all manner of buttons on the machine and still nothing. The machine took the only one dollar bill I had. Disgustedly, I went out the door and saw a waitress cleaning the outside tables at Wee Pub and asked her if she had change that included quarters since the laundry change machine took my dollar. All I was left with was two twenties, a dime and two pennies. She had 4 quarters but not enough to make change for a twenty so she just gave me the quarters. Pretty nice gesture if you ask me, and I hope her kindness returns to her many times because I figure she can’t be making much in tips or wages on any given Sunday at a Wee Pub in St. Marys, (the deep south) Georgia. I had the presence of mind to ask her name as she went back to the tables and I went back to the laundry. Her name is Sarah and if you would like to return an act of kindness and you frequent the Wee Pub, I would ask you to give her a little extra when you tip. They have pretty good daily lunch specials there, and I plan to try the fish tacos and thank Sarah and repay her act of kindness later this week. 

Cinco de Mayo, a Poem

Uno, dos, come in close, 

it’s almost time to raise a toast.

Dos, tres, is this the place? 

With a splash of lime, post haste!

Tres, cuatro, time to go, 

to celebrate today we know,

Cuatro, Cinco, for Mexico, 

today's the day we raise a drinko!

Happy Independence Day, Mayo de Cinco!

Second-Hand Digital Deals

Second-hand stuff, there’s a lot of it out there to be had at a good price. Second-hand dealing goes way back but when I think of second-hand stuff I think of the used car market and how when you consider the “drive off the lot” value depreciation of a new car, coupled with getting an almost as good as a new car warranty with the “certified” used car, I think buying second-hand often makes good cents sense. Then there are bunches of booming resale retail ventures that come to mind like Plato’s Closet that resells high end, gently used brand name clothing originally from places (in the mall) like Abercrombie & Fitch, or similarly, baby and maternity resale like Stellie Bellies in St. Petersburg and Palm Harbor, Florida. Consignment has come a long way. There are also several resale groups in my area, and I suspect many other areas, connected to Face Book. I am included in a bunch of these groups and the rules are pretty simple. You take photos to post your items and potential shoppers peruse them that way. And don’t let me forget old school garage and yard sales and the old adage that one man’s trash is another man’s treasure or according to Macklemore of Thrift Shop fame, another man’s come-up.

But finally to the topic at hand, digital resale, it’s already popular in Europe. Amazon is considering getting into it. Since 2011 a company in Boston, ReDigi, has been offering second-hand digital songs for as little as 49 cents vs. the 99 cents you would pay for new to ITunes. ReDigi’s second-hand market place has even grown into a social network as some customers like seeing who has previously listened to the songs they buy. With the popularity of social media and Amazon behind it I think the market for second-hand digital stuff is poised for even greater success. Some others in the industry must think so too because some, like Microsoft’s newest Xbox, are expected not to work with second-hand games.

The Poop on Trucking in Dubai

I have two friends with truck driving experience, one retired due to health issues directly related to the job and the other soon to be exchanging the life of a trucker for island life in the Bahamas, and I wondered what their take would be on this stuff I read about trucking poop in Dubai. Here goes.

In Dubai, particularly, but also in India and other places (not the US), there are high rising skyscrapers, sometimes 140 to 150 stories tall, that are not connected to any municipal infrastructure, and by this I mean no sewer system. In this country that we assume we can plug into an urban system that can handle whatever waste the populace of the building produces and we do. Apparently in these fast growing, and even faster modernizing cities, using the most sophisticated architects and engineers in the world, you can design and build a building of 140 or 150 stories, but designing and building a municipal network of sewage treatment to support that building is more complex? Hopefully that question mark indicates how puzzling this seems to me. Maybe they have the wrong architects and engineers or the planners are just superficial, but it seems pretty surprising to me that one would design superstructures without infrastructure. So in Dubai, what do they do with the sewage? They use trucks to take it out of individual buildings and then they wait in line, often for 24 hours at a time, to take a dump their load into a waste water treatment plant.

