Rats, Bricks, and Bees

Once, the use of arcane or apparently absurd statistics or observations was the prerogative of elite university seminars, which later percolated into books. David Hackett Fischer, for instance, could note the price of bricks from medieval times onward and devise whole theories of inflation from them. Richard Cobb could tell you all about the French Revolution from his storehouse of information about Parisian drains, and the insane number of cahiers de doleance that demanded that the revolutionary French state 'kill all rabbits, pigeons and monks'.

So, in that spirit, I've been training my eye on the ordinary things of life, and, surprisingly, found all my prejudices confirmed. I'm sure that that's a first for a blog.

Take rats, for instance. Or rather, take the view of the National Pest Technicians Association on rats. The NPTA suppressed 9 million rat births last year, and each year publish a 'rodent report' which, obviously, is subject to the usual caveats about special interest groups and so forth.

Today's Daily Mail notes how, despite these valiant efforts, England is undergoing a plague of rats. The cause seems obvious. There are far too many local councillors and local council employees who do nothing but raise taxes and steal children all day. Some of them have vastly increased the cost of removing rats.

Others have instituted policies that mean that rubbish is only collected every two weeks, and then under pain of all sorts of decrees about the contents of rubbish bins. As sure as global warming, ten years ago when it was happening, had everything to do with the sun and little to do with CO2, the rat population rise is a consequence. Like and sympathise with rats as I do (a woman I love very much once replaced me with one called Gordon when she wanted to stop talking to me, but it had the decency to give her an illness) is anyone in local government listening to this modern prelude to the plague of Justinian?

No.

So, let's turn attention to bricks.

As Father Jack Hackett, the Charles Coughlin of Craggy Island once noted, 'I love my brick', and so does the Brick Development Association. They are part of the Brick Industry. They sponsor awards for houses designed with bricks in mind. I had sought price or quality data, having once been posed a legal problem about the standard to be associated with reused bricks--it used to be all Perry Masonry down at the Inns of Court School of Law--but unfortunately, have only found one heartwarming story. That's the tale of how industry insider Katherina Lewis is 'just amazed by what can be done with a clay brick'. Especially in Ireland. Quite, what what don't you know.

We can all, in days to come, as we sit on the rubble of the coming stag-deflation, ponder such questions, as well as what the 'Surrey vernacular brick look' is.

Let's move on.

Did you ever wonder what happened to the bees? In this country, the newspapers and scientific journals last year were full of warnings of imminent agricultural collapse because of colony collapse disorder. This is a serious menace, involving the disappearance of bees on a huge scale across the planet. Bees are industrious and attractive creatures, but more importantly, vital to the biosphere.

Here, a debate was beginning to start about whether toxins in the food commercial apiarists sometimes fed bees, such as high fructose corn syrup, or mobile telephones, or some virus was killing bees. Then a particularly good 'Doctor Who' storyline came along which embarrassed everybody into thinking that talking about bees (as Einstein did) was silly, and everyone shut up in case they were accused of mixing fact and fantasy and thinking that the Bees had gone back to their own planet.

But Colony collapse disorder is still with us, and still very serious. No-one knows what has happened. Apparently beehives up and down and around the world are in some state akin to Afghanistan, which is terrible. I am getting some Christmas pre-ordering in, and fully intend to buy this book on the subject, recently noted in The Gothamist website.

Rats, bricks and Bees. Ah, the west towards the end. Here's a Neil Clark article on public conveniences in Britain (with a horrible photograph attached, be warned), contrasted with those of Shanghai. According to China Daily, 'Public Toilets face a revolution'. 'nuff said. Don't say that this blog doesn't bring you full-spectrum analysis, especially in the week of the World Toilet Summit in Macau. At least it's suitably near the World economic talks in which the west begged Asia for aid.

Good-bye earth, and goodnight. Here's Tom Lehrer on the mothers and sons of World War Three...