Word: ratting
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...area of silence which Kafka sought to decode, and which he succeeded at least in marvelously dramatizing, was that bleak void in which man, like a rat in a laboratory maze, strives frantically (and often ludicrously) to approach God, while God (with the detachment of the scientific mind) observes the data of the frenzy and the fun. Milton, in his blindness, sought "to justify the ways of God to men." The sum of Kafka's report was that the ways of God and man are irreconcilable...
Very few seemed shocked, or even particularly surprised, by the President's plea for aid to Greece and Turkey (see The Presidency). But the national mood was one of resignation and apathy rather than enthusiasm. Muttered a Chicago commuter: "More sand down the rat hole." Said an ex-soldier, now a student at the University of Oklahoma: "Well, I told my wife to dust off my uniform...
...experimenters had to invent a fiendishly ingenious gadget for keeping their rats awake. Cylindrical treadmills revolved slowly in cells half full of water. If the rat did not keep awake, he got dunked and had to scramble back...
...With a rat on each treadmill, the apparatus was set running 20 hours a day. The pace soon began to tell. The wakeful, wretched rats grew scrawny and stopped growing. After 30 sleepless days, their dispositions showed it. They snapped and bit out in all directions. Given an opportunity, they attacked and killed one another...
...test of a rat's mentality is to put him in an intricate maze half full of water, observe how quickly he finds his way out. After 50 days, the wakeful rats were dumped in such a maze. They swam feverishly, caught on to the maze, got out even faster than normal rats...