Still amusing ourselves to death

I read the book "Amusing Ourselves to Death" by Neil Postman a couple years ago and when I ran across this cartoon, well, it says it all. (Cartoon by Stuart McMillan at www.recombinantrecords.net)

Slain by a Giant????

Giants are apparently large spirit beings who like to live in certain trees, especially large trees with heavy shade. They are said to be able to cause mischief if you inadvertantly disturb them.

A friend’s brother recently became sick. He was 50 years old. Last week there were rumors that a “friend” of his whose father was a renowned practitioner of black magic had put “poison” in his food. But, this week they said it was a giant.

There was an old mango tree on his property which had been there since he was a boy. It’s a tree that bears the smelly mangoes, they are very sweet but have an unusually pungent odor and not everyone likes them. Some neighbors recently asked if they could cut the tree down and use it to make charcoal, a common way for rural folk to make a bit of cash. Since not many people are interested in buying the fruit, he agreed and it was done. But, soon afterward he became ill. According to the quack doctor, there had been a giant living in that tree and he was angry because it was cut down. The quack doctor recommended that they do a certain ceremony with a white chicken and 8 eggs. They did do the ceremony but it didn't do any good.

From what I could tell, the man had lived a hard life. His wife died soon after their third child was born, nearly 20 years ago. He left the kids with his parents to raise and he went to the city and spent many years as a pedicab driver. His meager earnings were spent mostly on drinking. He often just slept in his pedicab rather than rent a room. He smoked and drank for years and didn’t eat well. After his father died 5 years ago, he moved back home with his mother and worked some on the family farm but continued smoking and drinking heavily with his friends. When I heard that he was complaining of lack of appetite, weight loss, difficulty breathing, swelling, I assumed that he was probably starting to have problems with liver failure.

But, what do I know? Whatever it was, he died this morning. His entire family was present as he had requested. But I do wonder what they will put on the death certificate.....

Rat Update

June 8, 2009

Since we have been able to close the windows we have not had any more nocturnal damage to our fruit and vegetables. But it sure does make the place hot! The rat has not yet given up trying to get in. For the last three days he has apparently tried to climb up the glass and has left his urine all over the outside. We know he is BIG because the glass panes still have nearly a ½ inch gap between them. I am sure if he could get through, he would have done so. (Though he would still have to deal with our new screen.)

Saturday much of our white cement and saltine cracker mixture that we put at the back of the empty apartment next door had disappered. We refilled it and put out more dishes. Sunday I didn’t go check the dishes next door but the BIG rat had again left evidence of trying to get in through the window. I bought a kilo of bread crumbs from a bakery. It must have cake crumbs in it too because it smells really good! This afternoon we went to refill the bait bowls with the bread/cake/cement mixture we saw a dead rat in the path! Hooray! (But it wasn’t the BIG rat.) From the smell there are more like it down at the basement entry. Hopefully the new bait will smell as good to the rest of the rats as it does to me. I also bought some shrimp flavored Knorr cubes as a further taste treat if needed. We also found a plug-in rat repellant so we can try that too though of course it doesn’t solve the problem, it only (hopefully) sends them elsewhere. I’m not quite ready to leave the window glass open at night, though.

July 4, 2009

The rats seem to have vanished. We have had no more nocturnal visitors, we no longer hear them in the daytime and we haven't seen any at night either. We no longer find their droppings all over the yard, and we have barbecued a couple of times with no visitors! I gues the cement and bread crumbs did the trick. We recently got new neighbors who cleaned up a big pile of old cans and rubbish in their yard so we hope things will stay calm.

Unfortunately, the new mama cat died a couple of weeks ago. We think she died of poisoning because she died rather suddenly and we know other neighbors use rat poison. With three growing kittens she had been very busy hunting. Her three kittens were under the roof next door. We tried to catch them but only got one which died shortly afterwards. (They hide deep under the roof and we can't get at them.) We thought maybe all three had eaten of the same poison rat but suprisingly the other two have survived. They are very shy and startle easily. We have been putting food out 2-3 times a day and when all is quiet we can sometimes see them come out and eat. Fortunately no one has yet moved into the next door apartment on that side so we can go through there every day to put food on the roof. But we haven't figured out how to get them. I hope they will eventually be willing to come into our yard.

