News item: Complaints about rats throughout the five boroughs have chewed through the roof. From the start of the year to the end of April, New Yorkers called in about 7,400 sightings of Mickey’s ugly cousins to 311, a sizable jump from 6,150 last year and a bigger jump from the first four months of 2019. The yucky increase is happening on the mayoral watch of Eric Adams, who as Brooklyn borough president gleefully oversaw mass rodent executions using a newfangled trapping bucket. Curtis Sliwa, Adams’ general election opponent, had his own quirky rat eradication idea: unleashing feral cats.
News item: Thursday, scientists captured the first image of a black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy, called Sagittarius A*. About 27,000 light-years away, it’s 4 million times more massive than our Sun. The discovery, which is further validation of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity (that Einstein guy was onto something), was made possible by 300 researchers from 13 institutions. Over the course of many years, they harnessed technology somewhat more sophisticated than Adams’ rat bucket — eight radio telescopes spread across the planet.
This gives us an idea, if not one of Einsteinian caliber. From black holes, matter cannot escape. Neither can light. Neither can rats.
