On Mon, Nov 22, 2010 at 1:47 PM, Max Sawicky <sawicky at verizon.net> wrote:
> (Bad) Nicholas Cage movie in the works.
>
>
> On Mon, Nov 22, 2010 at 1:36 PM, Dennis Claxton <ddclaxton at earthlink.net
> >wrote:
>
> > I'm gonna hint that I want this book for xmas:
> >
> > "if you are in New York... you are within close proximity to one or more
> > rats having sex"
> >
> > http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2010/11/stratigraphies-of-infestation.html
> >
> > [...]
> >
> > Sullivan quotes one rat-control professional, for instance, who "foresees
> a
> > day when he will be hired to analyze a building's weaknesses, vis-à-vis
> > pests and rodents... 'They design buildings to support pigeons and for
> > infiltration by rodents because they don't think about it. Grand Central
> > Station, right? They just renovated it, right? Who knows what they spend
> on
> > that, right? You know how much they spend on pest control? You know how
> much
> > they budgeted? Nothing. I did all the extra work there, but they had to
> pay
> > us out of the emergency budget.'"
> >
> > Pest control here becomes an explicitly architectural problem, something
> > you can design both for and against. Imagine an entire degree program in
> > infestation-resistant urban design.
> >
> > Sullivan points out that a massive, urban-scale architectural
> intervention,
> > in the form of a quarantine wall fortifying all of New York City against
> > rats, was once tentatively planned: “There was a time in New York, in the
> > 1920s," he writes, "when scientists proposed a great wall along the
> > waterfront to shut out rats completely, to seal out rats and, thus,
> forever
> > end rat fear. Eventually, though, the idea was deemed implausible and
> > abandoned: rats will always get through.”
> >
> > But it's the particular subset of urban knowledge that has been actively
> > cultivated within the pest control industry that fascinates me here.
> > Sullivan spends a bit of time with a man named Larry Adams, a municipal
> > rodent control expert. “If you hang around Larry long enough," Sullivan
> > says, "you realize that he sees the city in a way that most people
> don’tin
> > layers." And what follows is well worth quoting in full:
> > He sees the parks and the streets and then he sees the subways and the
> > sewers and even the old tunnels underneath the sewers. He sees the city
> that
> > is on the maps and the city that was on the mapsthe city’s past, the
> city
> > of hidden speakeasies and ancient tunnels, the inklings of old streams
> and
> > hills. "People don’t realize the subterranean conditions out there," he
> > likes to say. "People don’t realize the levels. People don’t realize the
> we
> > got things down there from the Revolution. A lot of people don’t realize
> > that there’s just layers of settlers here, that things just get bricked
> off,
> > covered up and all. They’re not accessible to people, but they are to
> rats.
> > And they have rats down there that have maybe never seen the surface. If
> > they did, then they’d run people out. Like in the movies. You see, we
> only
> > see the tail end of it. And we only see the weak rats, the ones that get
> > forced out to look for food.”
> > [...]
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > ___________________________________
> > http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
> >
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>
-- ********************************************************* Alan P. Rudy Dept. Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work Central Michigan University 124 Anspach Hall Mt Pleasant, MI 48858 517-881-6319