More rats!

The war goes on. The day after the last post a mama cat came by. We quickly fed her and she decided that was cool and has now been regularly hanging around part of the day. This immediately decreased the day time rat sightings at least. But mama cat goes off to her kittens for long periods too and I think the rats have figured out her schedule. Two nights ago I was looking out my 2nd floor window and saw three BIG rats snooping around down below. I fleetingly wondered if they would ever get so hungry as to climb the walls and get in thru the kitchen window but was too sleepy to get worked up about it. But the next morning I saw that they had indeed climbed in through the kitchen window! They’d enlarged a spot where the screen was starting to pull away from the frame. They had eaten half of two mangoes and a sweet potato! Now I began to get worked up!

We put out a mixture of bread and cracker crumbs mixed with cement that night. We taped the screen. We moved some junk away from beneath the window that we thought they had climbed up. We set the TUFFCAT traps on the window sill. We tried to close the jalousie windows but since they hadn’t been closed in about 10 years they were stuck open. We dripped sewing machine oil on the screw thingies and managed to get two sections working the but the third was obstinately stuck open.

Yesterday morning there was no evidence that the rats had gotten in. But this morning they obviously had gotten in, we lost a couple bananas and another sweet potato. Unfortunately the rats do not like my mixture of cement and cracker crumbs. (Only the cockroaches and ants liked it.)

Luckily for us, the owner’s handyman showed up this morning to work on one of the empty apartments. He had enough extra screening to change our holey one. He also was able to get the third window to close. So now we are feeling a bit more hopeful about keeping the rats out tonight! Very good timing too as today was market day and we have a whole new supply of fruit and vegetables!

They say that if you are seeing rats in the daytime that means there are a lot of them. So there must be a lot of them because today I saw one sitting on top of a wall in the heat of the day. (Watching us?!) Unfortunately mama cat was looking hopefully at me and had her back to it. Otherwise she surely could have gotten that one!

The handyman in all seriousness advised us to not talk harshly to the rats lest they become angry and really wreak vengenace. Ha! Do the rats speak English?!

Rats!

We have been having problems with rats lately. A few weeks ago neighbors on both sides put out poison, which by the smell did kill several but it also killed a couple of the neighborhood cats who apparently caught poisoned rats staggering around before they died. So with the decreased cat population, the rats have been able to mount a major come back since they reproduce much faster than cats do.

We ourselves are down to one cat. He is the cat equivalent of an arm chair sportsman when it comes to catching rats. He loves to sit at the edge of the drain and watch them below, but when faced with two or three on his level he just wants to come inside.

What to do? Well, I don’t want to put out poison because we don’t need to thin the neighborhood cat population any more. In addition to poison, the stores offer traps and rat glue and glue boards. The idea of the rat glue is that you smear it on a board and stick some bait in the middle. When the rat comes it’ll stick to the glue. You can also buy ready made “boards” with the glue already on it. It’s the same idea as fly paper but on a grander scale. The downside is that you then get to kill it. But that’s not the only downside. Rats often get only partially trapped and will drag the glue-coated board with them sometimes great distances, sometimes smearing glue all over everything in between. We once tried it in the village. One dragged the board until he fell in some water and drowned. But the worst was one morning we found only a paw. No idea where it came from but several unpleasant scenarios can be imagined. I decided that even rats don’t deserve that.

There are wire cage type traps but you are then stuck with killing the rat and getting it back out of the cage in whatever order you can make work. What I really wanted was an old fashioned spring loaded rat trap that kills the thing right off. After visiting 4 hardware stores, however, it seems there is a big demand right now and they were all out of stock. Finally we found something called TUFFCAT rat trap.

The TUFFCAT rat trap is a plastic gizmo a bit bigger than a computer mouse but otherwise very similar in shape. It’s easy to set and load the bait. So we tried it.

But,

Below you can see a rat sneering at our TUFFCAT. His buddy is just out of view.


Here he is eating the bait.

The trap did eventually spring but all it accomplished was to startle the rats. They came back later to see if any of the bait got dropped.

