Saturday, July 28, 2012

Native Squeaker

 
Right now, as we squeak, Britain is hosting the XXX Olympic Games. People – and rodents – from around the globe have converged on London’s city streets (and, er, sewers) to celebrate camaraterie and engage in friendly competition. Along with this comes quite a confusion of dialect, and just as you humans can’t understand foreign languages, we rats, as crazy as it sounds, can’t distinguish foreign squeaks.
 
For example, who knows the squeak for cheese in Chinese? Who’s able to order sludge in Swahili? It’s been fleadiculously confusing beneath these London city streets!
 
What we need is a linguistic cheese wiz. A rat who knows every squeak in the world, who can translate in any tongue, any language, even with paws (because some of the rodent visitors are deaf) – indeed, a Native Squeaker!
 
Well, with more than 200 countries represented at these Olympic Games it’s unlikely we’ll find a critter capable of knowing everyone’s squeaks. Hmm … solution #2: chew through the humans’ translation cables, rewire them for rat lingo, and string ’em through the sewers along the London Underground – Brits are afraid to go underneath there anyway!
 
Keepinʼ it squeak,
Bob

Sunday, July 15, 2012

Karate


Recently I noticed my ratty figure has grown a bit more round than I would like, so I aspired to shed the extra poundage by improving my diet – i.e., cutting out the cheese. (Oh, how pawful.) Along with this weight loss goal I decided to better my fitness, and naturally chose the only exercise regimen appropriate for rodents: karate. (I mean hey, it worked for Splinter in the Ninja Turtles, right?)
 
Yesterday I competed in an international karate tournament that just happened to be held close to my hometown of Ratlanta, Georgia. It was intimidating competing against rodents from all over the globe – jerboas from Europe, capybaras from South America, even African pygmy mice – but I did my rat-tastic best. (Going paw-to-paw with the capybaras was particularly daunting, especially in sparring (light-contact fighting), as some of those critters can weigh up to 200 pounds! Of course, the weight I recently put on did partially make up for things.)
 
My karate instructor wasnʼt thrilled by the fact that in just a week since starting Iʼd managed to chew halfway through my white belt (what can I squeak? no cheese = hungry = eat everything in sight), but I still had enough fabric left over to wrap around my fat rat waist. (I did happen to notice that some of the other rodents at the tournament had supplemented their diet with belt cloth as well.) I ended up placing first in forms and weapons (not bad for just a weekʼs training), but the capybaras swept board breaking, and – surprisingly – the pygmy mice took sparring: turns out that due to their small size they're squeaktacular at slipping up underneath their oppawnentsʼ appendages and scoring points! Needless to squeak, even though I know all about dark alleys (I am a rat, after all), I don't want to meet one of those little guys down one.
 
So I plan to continue my karate training, hoping that one day my chewed-up belt will be the color of my rubber rat fur; you can call me “Black-Belt Bob” then. In the meantime Iʼll make sure to scuttle carefully down the back alleys – and apologize to the humans about the large number of introduced rodent species now present in Ratlanta.
 
Keepinʼ it squeak,
Bob

Saturday, July 7, 2012

Dairy in the Derriere

 
In recent weeks I’ve happened to make an occasional glance at my frame when passing by mirrors in the house of my human family, and I’ve noticed a bit of a pooch around the flanks of my hindquarters. That disturbs me: gaining weight is quite unusual for a rubber rat made from a pre-manufactured mold, but somehow, it seems, that’s just what it is I’ve done.
 
Now, in the past I’ve kept healthy by running on the hamster wheel for 30 minutes every day and restricting my diet to the lower-fat cheeses, but after the pawlidays last year I guess I just decided to relax and let my fur down a bit. Er, a little too much, perhaps, because now when I crawl onto the bathroom scale, my beady red rat eyes see several more pounds than there were in the past.
 
Maybe it was the Muenster. Perhaps the Parmesan. Or a likely culprit could have been the Colby-Jack; it’s one of the fattiest cheeses there is! My cheesy consumption has put me to shame. If I keep scuttling down this road I’ll end up as chubby as my corpulent rat pal Gus, and that’s not Gouda!
 
So now I’m making a plan to shed this weight (and maybe a little fur, too, while I'm at it: could help with an ounce or two). I’ll be sure to grease up the hamster wheel, keep healthy seeds and nuts on hand – and hide the cheese. (Oh, rats.)
 
Keepin’ it squeak,
Bob

Sunday, July 1, 2012

Flealentless Heat

 
For days Ratlanta has been trapped in the vice grip of an unsqueakable heat wave, finally setting an all-time record high of 106 degrees yesterday afternoon. It was so hot, in fact, that I decided to fry an egg on the proverbial rock – and nearly melted my rubber fur off in the process!
 
After almost becoming the makings of a new tire, I decided to find some ways to keep cool. First I took a stroll down into the sewer, thinking that a location that never sees the sun must surely be a cool place to be. But alas: the waters trickling down from the city streets above had been scalded by the reflected heat of the black asphalt, and turned out to be hotter than that egg-fried rock!
 
Then I decided to sneak into the fridge at a house nearby, capitalizing on the pawportunity to nip a snip of cheese while I was there. But when I was discovered in the bottom of the icebox, crouching with my snack between the salami and leftover green beans, I worked up such a sweat dodging the broom that lady was trying to whack me with that it undid all the good of my cool-down!
 
Finally, in a last-ditch effort to find some relief from this fleadiculous hot weather, I went for broke and paid a visit to my friend John, a naked mole rat who lives nearby. Because John resides permanently underground, his need for fur is negated – as is his need to drop his drawers when using the bathroom (hence his name). And though I find my ratty friend’s clawdacity to scuttle around in the buff more than a tad disturbing, at that point I was out of pawptions!
 
So while I spend the next few days chilling in the underground nude beach, I hope you can find ways to keep cool in this flealentless heat. And if you do have to go outside, remember to wear a hat – you don’t want your whiskers singed!
 
Keepin’ it squeak,
Bob