And I still need to get that notebook right over the stupid dead mouse, but now I'm all squeamish and overreacting. Why do they have to die so unexpectedly?
Why do they have to die so unexpectedly?
Like, when they take the bait in mousetraps? Who could have predicted!
Much preferable: deadmau5 (from Coachella 2010).
3: As if she never saw the "Mice determined to die in faculty offices" memo.
MMMMMMMMM. Dead mouse.
There was a mouse problem in my office last semester. Caught four of them. I find them cute, though I'm not squeamish about them being killed.
I eat a hearty bowl of dead mouse for breakfast every morning.
As far as having a Rube Goldberg-type device in your office, Mouse Trap is a pretty good choice. Doesn't take up too much space, and it's hours of fun for everyone!
Mice are cute. Rats are not. I wish the documentary that accompanied Ratatouille had done a better job explaining this phenomenon.
11: The GIS for "cute rat" says you're WRONG. On the internet.
8: Do you find Sifu Tweety cute?
I don't like either of them when they're scurrying. Occasionally at night I'll turn onto my block on my bike and see several rats run away; it's like they were having a confab in the middle of the street or something. Ick. But I also see them during the day sometimes, just ambling their way along, and then I find them cute.
7: MMMMMMMMM. Dead boa. (True story.)
To be fair, I've really cut down on my scurrying.
We occasionally have roof Norwegian rats in the attic. The babies (pups?) fall down 15 feet between the outer and inner walls. Sometimes we hear them squeal trying to chew through the plaster for several days before they die from inhaling insulation and start to stink up the place.
CCCrrruuunch! CCrrruuunch! Scrabble scrabble. CCrrruuunch.
I think scurry vs amble also explains why cockroaches in the kitchen are horrifying, but an equal mass of ants is just a dreadful annoyance.
19:Too fat, and their tails are too short.
22: Also, cockroaches are foul, disgusting creatures while ants taste like lemon.
I don't like either of them when they're scurrying. Occasionally at night I'll turn onto my block on my bike and see several rats run away; it's like they were having a confab in the middle of the street or something. Ick. But I also see them during the day sometimes, just ambling their way along, and then I find them cute.
In our second-to-last place, there was a healthy population of rats living in our back alley. They were relaxed enough that even when they were scattering post-confab, they didn't ever really rise to the level of scurrying. Between that and the fact that they never invaded our actual domestic space, Snark and I were both very fond of them and would cry "Ratty!" affectionately whenever one crossed our path.
Huh, I didn't know they remade Willard.
while ants taste like lemon
Like nasty metallic lemons filled with folic acid.
Anyway, want to know how I know what ants taste like? I was idly snacking on some Barbara's Jalapeño Cheese Puffs without looking at them (I was reading). "These are a little off," I thought after a few bites, and discovered that they were fucking crawling with ants. That's how I know what ants taste like.
Gosh! You've got to think positive here! At least it wasn't a dead cat.
(A black cat spotted with white from the neighborhood that I was feeding during these cold winter months turned up dead. Half his face was ripped off. I figure it was the bears. Useless it was the world's fattest possum (about two foot long by about a foot thick), the one that sometimes comes by and eats the cat food.)
max
['Maybe the squirrels ganged up on him.']
31: Coyotes tend to be the culprits with cats. A neighbor claims a red fox attacked their cat recently in my driveway ... but I'm skeptical.
30: If you'd discovered something important, that would be an inspiring story about the importance of contingency in science, instead of just gross.
To complete your experiment, Jesus, you now have to consume the control group of Cheese Puffs covered in cockroaches. My intuition says you'll only need an N of 1.
32: A red fox can't be more than ten pounds, right? You're skepticism seems justified.
Mouse infused olive oil on the other hand is quite tasty on roasted baby potatoes, at least until you go and get more. Not quite sure how my mom managed not to notice the dead animal floating in the bottle when she made them. We threw it out. Can't eat meat on Christmas Eve after all.
To the OP: just use glue traps, then you can kill them yourself and thus not be offended by the unexpected sight of dead mice.
