Skip to main content

What are rats?

Image
By
This is a chapter from my fourth book called When hunger yearns

These rodents first got to America by stowing away on ships. That was the first answer on Jeopardy when Alex Trebek started hosting the show back in 1964. The category was "Animals" and the contestant Greg Hopkins correctly responded with "What are rats?" I am not good at Jeopardy. I don't have a bunch of facts loaded in my memory. In jeopardy answers are given and you have to respond with the correct question. Some other interesting answers and questions from that first show are: This fastener gets its name from a brand of galoshes it was used on? What is Zipper; Though its name means "city of peace", it's seen over 30 wars, the last in 1967. What is Jerusalem?

Rats have a bad reputation but I observed that rats spelt in reverse is stars so maybe we just need to take a different look at them. Weirdly enough I learnt that Rats & Star was a Japanese male pop group that specialized in doo-wop-influenced music. According to wikipedia the band's palindromic name tells the story of how "rats" raised in the less affluent parts of town could, by singing doo-wop music, reverse their fortunes and collectively become a "star".  Who does not love an underdog story or should I say underrat story. The rise of the underrated. The sky is the limit and full of stars.

Today I learnt some cool facts about rats. Rats laugh when they're tickled. Rats are good swimmers. Rats often spend hours grooming themselves or each other. Rats grind their teeth, also known as chattering, to keep them from growing too long. A group of rats is called a mischief. Rats can count. I was thinking that a ratter is a rat who is a rapper but turns out a ratter is any dog specialized in catching and getting rid of rats. Who knew? I thought that was a cat's job. Speaking of rats on ships which began this whole chapter. Did Noah bring rats on the ark? I asked Google and saw an even more interesting question, did Noah put fishes on the ark? We may never no. Ah!

Have you ever wondered why life is described as a rat race sometimes? According to my friend Gemini, this likens the pursuit of success to rats running in a maze, endlessly seeking rewards. The funny thing about this is that humans are the ones who put the rats in that dilema. And we also tend to put ourselves in the same situation. Modern life does not have to be this competitive in the excessive pursuit of external successes like status and money. Do we really need to subject these rats to these mazes? Are there alternatives to these experiments? Do we need to chase after life in the way we do sometimes and become exhausted and burnt out? What are rats? We are not rats and life is not a rat race. Life can be amazing without the maze of the illusions of what happiness is. Life is not a race to the finish but a journey to be experienced.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

God opens doors

By
It is 1203am and I have decided to write. Saturday I spent the night coding. I was trying to get a FastAPI app up and running, all from my budget Android phone. The test cases were written to use Puppeteer. I ended up using Replit for that. Coding is more challenging when using a mobile phone. Not impossible but more challenging. I hardly blog about technology and coding anymore but the love is still there. I still have a dream of creating my own coding and youtube studio with a nice desk setup. That is nice but what should I make this blog post about? What do I want to write about? What should I write about? I love creating presentations. That is something I could do to revive my youtube channel. I love Maths too. I have this feeling that I could solve one of those longstanding Maths problems that seems impossible. Sometimes, like right now, I feel like abandoning my blog post. It is going nowhere. Maybe I should get up and go wash the wares. I wish God could tell me what to write abo...
Post a Comment
Read more

Mundane

By
It is 123am and I have decided to write. I have this new idea for a book called Mundane. It would be me writing about the ordinary. We chase the extraordinary but there is beauty in the ordinary. There is beauty in the simple. There is beauty in the everyday. What about God? We often think about God in grand terms. But what if God is simple too? What if God is mundane? What if we look for God in the everyday moments? I sit in this dark room with the air conditioning on. The fan is also on. The curtain is down but I imagine the moonlight shining on the grass outside. The cats are probably sleeping. I wonder if anyone else in the neighbourhood is awake at this hour? Is there another writer around who is also writing about the mundane? The fan breeze helps the air conditioning cool me down. These nights are warm otherwise. A mosquito flies across my screen. Hello friend or foe. I cannot quite decide which one. If I had a swatter you would be gone. I check my notifications and there is an ...
Post a Comment
Read more

What we do not know

By
It is 1245am and I have decided to write. I had this weird alienish dream and it ended with me winning by simply stating "the truth is that we do not know". In the dream everyone was having an opinion of what was happening as if they knew. On to something random. I had this question. What is the most unrandom thing? Then what is the most random thing? What if everything is equally random. My friend Chatty thinks that randomness is not an absolute property—it is a relation between you and the system you observe. Randomness is not absolute—it depends on perspective. Something perfectly ordered can seem random if you do not know its pattern. So in a sense, everything can be "equally random" relative to the observer's knowledge, making randomness more about perception than an intrinsic property. The more we know the less random things become. Let me make a detour. Suppose we do not predict things but things predict us. For example, when I flip a coin, did I predict ...
Post a Comment
Read more