So I guess we have to try something else.

Someone once told me that plaster of Paris is a way to kill rats without endangering cats, dogs, and birds. You simply mix it in dry food. Unlike cats, dogs and people, rats can’t vomit and the stuff apparently hardens inside and kills them. Now if I can figure out what plaster of Paris is called around here...

What do you do when your shoes fall apart?

Pilates.

Today I sat down to put on my sports shoes and noticed that one shoe was “smiling”. Oops! Not a good idea to do stair stepping with a smiling shoe. Guess I need to go out and buy some more glue. But I have an old pair of sport shoes too. When you have big feet and you live in SE Asia even when you get new shoes you are not hasty about throwing out the old ones because you never know. Like tonight.

So I pulled out the old shoes and put them on and went to crank up the VCD and set up the step. Then I noticed some stuff in the floor - like some little kid had dropped chunks of chewed up crackers and bread crumbs. The more I walked around the more I saw. Since there haven’t been any kids here all week I wondered where it came from – and that’s when I noticed that my old shoes were dropping chunks of old foam or something. On closer examination the soles are cracked in several places and the stuffing stuff has basically disintegrated and is coming out. So much for the old shoes, they are now unfixable. So now I’m barefoot, but no problem, I have a Pilates CD. After another 10 minutes cleaning up the crumbs, disposing of the old shoes and resetting up with a different VCD I finally got some exercise in.

And, until I can go out and get some glue I guess I’ll be doing Pilates...

On fragrant canals

Some things never change. Way back in 1971 John Perkins, the author of The Secret History Of The American Empire, went for his first stroll in the capital city of the second of my worlds. Here is his first impression:

...In an attempt to avoid being run over I nearly stepped into a gutter that was black as tar, littered with garbage, and reeking of urine.

The gutter drained down a steep incline to one of the many canals built by the Dutch during the colonial era. Now stagnant, its surface was covered with a green and putrid-looking scum; the stench that arose from it was nearly intolerable. It seemed preposterous that the inventive people who had turned the sea into farmland had attempted to recreate Amsterdam amid this tropical heat. The canal, like the gutter that fed it, overflowed with debris. I could even distinguish the two by their distinctive stenches. The gutter had an immediacy about its odor, rotting fruit and urine, while the canal carried a darker, longer-term pungency, the mixture of human excrement and decay.

I continued along, dodging the bicycle cabs that hugged the sides of the road. Beyond them, in the mainstream of the thoroughfare, was a frenzy of automobile and motorbike traffic; the sound of honking horns, backfiring engines, and muffler-deprived cars was overwhelming, as was the acrid stench of oil on hot pavement and gas fumes in the humid air. The weight of all this began to impact me physically.

Well said. He could write the exact same thing today in 2009.

Teachers to loose jobs because of swine flu?

This would be funny if it wasn’t potentially dangerous. At a rural junior high school in the second of my worlds, the teachers sat around gossiping in the teachers’ lounge as usual. But today things got out of hand. Instead of the usual topics of money and their sex lives, they started discussing swine flu. One thing led to another and soon the majority of the teachers there, being followers (sort of) of a certain prophet, declared that the minority of teachers, being followers of religions that permit pork consumption, should all be transferred elsewhere. The connection with swine flu was obscure but perhaps they thought that because of the name “swine flu” that people are catching the flu from pigs and after all, didn’t the government run around spraying pigs a few days ago? So it seemed logical to them somehow that getting rid of teachers whose religions permit them to eat pork would somehow prevent swine flu. They got quite heated up about it and began referring to students and teachers of said religions as “unclean outsiders that stink of balsem”. Unfortunately they didn’t consider that 75% of the student body belong to one of those religions. Word got out and by the end of the day, parents of 75% of the students were up in arms and threatening to transfer their kids elsewhere.

Moral of story: engage brain before opening mouth, ESPECIALLY if you are a teacher.

Spraying pigs to prevent swine flu??

It is unfortunate when people take action without knowledge.









(http://flutracker.rhizalabs.com/)
It seems that the "swine" part of the name of the current flu pandemic is having repercussions around the world. It was announced that fear of swine flu recently led the Egyptian parliment to demand that all pigs be slaughtered. The reaction in the second of my worlds hasn't been quite that drastic but I got a text message this morning that people supposedly from the health department had been going around the area "spraying pigs against pig flu".

