Spending Mother’s Day weekend with Mom is nice—although the games of Scrabble are brutal as the dark lord of Diction rises to smite the over-literate female peasantry—except for having to deal with the TV. Fortunately a baseball game was on most of the time so that my exposure to the toxic American narrative was minimal.

After the ladies retired and I was left to fight with the collie—a natural enemy, being a female enforcer of domestication as she is—over the couch, I clicked the various documentary channels and discovered that history is no longer aired on the History Channel, that arts and entertainment is about repossessing cars and bidding on storage lockers, that the only thing left to discover by the Discovery Channel is…a big ass in a wedding dress?

At last, I found a single offering, a BBC America investigation of the army of rats under our feet, with looks into roach and bedbug kind as well. Excrement, disease, long-tailed, greasy critters with mini-beaver teeth slithering into a sushi bar in Manhattan…

Not much about rats is news to the director of the Habitat Hoodrat News Desk, but I do recommend viewing this, especially the segment featuring the two exterminators in New York fighting a two-man rear guard action against nine million well-fed foes.