Rat

Residents in the 4500 block of G Street, armed with lawn chairs and placards, today protest an infestation of rats from the old Harrowgate incinerator on the 4700 block. Neighbors demanding a cleanup say people have been leaving waste outside the fence of the facility, which has been used recently only as a refuse transfer station.

One reason I tend to be optimistic to the point of idiocy is because I've noticed that nothing one learns ever goes to waste. For years, I thought the nadir of my formal education was an unhappy brush with experimental psychology in which I accidentally drove a rat nuts. I was attempting to fulfill a science requirement without having to take something serious, such as physics. They gave me a Skinner box and a nice little white rat. I was supposed to teach my rat he had to press the bar in the Skinner box to get a food pellet; he learned in no time flat.

Mobster Lawrence Merlino was slipped into a judge's anteroom yesterday to plead guilty to third-degree murder in the 1985 murder of Frank "Frankie Flowers" D'Alfonso, the Daily News has learned. Merlino is said to have agreed to testify for the prosecution in the retrial of imprisoned crime boss Nicodemo "Little Nicky" Scarfo and six others in the D'Alfonso hit. "If it is true that Merlino pleaded guilty in exchange for his testimony, then there is no pride" in the district attorney's office, said Scarfo's lawyer Norris E. Gelman.

Haywood Fennell has spent 25 years in prison because he has refused to violate the inmates' code against ratting on a pal, the prosecutor said. Yesterday, Fennell, now 43, continued his devotion to the code by refusing to testify against Stephen Watkins, 44, whom he originally implicated in a statement to police in the stabbing death of Joseph Hayes, 42, during a 1968 robbery. The district attorney's office brought Watkins to trial because Fennell had said he was ready to testify.

The president of a Philadelphia company that supplies food to school cafeterias said yesterday that it was "purely accidental" that a rat choked to death on a cracker supplied by his firm. In an experiment similar to those performed often in other schools, sixth graders at Harrison Elementary School recently fed one rat junk food and another food from the school cafeteria to observe the effects of the different diets. On Thursday the rat eating the cafeteria food died. "In all these years of providing this program at no extra cost to school systems, we have never lost a rat," said Richard Levin, president of Blue Ribbon Services, which has sponsored similar experiments at Harrison and other schools over the last three years.

Just when we thought a few areas of natural law were settled, along comes the case of the fellow in Hillside, N.J., who has been charged with unlawfully (and unceremoniously) executing a rat in his garden. This is not so much a matter of due process: The rat was railroaded, no question. No, the charges involve the method of execution: The rat was thwacked to death with a common broom handle. (Admittedly, cruel. But in the history of rat oppression, hardly unusual.) The accused - a small-time tomato gardener named Frank Balun, 69 - doesn't deny the hit. In fact, it was he who called the American Humane Society in the first place, having trapped the rat in a squirrel cage upon discovering him nibbling the tomato plants.

Greg Huttie knew last year would be difficult to top. In 1987, Huttie's team, the Rathskellar, dominated the West Chester Adult Baseball League like no team had for five years. The Rat became the first team since Englund's in 1982 to win the regular-season race, the playoff championship and the Fourth of July Tournament. This year, the Rat is in the hole. Norristown captured the annual Fourth of July Tournament, defeating the defending champs in the final game, 6-3, last Sunday afternoon at Hoopes Park.

While predicting that trash accumulating from the municipal workers' strike will likely turn out to be more of a nuisance than a health hazard, experts say that rat bites and bacterial infections could result because of the mounting garbage, particularly at the temporary dump sites. The garbage, rotting in 90-degree-plus weather, not only will attract rats, but also flies and other insects, stray dogs and possibly raccoons, experts say. "The garbage that is sitting out is a food supply for bacteria and animals and insects," said Stanley Mayers, a professor in public health at the Pennsylvania State University.

A trip to a variety store resulted in post traumatic stress disorder for a Delaware County man who says he was shopping for a ribbon when he was attacked by a rat. In a suit filed this week in Philadelphia, Bernard King, of Sharon Hill, said he suffered "mental anxiety and anguish and severe shock to his entire nervous system" following a Mar. 23 visit to the Dollar Tree at the Penrose Plaza in Southwest Philadelphia. King, a 50-year-old roofer, needed a ribbon to wrap a birthday present for his daughter, his attorney said.

A trip to a variety store is said to have resulted in post-traumatic stress disorder for a Delaware County man who said he was shopping for a ribbon when he was attacked by a rat. In a suit filed this week in Common Pleas Court, Bernard King of Sharon Hill said he suffered "mental anxiety and anguish and severe shock to his entire nervous system" following a March 23 visit to the Dollar Tree store at Penrose Plaza in Southwest Philadelphia. King, a 50-year-old roofer, needed a ribbon to wrap a birthday present for his daughter, his attorney said.

