Coffee Klatch

Just read on CNN.com: 1,300 Rats Overwhelm Man’s Home. Apparently he got one to feed his pet snake and felt sorry for it, so he befriended the rat instead. Then he bought three more to be friends with him, and then nature took its course.

Roger Dier’s house in a quiet middle-class neighborhood in Petaluma reeks of urine, and the floor is covered with the feed mixed with rat droppings, and gnawed walls, according to The Press Democrat.

When animal control officers arrived after a neighbor called about a foul smell, they found some rats stacked six deep in cages so overcrowded that many had missing eyes and limbs.

No mention of the pet python that started the whole mess. My guess is that the rats rose up and overthrew their carnivorous master, turning tails (pun intended) on the snake and eating HIM instead! Once the python was gone, it was every rat for himself!

Rats make nice pets, but come ON! There’s got to be a limit!

Current music: Toward the Within, by Dead Can Dance

From the Book of Ratings, an analysis of Cold Symptoms. (For those of you unfamiliar, the Book of Ratings is an AWESOMELY funny book by Lore Fitzgerald Sjöberg, who provides “opinions, grades, and assessments of everything worth thinking about.”)

Cold Symptoms
Sneezing
In minute quantities, sneezes can be gratifying. I’ve heard orgasms described as a sort of full-body sneeze, and that’s an alarmingly accurate description. I don’t go on the Internet at two in the morning looking for pictures of bee pollen, so I think I’ve still got perspective, but I figure if you’re going to be expelling mucus at fastball speeds, you may as well put it in the best possible light. B+

Stuffy Nose
When I was younger I didn’t realize that sinuses actually swell when you’re sick. I thought that the reason I couldn’t breathe out of at least one nostril was that a wad of passage-blocking snot was in the way, and it bugged the preteen hell out of me that no amount of blowing could clear it. The only good thing about a stuffy nose is that if you’re in too much misery to sleep, you can always play “waiting for the nostril switch.” D+

Coughing
The human animal has an astonishing repertoire of coughs, the sickness equivalent of a high-end synth box. My favorite, which is to say the least annoying, is a quick lung-clearing hack. The worst are those long resonant vibrating coughs that leave you feeling as if your lungs had been scrubbed by an obsessive-compulsive with a fresh scouring pad. C-

Fever
I don’t find fevers pleasant–except, of course, for disco fever–but I am grateful for them as the ultimate vindication of one’s whining, short of wasting death. Complaining about headaches and scratchy throats can be dismissed as a ploy to get attention and/or avoid work, but once that thermometer reads 98.7 or so, you’re sick, baby, with all the pillow-fluffing and daytime-television-watching due thereto. B-

Sore Throat
A vague scratching at the back of my throat is, often as not, the first sign of an oncoming attack of several days of burning misery. Because of this, I pay frequent low-level attention to my throat, the way adolescent girls pay frequent low-level attention to the growth of their breasts. Unfortunately, it’s very easy to convince yourself that you have a minor sore throat if you’ve just woken up, inhaled cold air, or eaten wasabi in the last week, so there are a lot of false alarms, and many oranges have given up their lives for my paranoia. D-

Headache
I don’t get many headaches, of which I’m glad, because if one is to believe television advertisements, most headaches are slightly more painful than extended torture by intelligent evil mandrills and are accompanied by such uncomfortable effects as blurry close-ups of you grimacing while holding a hand to your forehead. Luckily, you’ve got Epoxidril, with the maximum amount of painkiller available without immediate liver failure. D

Personal Note: Up there with the coughs, at least from an observer’s unfortunate standpoint, is OTHER people’s coughs that are continual attempts to clear the phlegm from their breathing passages. Yuck!

Current music: In the Wake of the Wind, by David Arkenstone

No, not the movie. The actual thing! In the recent budget approval by Congress was $700 million for Mars exploration. The first plans actual visits planned are to be unmanned flights, of course. And if the machines to get there have to be big when carrying people, we’ve got the International Space Station and the moon, to which President Bush promised in 2004 that we would return by 2020.

For more on the budget, read the article on Fox News.
For more on the Mars Exploration Program visit NASA’s site.

What is the opposite of ‘more?’ Most people would answer ‘less.’ In fact, many people think of that as the only answer. Truth be told, they’re wrong. More times than they have any idea.

‘More’ means a greater number or amount. You use the word ‘more’ whether you’re talking about coins in a fountain or water in the fountain. The difference is whether the thing there’s more of is made up of individual components (coins) or is one big mass (water). That makes no difference if you’re talking about increasing the amount, but if you’re decreasing, there IS a difference.

‘Less’ is used for the mass description. More water, less water.

‘Fewer’ is used for the item description. More coins, fewer coins.

You can’t have ‘less coins.’ It just doesn’t work. You also can’t have ’12 items or less’ in your shopping cart at the grocery store. The proper grammar is ’12 items or fewer.’ A friend of mine back in Grand Rapids always had an issue when he saw that kind of error on signs in a grocery story. And when the day came that Meijer changed their signs to ‘# items or fewer,’ I tell you there was great joy in the Burghart household!!

So there you have it. Less water. Fewer coins. Now you know. (And if you already did, God bless you and spread the word.)