#864 Those Dirty Rats

Thinking about the cheesy Wall Street meltdown made me think of those dirty rats, the shameless profiteers, and that made me think of a new word, greed-i-teers, and that made me think of the Mickey Mouse Club.
What are you gonna lose when your mortgage payment adjusts up?
H-o-u-s-e...
Well a couple of news stories show that rats are on people’s minds all over the place. Seems a Muslim cleric in Saudi Arabia, Americas ally and nearly most repressive and regressive regime on earth, has denounced our beloved Mickey Mouse, labeling him one of Satan’s Soldiers.
The adorable rodent-slash-devil-in-disguise was ratted out by the cleric for trying to trick Muslim children into loving mice. He said according to Islamic law, Mickey Mouse should be killed in all cases.
I’m guessing the Disneyland franchise won’t be granted in Riyadh anytime soon.
Let’s hope the rat fatwa doesn’t catch on. Because another news article showed a promising use for rats in war torn middle eastern regions, trained mine sniffers. Yep. Mine sniffers.
Turns out rats are very smart, and with sensitive enough noses to be trained to sniff for the explosive scent in land mines. And light enough to not trip them.
The trained dogs they were using didn’t always survive the trip. But the African giant pouched rat was just perfect. They are cheap to raise—they breed like, um, rats—and they easily learn to sniff TNT to get a reward.
A Belgian guy named Bart Weetjens has so far put together a contingent of 30 trained rats which he calls HeroRATS. I wonder if he calls one of them Mighty Mouse.
Anyhow, they are currently sweeping minefields in Mozambique and Tanzania. The good thing from some folks perspective is when you use rats to detects mines and they fail, you’ve blown up a couple of rats.
Which is what many countries are trying to do anyhow. And really, no worse than giving rats cancer to save humans.
Ethically, well, who knows, maybe we’ll have a cautionary movie called Planet of the Rats someday.
Probably won’t play in Saudi Arabia.
But Wall Street will love it.
America, ya gotta love it.