Another victim of 2-week old garbage.

Don't let PETA (or is it PITA?) get wind of this.

I hope you put Landau irons on the side of the recycling cart.

Did you stitch up Stenchy's hat yourself? Nice work.

Iphone4s photo eh?

So does the dead rat go in the slop bucket or the garbage? It is "meat" at this point, no? I'd hate to be around to smell that thing after it lays around for a day or two let alone two weeks for the next garbage day. Just thinking about it makes me kind of sick.

I think the protocol is to double bag it and put it in the garbage. I'm sure the City of Portland would fine you for putting the garbage sorters in danger of contracting Black Plague if you just threw it away, and we wouldn't want to endanger the career of a Portland Bureaucrat from the Bureau of Sustainability, would we? The rat problem is no doubt due to our continuous production of garbage, and not a product of our living an approved "sustainable" life.

C'mon folks. You're supposed to keep it in the freezer until your pick up day.

I think the protocol also was anyway to prohibit putting meat and food waste in with our yard debris.
I keep bringing it up as I consider this a serious matter. Maybe others don't care or are depending on that our political decision makers have made decisions based on science. Big question is have they or have these officials just been "properly" lobbied for vested interests?

Can we assume the heat victim pictured here didn't heed the the Storm Teams warnings to stay hydrated?

It should be at least cooked a bit before the PITA

It should be at least cooked a bit

What? You haven't tried rat carpaccio? or ceviche?

Please . . . Tartare!

Okay, I'll admit to a little bit of throw-up at the back there after that one.

So do you double bag the rat in unsustainable plastic bags? Paper won't contain a thing. Perhaps the powers that be should provide all those in the slop bucket zone with biodegradable rodent bags for situations like this. It would also be nice to know if Jack notified the next of kin first before displaying the body for public viewing. Do we know his name? I'm sure Stenchy is all over this one...and Jack will soon have a rat protest on his doorstep, but from the looks of things the kitty cats have the upper hand for the time being.

If a cat got that rat, it's a pretty wussy cat. Our cats leave the head, tail, and what appears to be lungs for us to find on the mat. (Or maybe that cat gets fed better than ours.)

The first major project of his ministry after Independence, he said, had been to put the country's food cycle on a stable-state basis: all food wastes, sewage, and garbage were to be turned into organic fertilizer and applied to the land, where it would again enter into the food production cycle. Every Ecotopian household, thus, is required to compulsively sort all its garbage into compostable and recyclable categories, at what must be an enormous expenditure of personal effort; and expanded fleets of garbage trucks are also needed.

- Ernest Callenbach, 1975. Ecotopia.

Sounds vaguely familiar.

There's a new scourge related to this whole composting mess. Our trash bin stinks so bad now that we had to move it outside of the garage to the side of the house.

Well... My wife doesn't like to take trash all the way out there, so she frequently drops it in the garage and I put it in the bin when I get home from work. That would be fine, except on Tuesday she forgot to close the garage door. When I got home, a neighborhood cat was in the garage, eating garbage from a freshly-torn hole in the trash bag. I had to shoo him away and clean up after him.

That wouldn't have happened if the bin was still in the garage.

This series is genuinely funny, but don't lose perspective - you are all going to run the risk of catching a disease from the resurgent pests.

Things will eventually reach a critical mass that overcomes the other sanitation methods that are still in effect. I'm sure the City will find a clever way to blame you for it.

I'm sure the City will find a clever way to blame you for it.

I can see the city and the cult that follows the behavioral dictates blaming those who didn't perfectly follow the instructions. There may be new jobs for the "snitch" garbage management and collectors of fines for those who have not perfectly cleaned the green bins.