Well, that’s weird
I was on the phone to my old man the other day, reminiscing about the time he shot a huge rat in the family hunting cabin and all the little rats went screaming insane around us for a day. I had it in my head that a master rat was known as a rat king, but it turns out these are rat kings — a bunch of rats that somehow get tangled at the tails and live out their days as a big traveling clump o’ rats.
First reported in 1564, they may or may not be for real — despite several found in museums and sightings well into the 20th C. The Rucphen rat king (above) shows what looks like damage and healing of the knotted tail bones on x-ray, so if it’s a fake, it’s a clever one.
Surviving rat kings are made up of black rats, Rattus rattus, which have been almost completely displaced in Europe by the brown rat, Rattus norvegicus. So that explains why there aren’t any more. That, or because the whole thing was bullshit.
Rat kings were believed to bring plague — which I suppose they could do as well as any other kind of rat.
Have some Alta Vista translations: the Dutch rat king a Rutphen, the German rat king of Altenburger and the French rat king of Nantes.
Now, does anybody know what a rat patriarch is called?
February 3, 2010 — 7:48 pm
Comments: 20
Separated by a common language…
Here’s a weirdie: instead of “holy shit!” or “hot damn!” or “frilly pig knickers!” Brits will occasionally blurt “Gordon Bennett!”
Because they’re nuts is why.
James Gordon Bennett, jr. was an American, son of the Scot who founded the New York Herald. He continued the newspaper tradition, but he was better known as the archtypal crazy rich bastard who does not give a shit.
He was the editor who arranged and financed Sir Henry M. Stanley‘s search for Dr. David Livingstone (if all you remember is the tagline, Livingstone was a missionary missing and presumed dead in Africa). This brought the Herald all kinds of good publicity, which they promptly pissed away in the Central Park Zoo hoax.
On November 9, 1874 the Herald ran a breathless front-page story that all the animals had escaped from the Central Park Zoo and were rampaging through Manhatten eating people. The hoax ‘fessed up in the last line, but most New Yorkers didn’t read to the bottom before utterly losing their shit, making this the War of the Worlds of 1874.
Shortly after, Bennet became engaged to socialite Caroline May — until her parents threw a legendary New Year’s party. Bennett arrived late and drunk and pissed into the fireplace (or possibly the grand piano) in view of the guests. This sort of thing was frowned upon in 1877. The engagement was off, and Miss May’s brother caught Bennett in the street soon after and horsewhipped him.
This freaked Bennett so badly, he fled the country forever and didn’t marry until the age of 72 (to Baroness de Reuters, of the Reuter’s News Reuters).
In between, he was pretty much the first international playboy; all yachts and polo ponies and fast cars. There’s still a balloon racing trophy named after him. He died in France in 1918.
I’d love to think his last words were “Gordon Bennett!” but it doesn’t appear in print as an exclamation until 1937. It’s probably just a ‘god’ substitute, like “golly gee” or “gosh.”
Thinking about it, I’d like to volunteer myself as a curse word. I think you’ll find hissing SSsssssssstoatyWEEZel an entirely satisfying response to moderate pain or surprise. I live to serve.
February 2, 2010 — 3:44 pm
Comments: 28
Will somebody please tell me what the heck I’m talking about?
I was surfing around recently (Wikipedia, I think) and I came across the most marvelous term. It was something like the “national park effect” and it had an alternate version that mentioned a specific park. Yosemite, maybe. Does this ring a bell with anyone? I’d love to know the exact phrase.
What it means is, whenever a bureaucrat is ordered to cut back, he immediately chooses the most beloved or most important programs and threatens to disembowel them, as though it’s the only possible way to cut costs. Walk right on by all the useless cash-eating bullshit government sponsors — tax cuts mean drastic changes to the national parks or the military or highways.
Here in the UK, it’s usually schools and hospitals. Fortunately, those things mean nothing in the Badger household, but they get us with police and trash collection.
I know from my own experience (mostly reading the little area paper) that our local district council has a salaried position to show new-ish mothers at home how to brush a baby’s teeth (only this!), keeps someone on staff to come around and look at your compost heap and tell you if you’re doing it right, floats a full-time rat-catcher (okay, this guy was quite useful and interesting). They recently sponsored a trapeze artist to teach basic moves in the community centre (fitness, don’tcha know).
Don’t forget these employees enjoy salaries well above those in the private sector, benefits often equal in value to their salaries, and pensions...well. Pensions are the killer. Carrying civil servants through their golden years is murdelating our budgets. And, even worse than the States, government is the only part of the economy that has continued to grow and grow as the private sector shrinks.
We’re coming up on an election here, probably in May, and the Tories are probably going to walk it, though they richly undeserve to win. Already the BBC and Labour (but I repeat myself) are full of “ZOMG, Tory cuts in services!!!!!” and already the Tories have responded by deciding that cuts really don’t need to be deep.
Ugh. We are drowning in tax over here.
So what I like to do — it’s a little masochistic game I play — is mosey over to the Guardian jobs section and spot the most useless, expensive government job opening on the books. Lesbian outreach workers and sustainability officers and like that. Our entire household tax expenditure probably isn’t enough to support one of those useless parasites, and that makes me feel as warm and fuzzy as goat testicles.
Interesting to note, by the way, that the government’s favorite place for classified ads is a highly left-wing paper with tiny circulation. They know their constituency. Although today’s winner is from that once-great conservative paper, the Daily Telegraph.
February 1, 2010 — 7:10 pm
Comments: 36