So I asked my two friends about this and here is what they said:

First my Bahama bound, soon to no longer be a truck driver, friend referred me to a video clip on You Tube, a documentary about West African Truckers that highlights the disparities between the trucking industry here and trucking in third world countries where drivers spend days, weeks, and sometimes months dealing with corrupt border officials and illegal checkpoints on delivery trips. Though this info wasn't specifically about poop trucking it did bring home the lack of regulation, and what many in this country would find unacceptable, is an accepted norm in third world countries. Basically what I think is crazy, trucking poop from skyscrapers, is pretty common place in, not only Dubai, but also in lots of other places and is one more indicator of how good we have it in this country.  

Next, I quote my retired truck driving friend and these are his thoughts about poop trucking and waiting in line for 24 hours to unload, Here trucks that remove and deliver sewage from septic tanks to treatment plants are called honey dippers, but I don’t know what they would call them there. Sounds like a (expletive deleted but you can guess what went here) job from start to finish. Line that slow, seems like they could use a laxative or an enema.

Enough said.

Tie a String Around the Moon

When lovers profess they want to give each other the moon, I don’t think they are thinking moons over my hammy or the moon that’s out early tonight (as my grandson would say about the latter and all observable plumber’s cracks, crack kills). It’s more like telling your precious one that you love them to the moon and back, a really grand gesture to show the immensity of your love.

Well the title of this post is a bit misleading because what I really wanted to write about is a plan some scientists and engineers have to establish a base on the moon and from this base, a mining camp of sorts, lasso an asteroid (one of those we hear is coming closer and threatening to crash into us and cause our extinction, yada, yada..) and yep, you guessed it, they want to mine it. As I read recently in an article in a New Scientist magazine, the motivation for space travel is shifting from one of discovery to one of economics, and by this I mean the for-profit exploitation, rather than exploration, of space. There are a lot pros and cons to consider and they seem to center around the idea of whether or not it is ethical to save our pristine planet’s resources at the expense of the resources from what we consider desolate places like asteroids and the moon. Despite these arguments there are others that are not waiting for answers or regulations. It seems pretty obvious that this movement has already ready started and has prompted some to ask, Is space mining the next gold rush? Of course the technology for such enterprises is pretty much out of this world, and by that I mean the stuff we use here for such operations isn't exactly suitable for the conditions in space. This is where innovation exceeds my imagination. 

Space mining, seems to me to be a grand gesture that shows the immensity of human greed on one hand and ingenuity on the other.

Mucophagy

Last night I disgust discussed the idea of writing about this topic with my husband on SKYPE as I often do. I figured I’d get some positive input on this one because after all it was his idea that led me to write about the snot-eating bone-flower worm but in the case of mucophagy, an endorsement from him was snot happening. He even went so far as to say that if I picked this topic I would snot be picking a winner. All this from someone who admittedly nose nothing about mucophagy and when I mentioned the very word answered with “Huh?”

At the time of this discussion on SKYPE,

[4/30/2013 9:51 PM] Jo Mount: I don't have anything written for my blog tomorrow so I will be getting up and getting busy with that in the morning.

I hadn’t actually done any research on the word mucophagy so this morning I figured I’d Google it. I found that like most words mucophagy has more than one meaning.

In the first part of the definition I found out that mucophagy is the feeding on mucus of fishes or invertebrates. And that there are mucophagous parasites, such as sea lice that attach themselves to gill segments of fish. This immediately made me think of the bone-eating snot-flower worm that also lives under the sea. Also, mucophages may serve as cleaners of other animals. Remoras attaching themselves to sharks (like the one that took a bite out of Captain Jim’s boat in a previous post came to mind also).

Then I read the second part of the definition: It may also refer to consumption of mucus or dried mucus in primates.

Here is when I suddenly remembered that I hadn't had breakfast yet and in fact if I read any further I might snot be able to stomach any this morning. Already after just my morning cup of coffee I was feeling a bit queasy. Dang Skippy, it’s really snot that hard to admit this, but maybe I should have listened to my husband and picked a different topic after all.