Cursing Rats

  So there's a wave of luxury cars and yachts and planes arriving on the market, all outside of the reach of most of us since even the standard luxury yacht can cost $10,000+ a week in maintenance, fuel, supplies and crew salaries when the yacht is being used.  But they're trying, said Penta, (maybe not so much the owners themselves but the yacht companies) by adding solar panels and lining the decking with cork instead of teak; this basic custom remodel begins at a measly €5.9 million if ordered via Amer Yachts of Italy.  Too much money for you?  Then just jump on one for your next visit to the Galapagos (what??).  You can get there on your customized personal Boeing jet complete with "living" walls of ferns and aquariums, not to mention king size beds and marble floors (remodels there begin at a cool $10 million but most spend upwards of $200 million for the job, not including the cost of the jet itself); Boeing already has 400 of these varied jets in the air and yes, its newest BBJ MAX 8 is already being delivered to a few select customers.

   This contrasts with the recent report that housing prices are now higher than in 2006, and that for this month new housing starts are down.  Another graph, another chart, another number and you may be wondering just how this all relates to those luxury yachts and jets (yes, customizable supersonics on the way after orders were placed).  Turns out that while some financial numbers are unimaginable or unrelatable on the high end, take note of what Kiplinger's recent newsletter had to say about the lower end numbers: Steep prices, rising interest rates and low inventories are squeezing home affordability.  The National Assn. of Home Builders estimates that a $1,000 bump in the median price of new homes would price about 128,000 households out of the market this year.  A quarter-point mortgage rate increase would put a home out of reach for 1 million.  Renting is cheaper than buying in big cities, including Houston, Los Angeles, Phoenix and San Diego.  But rents are climbing, too...faster than wages in many areas.

Copyright PEANUTS by the late Charles Schultz

   So I grew up in a home with virtually no cursing...no f-words or n-words or c-words.  Okay, my step-dad was a salty military Santini and a "Jesus Christ" would come out now and then; but overall no religious pressure which meant no language pressure either.  It's difficult for me to even utter such words only because they are not in my vocabulary; and upon hearing Richard Pryor for the first time I was introduced to a world where an alternate universe existed, one where such language was so common as to become inconsequential.  F-words were added to virtually everything and punctuated each sentence multiple times, so much so that your ears soon began tuning it out as if such utterances were little more than gnats that weren't worth the time to brush off.  Humor at this level with so many comedians now appears to be losing its shock value as audiences no longer seem to wince or feel uncomfortable, as if the words were no different than other adjectives that once defined viewpoints such as "fabulous" or perhaps now, "fantastic."  For family and friends of mine, to hear such language coming from me (or me hearing it from them) would indeed still prove shocking, even when voiced in the angriest moments; none of this is not a judgement but rather a reflection of how one has grown up and in what atmosphere and how one needed to converse in order to fit in or to be accepted.  For me, it became a search for alternatives and somehow I latched onto the innocent world of Charles Schultz; as with his characters Charlie Brown and Snoopy, stubbing my toe or scraping my finger produced little more than my angriest sound, which was their angriest expression...rats.  Which brings me to the subject of feeding the birds...

   It's my wife, really, a patron saint to feral cats, ducks, geese, crows, even a stray goldfish someone had thrown into a cemetery's pond.  She feeds them all every single day, regardless of the winter snows or spring rains.  The geese have come to know her, having left and mated and now returning (for two of them, this is the third year in a row).  Crows caw overhead and dozens of pigeons fly down to circle her car as she drives up.  She is one of many who work with catch-and-release programs for the cats, trapping them, having them fixed, then releasing them back into their "wild" home, which of course for many is simply an empty field or trashed-out lot next to an apartment complex or other area in which they were often abandoned by people who moved or simply didn't want them anymore.  And as she made the rounds and became a regular at her five stops, she noticed the birds -- the ducks and geese in a large irrigation pond at a cemetery (and the goldfish, which managed to live through the winter even under the iced-over smaller pond, my wife throwing fish food each day into the small opening created by the little waterfall that fed the pond), the pigeons on her way to another field.  And feeding them soon became as urgent as her taking care of the cats.  So how many birds, you ask?  Suffice to say that she goes through about 100 lbs. of seed every six days...which is when I first noticed the rats.

   Moving a pile of wood some years ago gave me my first close up glimpse of a rat, a moving swath of brown fur that was really quite striking, an almost luxurious reddish brown that was as shiny as any mink or other animal that sat stitched and pasted onto a ladies coat back in the 1920s.  But it was indeed a rat.  And my impression was likely similar to that of most people, they were dangerous and could bite you and who knew what diseases they carried (the plague???) and that they ate virtually anything (including the insulation around pipes!!) and they moved through drain pipes and would jump on you at any moment as if somehow related to the scariest of spiders.  Forget how big we were and how they must feel when looking up or at being discovered.  Ratatouille (the movie), they certainly were not.  All of which showed just how little I actually knew about rats.  Rats!

   In a recent piece in National Geographic, rats are looked at from a different perspective; yes they are the gleaners of our garbage of sorts, but it turns out that in other parts of the world rats are revered animals and in other areas are served as delicacies to eat (this shouldn't prove too shocking as small dogs were once bred for eating by ancestral Central Americans, said Snopes; and yes the dog-eating festival in Yulin* continues).  Rats have belly buttons and their tails are their thermostats, and they can survive a fall from 50 feet (given a rat's size, this would be the equivalent of us living after falling from a 12-story building) and they can easily tread water for 3 days (so forget that flush down the toilet), said Discover.  Added LiveScience, 95% of our lab experiments occur on either rats or mice, and in case you needed more trivia: According to the Australian Broadcasting Corp., male rats are called bucks; females are does.  Infants are called pups or kittens.  A group of rats is called a mischief.

   So there I was at Costco, the couple ahead of me noticing that in my basket was a 4-tube bird feeder that the store was closing out.  We bought one of those last year, they told me, and we love it.  And before long we began a conversation about all the birds which led to the rats that arrive to feast off the trimmings that fall out of those birdfeeders (did I mention that rats can climb --and some live in-- trees?).  Oh yeah, the woman said, but that's just part of the system.  I then told her that German Shepherds (at least when young) were once known for catching rats (ours did but they're too old now and it would seem that the rats know this, those rascals), but that our house now boasted an occasional hawk perched high above in the trees.  Ours too, she exclaimed.  It was the circle of life, of sorts, complete with the debate of good or bad, of exterminating other animals or of being exterminated, of being viewed as vermin or of being something just not understood.  Instead of being simple it was growing complicated; and all I could do as I turned away from the window after watching the birds and noticing the rat trail in the snow, was to sigh...and of course to utter my one thing: Rats.


*If you dive into this further, be prepared to be truly shocked; the festival is an annual tradition and unfortunately estimates are that between 10,000 and 15,000 dogs are killed, cooked and eaten.  Yuck.  Activists and protesters have managed to save about 10% of that number but this is considered an accepted part of tradition in this part of China and getting the laws changed, much less enforced, is a very slow process.