ALTHOUGH we at IBEW Local 98 appreciate Signe Wilkinson highlighting our newly created Rat-Mobile in a political cartoon, she missed a key point in the narrative. Rather than depicting unions as distributing political contributions - a tired old cliche - Signe should have depicted us doing the city's job: Collecting unpaid taxes, permit fees and license fees from unscrupulous developers and contractors. Exposing these cheats in order to help our cash-strapped city collect desperately needed revenue is our mission.

The same social media that Green Eggs Café has used to regularly promote its breakfast offerings has come back to bite it — like a rat. The restaurant's Midtown Village location, at 13th and Locust streets, fell under public scrutiny beginning last night, when passersby spotted a number of rats on a table. A crowd gathered around the closed establishment about 10 p.m., taking photos of the rodents surrounding two pizza boxes on a table. Jenna Bachen, who lives nearby, said she was walking home when she saw the rats — at least four — on the table and the floor.

COULD THE GIANT inflatable rat, a common prop at organized-labor protests, go extinct, replaced by a louder, more mobile rodent? Let's test-drive the Rat-Mobile, a new model from that old school of labor protests, Local 98 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. Currently being test-driven around the city and soon to be deployed to protests, the Rat-Mobile is a converted minivan. John Dougherty, the union's business manager, said the conversion cost $14,000 and took three months.

Hours before his mother, young son, and four other relatives were killed in an October 2004 firebombing in North Philadelphia, Eugene "Twin" Coleman unexpectedly encountered the man prosecutors say ordered their deaths. Coleman had been waiting in a holding cell at the federal courthouse in Philadelphia when U.S. marshals escorted his former friend, accused drug kingpin Kaboni Savage, to a neighboring cell, Coleman told a federal jury Tuesday morning. Savage knew that Coleman had become an FBI cooperator, and knew Coleman was within earshot when he began ranting to another prisoner about snitches.

Philadelphia District Attorney Seth Williams is known as an avid user of the Facebook social media site. But he has some complaints and on Monday Williams used his public pulpit to take that gripe right to the top: Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Williams called on Zuckerberg to show he is a "good corporate citizen" by ordering Facebook to remove the page of a Philadelphia man Williams alleges used it to solicit the killing of a witness in a criminal case involving illegal firearm purchases.

SETH WILLIAMS isn't liking Facebook too much at the moment. On Monday, the district attorney called a news conference to ask the social-media site to remove a Philadelphia man's page that urges people to "kill rats. " Williams said that the man, Freddie Henriquez, used the site to solicit the killing of a witness in a criminal case involving purchases of illegal firearms. Williams said that he sent a letter to Facebook founder and chief executive Marc Zuckerberg asking him to remove the page and deactivate the Facebook account.

Can a placebo relieve pain in rats? The logical answer is no, since the placebo effect involves beliefs, expectations, emotions - in a word, the mind. Rats don't have minds. But rats did indeed respond to a placebo in a University of Florida study, published in the October issue of Pain. "That was the big finding," said lead researcher John Neubert, a dentist and pain management specialist. "The animals that expected pain relief actually got pain relief when given an inert substance.

APHILADELPHIA JURY for the first time has convicted a defendant for criminal Internet postings, the District Attorney's Office said Friday. The unlucky poster is Mark Lee-Purvis, 36, who was found guilty Wednesday of retaliation against a witness or victim, intimidation of a witness or victim and making terroristic threats. Lee-Purvis faces up to 19 years in prison when he is sentenced on Oct. 22 by Common Pleas Judge Barbara McDermott, who revoked his $1 million bail and sent him to jail after the conviction.

Don't worry, Philly wiseguys. Gaeton Lucibello isn't pulling a Henry Hill on you.   He won't be taking the stand to tell the jury about the alleged crimes of Philly mob boss Joseph Ligambi and his underlings. That's because the guilty plea Lucibello finalized Thursday doesn't require him to dish on La Cosa Nostra to receive a little leniency. "It's a noncooperation agreement," said David Fritchey, chief of the Organized Crime Strike Force in the U.S. Attorney's Office.

A fire started by a rat in a PSE&G power switch halted NJ Transit River Line service through Camden for more than 11 hours. Normal service resumed after 7 a.m. today. The fire broke out around 8 p.m. Monday in an auto transfer switch at the Walter Rand Transportation Center on Broadway at Martin Luther King Boulevard in Camden, said PSE&G spokeswoman Melissa Ficuciello. The outage also knocked out power to 1,100 other customers in Camden, but they were back on line this morning, Ficuciello said.