Rat Farms

This story

Thanks to hunters, and a promise of prizes from the provincial government, Bulacan’s rice farms were saved from widespread devastation by field rats.

Farmers, who joined a rat hunting competition launched by Gov. Wilhelmino Sy-Alvarado in May, killed 106,620 rats and saved about 80 percent of the province’s rice farms from rodents that feasted on their crops.

To encourage farmers and residents to help eliminate field rats, called “dagang bukid” here, Alvarado promised an incentive of P1 for every rat killed.

reminded me this from the Discworld novels by Terry Pratchett

“Shortly before the Patrician came to power there was a terrible plague of rats. The city council countered it by offering twenty pence for every rat tail. This did, for a week or two, reduce the number of rats—and then people were suddenly queueing up with tails, the city treasury was being drained, and no one seemed to be doing much work. And there still seemed to be a lot of rats around. Lord Vetinari had listened carefully while the problem was explained, and had solved the thing with one memorable phrase which said a lot about him, about the folly of bounty offers, and about the natural instinct of Ankh-Morporkians in any situation involving money: “Tax the rat farms.”

Jesus and Mo: Euthanasia

I think this is a nice follow up to the news that Terry Pratchett is preparing for his own death since a lot of people seems to have been freaked out about it.

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I really feel bummed because of this

Sir Terry Pratchett begins process that could lead to assisted suicide

Sir Terry Pratchett, the author, has started the formal process that could lead to his assisted suicide at the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland.

The 63-year-old, who has a rare form of early-onset Alzheimer’s disease, said he had received the consent forms recently and was now considering whether to sign them.

Sir Terry, made the decision to request the forms after accompanying a motor-neurone sufferer to the Dignitas clinic for a controversial documentary to be screened on Monday evening on BBC TWO.

I have enjoyed many hours of pleasure reading his books.

Quote from Terry Pratchett

I was reading Jingo and was struck by this phrase, so rather that typing it up i looked up the first line in google so I can copy and paste it here:

"It was much better to imagine men in some smoky room somewhere, made mad and cynical by privilege and power, plotting over the brandy. You had to cling to this sort of image, because if you didn't then you might have to face the fact that bad things happened because ordinary people, the kind who brushed the dog and told their children bedtime stories, were capable of then going out and doing horrible things to other ordinary people. It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone's fault. If it was Us, what did that make Me? After all, I'm one of Us. I must be. I've certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No-one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We're always one of Us. It's Them that do the bad things."

Copied and pasted from LiteraCita