neighbors

another nice one from boing boing: elderly twins who fed rats in their home for at least 5 years, while the local authorities dithered:

It’s hard to imagine a case more appropriate for Adult Protective Services than two elderly women drowning in biblical prophecy who live with packs of probably diseased rats. Yet there’s no record that Adult Protective Services ever sent anyone, even when City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo’s office finally — and ineffectively — stepped in.

Eventually, Barthel family friend Robinson and her husband came with chain saws one day. They cut down large, overgrown, rat-friendly thickets of birds of paradise, and, Robinson admits to the Weekly, “It was bad. It was infested.”

According to the meager records that portray only a fraction of what unfolded, county inspectors returned a week later and saw another rat through the window. Margaret refused to allow the inspectors, who had no search warrant, inside. The resulting county health report was a testament to how poorly the county dealt with the unchecked rat boom: Neither inspector knew the rats had chewed through the wood floors of the kitchen, living room and bedroom, allowing themselves free rein from a basement crawling with them, as the Weekly learned from court documents.

report from the Ballard Expo in Barcelona

wish i could have been there

excerpt from “swansea terminal” by robert lewis

People thought he was very funny for the first five minutes. Outside Oxwich he harassed a geriatric in a Peugeot estate until he drove into a hedge and they applauded. But they were all very quiet by the time we got to town. As a matter of fact the guy opposite me called him a fucking idiot: we’d had five near-shunts by the time we’d got to Uplands. He spent half his driving time reading from a laminated sheet of route stops, and the other half on his hands free, moaning to some sympathetic or hapless woman about how he’d really had enough today. He made driving a bus look like something the equivalent of running a hospital single-handed. A living rebuttal of the maxim that if you want something done, you should ask a busy person, he could have looked busy standing alone in a darkened room. A one-man trade union, was what he was, membership and executive all rolled into one, making up the constitution as he went along, feeding off the traditional unity between yourself and whatever it is you think you want at the time. It’s the only kind of solidarity you see these days.