Ratszapoppin!

I have wanted to write this blog item for literally months now, but I didn't have what they call in the news business a "peg."

Well, now I have a peg. Oh, boy do I have a peg.

I'm sure at least some of you have seen the gruesome images broadcast on New York TV of a dozen rats scampering around inside a KFC/Taco Bell store in Greenwich Village the other day. The story got a huge amount of press, and if you go on You Tube and type in "KFC rats" I'm sure you'll be able to find some of the footage.

This is not to bash KFC or Taco Bell or the parent company that owns the store in the Village. They're just the scapegoats here. The real problem is much bigger.

The problem is that, at the moment, New York City, and Manhattan in particular, is swarming with rats. Thousands of them. There are more rats running around in plain sight in Manhattan right now then there have been at any time in living memory -- it's an epidemic.

If you take the N or the R local train uptown late at night, sit in the first car right behind the motorman. Wait until the train pulls into the 34th Street station. As the doors open, keep your eyes on the floor. Chances are that you're going to see a rat on the platform scampering right in front of you. The odds are better than 50/50. I refer to it as "the floor show."

My street is swarming with rats. If you walk down it late at night you're apt to be run over by one of them -- which is why, if it's late enough, I've taken to walking in the middle of the street rather than the sidewalk. I'd rather take my chances with an oncoming cab than with the rats. The rats are bigger.

A lot of this has to do with the frenzy of construction that's been going on of late in Manhattan. Whenever there's a lot of construction the rats are driven out of their hiding places and they have to find new ones -- so they scatter. Lately they have scattered into my building, where they have been making a concerted effort to enter the apartments of myself and my neighbors. When the sound of rats trying to claw into your apartment is so loud that it wakes you up out of a sound sleep, you know that you have a serious problem.

It remains to be seen what the mayor and the city is planning to do, if anything, about this problem. I complained to the MTA about the rat problem at the Penn Station subway stop and got a placebo-esque e-mail in response.

But they better do something, because what we saw, and were sickened by, at the Greenwich Village KFC is just the tip of the iceberg.

Tom Moran

Note: I was laid up with the flu this past week, so I've gotten a little behind in my revisionist Oscar survey. I'll take it up again this coming week, as well as a discussion of the AFI's upcoming special on "100 Years, 100 Films." This is the second time they're doing this poll, and the last time was a disaster. Will they do better this time? I'll discuss it at length.