NEWS
By Annie Linskey | October 7, 2008
Baltimore might benefit from a rat census, says a City Council resolution introduced last night by Council President Stephanie C. Rawlings-Blake. Three million of the reviled rodents could be burrowing in the city, but nobody knows, in part because no proper count has been done for 50 years, she said. "It never hurts for us to have updated information," she said at yesterday's weekly City Council lunch, held at the Wheelabrator Baltimore waste-to-energy complex near Westport, a plant that receives more than 21,000 tons of garbage daily.
NEWS
By Joe Burris | June 27, 2007
Ronald Cuffie chuckled at the thought of Baltimoreans lining up this weekend to see Ratatouille, the new animated film about a rat in Paris who's an expert chef. Surely some of the city's moviegoers are responsible for the 25,000 service requests made each year to the city's "Rat Rubout" program, which removes the repulsive vermin from infested neighborhoods. "In the movies, rats are likable characters," said Cuffie, director of the city's vector control initiative. "In real life, people want to drop a brick on them."
NEWS
By JACQUES KELLY | June 24, 2006
It was the sighting of heirloom hydrangeas that knocked me into the realization that an old-fashioned Baltimore summer has arrived. Their hot blueberry and purple blossoms, which resemble the shades of snowball flavorings, remind me of canvas awnings and summer hotels. These hydrangeas are tough city survivors. They are tucked into the areaway of some old apartment houses near my home. They seem to thrive on utter inattention and soil conditions only a little removed from a clay pit. I can never recall their not being there; there is something comforting about the annual return of these June veterans.
NEWS
May 8, 2006
Suddenly, On May 6, 2006, WILLIAM N. "Rat" MENDENHALL; dearest son of Bill and Marge Barlage and William Mendenhall; beloved brother of Buddy and Mike Barlage, Cathy Neslein, and Lee Greenborn; loving god-father of Tiffany Mc Kee and best friend of Frank Hunt. Also survived by many other nieces, nephews, relatives and friends. Family invite friends to call at the Charles S. Stevens Funeral Home, Inc., 1501 E. Fort Avenue, Locust Point, MD, on Monday 2 to 4 P.M. and 6 to 8 P.M. Funeral Services will be held at the conclusion of the visitation on Monday evening at 8 P.M. Interment will be private.
NEWS
By LAURA VOZZELLA | February 17, 2006
It has all the elements of a great urban legend: a wayward rodent and terrorized Girl Scouts crossing paths in the august surroundings of the Lowe House Office Building. Add to that the implicit rat/politician jokes. Surely too good to be true. But the tale of the Annapolis House rat actually checks out. So says General Services spokesman Dave Humphrey, who recounts yesterday's 9:30 a.m. incident so well that I'm just gonna let him tell it: "The subject rat was on the second floor of the House of Delegates building.
NEWS
November 14, 2005
"He's a rat that belongs in the gutter. I can smell him a mile away. That guy doesn't care about Terrell. He's recruiting next year's players." Keyshawn Johnson On Drew Rosenhaus (above), the agent for Terrell Owens "I'm like Obi-Wan Kenobi in a room of Luke Skywalkers." John Schuerholz Atlanta Braves general manager, 65, on his young colleagues at the GM meetings "It's obvious. Jackson has Owens on his fantasy team." Tom Hoffarth Los Angeles Daily News, on the Rev. Jesse Jackson's defense of Terrell Owens
NEWS
By Julie Bykowicz | April 21, 2005
The warm temperatures this week have revealed yet another unpleasant aspect of jury duty in Baltimore City: The 105-year- old Clarence M. Mitchell Jr. Courthouse smells like dead rats. As if the tedium, uncomfortable chairs, dingy bathrooms and hallways filled with shackled prisoners weren't enough. A strong odor of decaying rodents (or something equally foul) is permeating some of the courtrooms, hallways and jury rooms on the building's second and third floors, prompting one judge to apologize for the, "shall we say, environmental factors" of jury duty.
NEWS
By PETER SCHMUCK | August 12, 2004
IF THIS IS Thursday, Philadelphia Eagles receiver Terrell Owens is probably making an ass of himself somewhere. The past couple of days, he's been trying to wriggle out of the controversy he created when he hinted in a soon-to-be published Playboy magazine interview that former teammate and current Cleveland Browns quarterback Jeff Garcia is gay. I'm guessing it will be easier for T.O. (which also is NFL shorthand for timeout, turnover and totally obnoxious)...
NEWS
By Rosie Mestel | September 26, 2003
After years of frustrating failures, scientists have succeeded in cloning the laboratory rat, Rattus norvegicus. The feat - reported online yesterday in the journal Science - was hailed by scientists as a boon to medical research because the rat is the animal of choice for studying many human diseases, including hypertension, diabetes and heart disease. It also adds new glitz to the rat as a research tool. In labs, the rat has long been eclipsed by its cousin, the mouse, which has been a powerhouse for genetics research for decades and was one of the first mammals to be cloned, in 1998.
NEWS
By Julie Bell | March 1, 2001
Rivals in the sometimes acrimonious race to sequence the human genome are working together to unravel the genomic software powering the rat, an animal often used as a model to help understand disease in people, the National Institutes of Health announced yesterday. Celera Genomics Group, which recently published its human genome sequence in the journal Science, and the Baylor College of Medicine, a key sequencing center for the rival publicly funded project that published in Nature, have been awarded two new grants totaling $58.5 million to help sequence the rat. The awards, $21 million of which will go to Celera over the next two fiscal years, are meant to speed up a publicly funded rat DNA-sequencing project begun at the end of the 1999 fiscal year.