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Authors: Mark Leyner
Tags: Fiction
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infected than rats, and raccoons are the most common wild animals to have rabies. As far as the transmission of human rabies is concerned, bats have been responsible for almost 75 percent of rabies cases since 1990.
So let’s lighten up on the rats, okay? It’s so unfair. People are still blaming rats for the Black Death (the bubonic plague epidemic that killed 20 million victims in fourteenth-century Europe), when it was actually the fleas that lived on the rats fault (
Xenopsylla cheopis,
to be exact).
In an effort to rehabilitate the reputation of the rat, here’s a list of our favorite rat songs:
“Eat That Rat” by The Ramones
“Rats” by Pearl Jam
“Rats in the Cellar” by Aerosmith
Anything by the bands Ratt or the Boomtown Rats
And, of course, the GREATEST rat song ever: “Ben” by Michael Jackson
WHY DO PEOPLE SAY, “I HAVE TO PISS LIKE A RACEHORSE”?
A horse is a pretty big animal, and it’s a good rule of thumb (or rule of bladder) that the bigger the animal, the bigger the bladder, which means the bigger the puddle. In adult humans, the average urine production is 1 to 2 liters per day. Normal urination for a 1,000-pound horse is about 1 to 2 gallons a day. And then there’s the horse’s famously forceful urinary stream—a torrent that could blast rioting demonstrators against a wall!
But this saying may actually have gained currency as the result of the widespread practice of giving racehorses a drug called furosemide prior to a race. Ostensibly a preventive measure for exercise-induced pulmonary hemorrhaging (EPIH), the drug has also been found to have a clear performance-enhancing effect. Why? Probably because furosemide is a diuretic—it makes you piss—and horses given furosemide lose about twenty pounds of their pre-race body weight through urination. And, at the track, lighter means faster.
Horses, by the way, aren’t the only animals in sports subject to chemical cheating. Police in Shanghai, China, recently shut down a gambling den where fighting crickets were given performance-enhancing drugs!
For the hauntingly poetic qualities of horse piss, check out the renowned seventeenth-century Japanese haiku master Matsuo Basho, who wrote the following poem (which appears in his collection
Narrow Road to the Deep North
):
Bitten by fleas and lice,
I slept in a bed,
a horse pissing all the time by my pillow.
Okay, maybe it loses a little something in the translation.
WHY DON’T MOSQUITO BITES HURT WHEN YOU GET THEM, AND WHY DO THEY ITCH?
Ahh…the amazing, diabolically ingenious mosquito. A mosquito stabs you with its piercing-sucking proboscis, which is actually made up of several needlelike tubes. She (only the females bite) then injects you with her saliva laced not only with an anticoagulant, so your blood won’t clot and can flow easily up her tiny straw, but also an anesthetic, so you won’t feel the pain and whack the little bugger in the midst of its vampiric happy meal. The itching you feel later on is an immune response to the foreign proteins in the saliva left behind in the wound.
Try to resist the almost irresistible urge to scratch your mosquito bites.
It’ll only make the itching worse, and could even lead to infection. Calamine lotion is a better bet. That dappled-with-blobs-of-pink-gook look won’t garner many kudos on the fashion runway, but at least you’ll feel better.
Leyner, who fancies himself something of an amateur entomologist, is particularly obsessed with mosquitos. Here, from the pages of
Travel & Leisure
magazine, is his lovely description of the large mosquitos that inhabit the Canadian Arctic province of Nunavut in the warmer summer months: “The mosquitos here are enormous and ravenous. They actually gaze up at you while sucking, like in a porn movie.”
WHY ARE SOME PEOPLE SWEETER TO MOSQUITOES?
There are many different factors and variables that come into play when a mosquito chooses to bite you over someone else or vice versa. So
So let’s lighten up on the rats, okay? It’s so unfair. People are still blaming rats for the Black Death (the bubonic plague epidemic that killed 20 million victims in fourteenth-century Europe), when it was actually the fleas that lived on the rats fault (
Xenopsylla cheopis,
to be exact).
In an effort to rehabilitate the reputation of the rat, here’s a list of our favorite rat songs:
“Eat That Rat” by The Ramones
“Rats” by Pearl Jam
“Rats in the Cellar” by Aerosmith
Anything by the bands Ratt or the Boomtown Rats
And, of course, the GREATEST rat song ever: “Ben” by Michael Jackson
WHY DO PEOPLE SAY, “I HAVE TO PISS LIKE A RACEHORSE”?
A horse is a pretty big animal, and it’s a good rule of thumb (or rule of bladder) that the bigger the animal, the bigger the bladder, which means the bigger the puddle. In adult humans, the average urine production is 1 to 2 liters per day. Normal urination for a 1,000-pound horse is about 1 to 2 gallons a day. And then there’s the horse’s famously forceful urinary stream—a torrent that could blast rioting demonstrators against a wall!
But this saying may actually have gained currency as the result of the widespread practice of giving racehorses a drug called furosemide prior to a race. Ostensibly a preventive measure for exercise-induced pulmonary hemorrhaging (EPIH), the drug has also been found to have a clear performance-enhancing effect. Why? Probably because furosemide is a diuretic—it makes you piss—and horses given furosemide lose about twenty pounds of their pre-race body weight through urination. And, at the track, lighter means faster.
Horses, by the way, aren’t the only animals in sports subject to chemical cheating. Police in Shanghai, China, recently shut down a gambling den where fighting crickets were given performance-enhancing drugs!
For the hauntingly poetic qualities of horse piss, check out the renowned seventeenth-century Japanese haiku master Matsuo Basho, who wrote the following poem (which appears in his collection
Narrow Road to the Deep North
):
Bitten by fleas and lice,
I slept in a bed,
a horse pissing all the time by my pillow.
Okay, maybe it loses a little something in the translation.
WHY DON’T MOSQUITO BITES HURT WHEN YOU GET THEM, AND WHY DO THEY ITCH?
Ahh…the amazing, diabolically ingenious mosquito. A mosquito stabs you with its piercing-sucking proboscis, which is actually made up of several needlelike tubes. She (only the females bite) then injects you with her saliva laced not only with an anticoagulant, so your blood won’t clot and can flow easily up her tiny straw, but also an anesthetic, so you won’t feel the pain and whack the little bugger in the midst of its vampiric happy meal. The itching you feel later on is an immune response to the foreign proteins in the saliva left behind in the wound.
Try to resist the almost irresistible urge to scratch your mosquito bites.
It’ll only make the itching worse, and could even lead to infection. Calamine lotion is a better bet. That dappled-with-blobs-of-pink-gook look won’t garner many kudos on the fashion runway, but at least you’ll feel better.
Leyner, who fancies himself something of an amateur entomologist, is particularly obsessed with mosquitos. Here, from the pages of
Travel & Leisure
magazine, is his lovely description of the large mosquitos that inhabit the Canadian Arctic province of Nunavut in the warmer summer months: “The mosquitos here are enormous and ravenous. They actually gaze up at you while sucking, like in a porn movie.”
WHY ARE SOME PEOPLE SWEETER TO MOSQUITOES?
There are many different factors and variables that come into play when a mosquito chooses to bite you over someone else or vice versa. So
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