One of Professional Moron’s many goals in life (along with scaling Mount Everest in only a bobble hat, juggling with nuclear warheads, and invading Buckingham Palace with a spade) is to understand what the heck is going on with certain things. One of the great modern enigmas is (and are) rats. They’re sneaky, squeaky, intelligent, massive, and they lurk everywhere… always just out of reach! It got us thunking, so we thunked it out.

‘Tis said by rat experts (known as “ironmongers”) we (humans) are always within 5ft of a rat. We concur with this by attesting to it; in our office Professional Moron are never more than 10ft away from a hamster (in the form of Keith, our pet). Admittedly we bought the furry little git and keep him in a cage within 10ft of us at all thymes, but you get the idea.

Rats, of course, aren’t hamsters and hamsters aren’t rats, either, nor are they sharks or daffodils. Now we’ve clarified this information, we must question one of the truly great unknowns we first postulated in our blog’s headline: do rats ratify stuff through ratification? Professional Moron went all investigative journalist with this and took to Manchester’s sewers to interview a broad range of rats. Our esteemed editor, Mr. Wapojif, didn’t find any willing to talk to him (most ran away squeaking in terror at his grotesque appearance), and he got covered in excrement. All in all, the outing was a dismal failure.

Whilst Mr. Wapojif slopped about in effluence, the rest of the team researched the word “ratify”. Initially we’d believed it to mean turning something into a rat, like a wizard (such as Gandalf) would wave his wand to turn a pumpkin into Leonardo DiCaprio. Apparently this isn’t the case. Ratify is a normal word with a normal meaning, and has nothing to do with slobbering great big rodents. Hmmm… we’re quite disappointed, and our office now stinks like a sewer. Today has not been a good day.