Remembering the "spraying against dengue" that was done a few weeks ago, I wondered what on earth they could be doing. This flu isn't being spread by pigs, pigs are not getting sick, and as far as I know there is no vaccine out yet and even if there was it would likely be injected not sprayed.

The villagers were in a bit of an upheaval because they are concerned that their pigs are being sprayed with some kind of poison or even a virus to make them get sick and die. They are very aware of the paranoia towards pigs by some of the folk of a different religion and they well remember the attacks on pig farms by some fanatics a few years ago.

A quick check on the internet showed a few stories on how the department of health in various parts of the country has begun spraying pigs with disinfectant. More texting back and forth revealed that the pigs had been sprayed as well as the area around them and that it was odorless. And at least one family had just flatly refused to let their pigs be sprayed. I told them about the spraying with disinfectant and suggested that it was probably okay and wouldn't hurt the pigs.

I do wish the folk from the health department would put a bit more effort into explaining things to people.

I am not sure how much good spraying bleach water on all the pigs will do towards stopping this human flu pandemic but perhaps it makes nervous people feel like the government is doing something?

The rabies got a bit more personal all of a sudden

About a week and a half after the dog was killed, I went outside one evening to break up a fight between two of the puppies who had really latched on to each other and were making quite a racket. I shouted, I smacked their back sides, I even flipped them over a couple of times. No effect. I didn’t want to dump water on them because they were still small and it was night and I didn’t want them to get chilled and end up sick. So, stupidly I whacked them a bit closer to the head with my hand. It broke up the fight but one of them bit my finger. The holes weren’t big because the puppies are still small but their teeth are sharp – it felt like it went all the way to the bone!

It bled a lot, dripping all over the floor on my way to the bathroon to wash it. That is good they say, for cleaning out a wound. I washed it well with soap and plenty of water. Somebody had some betadine so I applied that. Coincidentally, a teenager in the house had been bit by the neighbor’s dog earlier in the day. That dog probably isn’t rabid, he just likes to bite. When the neighbor got home she came over and brought some grated up pulp from a particular tree that they say draws out poisons. So they packed the teenager’s wound and my finger with it. It was cool and soothing but after an hour I took it off and reapplied betadine. My wound wasn’t particularly painful but of course we are all aware that the mother was recently killed for presumed rabies.

From what I have gathered, the incubation for rabies in dogs is usually 3-6 weeks but can be as long as 6 months. The virus works its way up the nerves into the brain and when it gets to the brain it infects the saliva glands and the saliva is what carries the infection to other animals or people. That is also when the symptoms start. So apparently the animal is not contagious until about the time the symptoms start or a couple days earlier. That is why they say to observe the animal 10 days. If it was coming down with the disease, it will be showing definite symptoms in that time. If the dog is not sick within 10 days, then it was not infectious at the time of the bite – even though presumably the animal might still come down with the disease at a later date.

To comfort (?!) me they told me all about a 10-year old boy in the next village who had died of rabies a couple years ago. He got it from a puppy that they didn’t know had rabies. (Puppies die from all sorts of things.) They told me about a 20 year old girl from another village who had also died of rabies of unclear origen. So rabies is definitely endemic in the area. In fact, one of these puppies was killed in the night presumably by a rabid dog. Fortunately for me, that puppy was not the one that bit me.

The government has intermittent campaigns to vaccinate dogs and there are antirabies shots for those bitten, although with the chronic electricity problems in the area one wonders how viable the vaccine is. After arriving back in the third of my worlds a few days ago I heard that rabies is also an ongoing problem here though they seem to have made more progress in getting animals vaccinated routinely. They also vaccinate water buffalo, cattle and horses. I told the vet about my adventure with the puppies and he confirmed what I had found out about incubation, etc. He also suggested that I considered getting vaccinated against rabies since I am often in a high-risk area. He himself gets an annual booster. He also advised me that the next time I want to break up a dog fight to just use water!

Anyway, I am now past the 10-days and the puppies are still healthy.