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Roger Rabbits with |
It’s a rule of thumb that every message of criticism or dissatisfaction directed to the media equates to 200 other complaints.
Simply because most people don’t go the extra step to register their concerns.
So Jo of Katikati, you’re in big company.
And because we’re not above a good spanking and a dose of humility when it might be deserved, here’s Jo’s thoughts on our Page 2 ‘rat coffins/sausage rolls’ rave in our February 16, 2024 edition.
“Well Sun, you have done it again!” wrote Jo.
“Your constant ridicule, derogative comments and putting down of Senior Citizens (sic) has just gone too far.
‘Soft as a pensioners poo…’ is just about as low as you could go. Uneducated, gutter stuff.
Right on one point Jo.
Three subjects in school certificate probably ranks me relatively uneducated.
The “soft as….” comment was ‘rat coffin’ reviewer’s colourful language – not mine – but I did get a giggle.
However, it’s Jo who is front of stage at the moment.
“You could print some extremely interesting and educational articles if you took time to visit retirement villages,” writes Jo.
“You would learn about some amazing journeys and what they have contributed to society. All that history is being lost!”
I agree. Everyone has a story to tell.
Pity there isn’t the will, nor the resources, to fossick through it all.
Jo signs off as “a senior citizen who expects more from those who have benefited from the hard work and sacrifices our generation had to make!”
Thank us
Tai hoa Jo! – I am one of you.
I am very on the wrong side of 70.
And as I’m constantly reminded by some smart young things who have supposedly “benefitted”, they want to thank us for the climate crisis, thank us for ruining ‘THEIR’ planet, and thank us for destroying ‘THEIR’ housing market.
They see things differently. And they ask we remember it’s ‘THEY’ now paying our NZ super.
While on ‘rat coffins’ and rodents, there was the image that turned the stomachs of a nation – a mouse crawling around an open food cabinet at a Christchurch supermarket deli.
“Would you like leptospirosis or bubonic plague with your potato salad?”
And the Dunedin supermarket putting a call out to the Pied Piper after a rat infestation closed the store.
Not a plague of biblical proportions but enough to titillate ‘rat-tastrophe’ theorists.
Are we on the brink of another Black Death – when rats with plague-infested fleas caused 25 million deaths in the 14th Century?
It prompted an outpouring of personal rat stories, dreadful, life-changing encounters with rodents. Seems everyone’s had one.
Like a rat scuttling over a friend’s bare foot in the bedroom of a student flat in Dunedin.
“I panicked, I screamed, I threw up. I have never been the same.”
But then have you ever been in a ‘scarfie’ flat in Dunedin? You might sympathise with the poor rat having to live in that squalor.
Friend still hates rats. “I don’t care about the eco-system food chain, kill every last one.”
Rat Fact 1:
Rats are carriers of at least 60 communicable diseases. Bite people when they’re asleep.
Which leads us to ‘Sugar’ – a lovely Persian cat which bought a rat into a young couple’s bedroom.
The rat escaped beneath the bed clothes and there was pandemonium before the man hero uses a hunk of timber to beat the bejesus out of a rat-like shape scurrying beneath the duvet at the bottom of the bed.
“Freaked me out,” says the crying, screaming, yelling one.
“I slept tucked up in a foetal position because I worried there might be a rat at the bottom of the bed.”
Every night she would pull back the duvet and do a full rat check before climbing in.
Rat Fact 2:
A female rat can have 500 partners during a six-hour period of ‘heat’, 15 times a year.
The upshot: 2000 offspring annually.
There’s a horrible, primal wailing as the family’s ‘Scamp’ cat arrives home with a long ,skinny tail dangling from one side of his mouth and beady rat eyes and whiskers from the other.
Scamp was parading his latest, not quite dead, trophy.
“Do something!” she says. Why is it always the bloke who has to “do something”?
Anyhow, man steps up, grabs rat by the tail and heaves it onto the back lawn to be dispatched with a garden spade.
I will spare you the gore, but the executioner ends up spattered with a cocktail of rat blood and 60 communicable rat diseases.
I spend the next months watching for signs of rat pox.
Rat Fact 3:
A rat’s teeth grow 13cm a year.
They stop them growing through their heads by eating wood, bricks, cement and bones.
There was the family who trapped a mouse in a tube of Pringles chips.
When the father arrives home he grabs the tube to snack on a few of those saddle-shaped chips.
He flips the top, upends the tube, and instead of a few salty paraboloids, a rodent leaps out onto his chest.
Might be a bit of pay back coming in that house.
