The Rats of Tompkins Square Park Have a Movie Trailer Now

• I heard Steve M and Jeff R are too scared to walk through the park after seeing approximate 15 rpm (rats per minute) on the way to Doc Hollidays last Saturday

• I wonder if the rats' holes have gotten flooded with all the rain we've had since Saturday.

• OH. At first I thought this was going to be about those flying rats that infest public places everywhere across the USA, but then I realized it was about the rodent. The only rat stories I know about are from Austin, Texas in the 1980s, when I worked in a college bookstore that had a rat infestation in the basement. So poison was duly laid out and in due course, a couple of rats died...in the basement wall. Nothing like having to sledgehammer a wall to get at a stinky rat corpse. After the second rat, the sticky glue boards were deployed  and they worked great, until it came time to actually dispose of the live rat trapped on the board. That was not such a good thing. Finally, there was the incident where one of the clerks put a large black gummy rat in the $20s slot of the register of a manager (a big, macho dude we often compared to Sam on "Cheers") who was doing textbook buyback. (It was not me, but I was in awe of the chutzpah.) The manager did a buyback, rang up the amount, opened the register drawer, then jumped back in absolute terror. He made another\ clerk give out the money and then had the clerk who'd dropped this candy rat remove it from his drawer. For all of his macho man attitude, Joe was terrified of rats. Apparently growing up in Chicago had something to do with it.

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