34: He has to eat the roach at unawares for it to be a comparable test. Anybody know his kid's email address?
11 is a damned lie. Some rats are awfully cute. And smart.
Like, when they take the bait in mousetraps? Who could have predicted!
But they left it there for months! I thought they were smarter than that.
Our neighbours' cat attacks and sees off fully grown red foxes.
32,35: yes, typically foxes weigh less than 10 lbs.
i think rats are reasonably cute but their testicles are unsettlingly large and prominent. also apparently they only live for like 2 years, so while they make for affectionate and intelligent pets, it doesn't last. same with octopuses.
Let me say that while finding a dead mouse in a trap is not pleasant, finding a live mouse is really disturbing.
I mean a live mouse in a trap. His poor foot was caught by the spring and his eyes were saying "Just because I stole the cereal you spilled?"
31: A black cat spotted with white from the neighborhood that I was feeding during these cold winter months turned up dead. Half his face was ripped off.
Not that I like to repeat that description, but: that's awful; I'm sorry, max. It depends on how foolish the cat might have been, but cats generally know to stay far away from foxes, who generally don't deign to address cats. I'd speculate raccoon -- they have no morals and have vicious claws. I'm not very familiar with the ways of possums, who I think of as retiring, but that may be wrong.
25 made me feel sick to my stomach.
I had a rat in a house I rented--luckily it was promptly exterminated. I didn't see it, and I stepped on it. Ugh.
44:With a leg caught rat, I use a foot long screwdriver, hammer, or the meat tenderizer wrapped in a paper towel. Dozens of times. I do really feel bad each time for killing, but I also hate the fuckers.
Last month one aggressive female ate the plastic dog food container in the dining room. It holds 25 pounds of kibble, hard hard plastic at least a 1/4 inch thick. It was a replacement, we though they couldn't get through this one. She would nibble a hole toward the bottom, just big enough for kibble to dribble into her mouth, while on her back in leg-pumping bliss we presume.
I would duct tape over the hole, and find a new one next morning. Duct taped the whole thing, she ate the duct tape. Sliced of a huge sheet of metal windowscreen, wrapped it up covered in duct. She ate thru the screen. We were hoping the metal slivers would slice her mouth and stomach, but she came back even after I doubled wrapped it in screen.
Got a solid aluminum dog kibble container. She appears to be gone.
We have huge vicious "tomcat" traps everywhere, the kind that are scary to set. We surrounded the dogfood with big tomcat glue traps, she just walked over them.
We won't use poison, because they eat thru the water pipes and such as they bleed out.
The above is all true, and recent.
Maybe not rats that live in cages as pets. Or street rats that are just looked for a bite to eat. But all the rest can burn in hell.
||
Huh. I just noticed that Crooked Timber has a post about whether intellectual property should be considered property, whether or to what extent freedom is involved, and so on.
|>
"I don't like it when you touch me that way", said the mongoose.
52: Ugg. I suppose they must have some very good food source near you for then to come back. If the rats are chewing through copper water pipes, don't let me know.
I've never touched a mongoose. At least not a live one.
59:A lot of Texans have Norwegians, but don't talk about it. We aren't very far from some wild country.
These fuckers are bugger than a man's foot, and mean.
Kibble is the very best bait. But I have seen rats empty them every night for a week without tripping, so we tried glue traps.
"So what went wrong? The answer is: out-of-control banks; Irish banks ran wild during the good years, creating a huge property bubble."
Doesn't that second sentence have too much punctuation? That's Paul Krugman. He won a nobel prize, but there's too much punctuation.
Does Megan have a habit of touching mongeesegooses those things?
but there's too much punctuation.
I say: grr; too much punctuation, my ass.
too much punctuation, my ass colon.
62: I thought Norwegians ate spoiled fish, not kibble. Anyway, if you get the right dog, they'll hunt rats all day. Dad's family had a terrier when he was a kid. The dog would hunt rats all day. This was on a farm with pig pens and all the other stuff. They had cats, but the cats would kill a rat and eat it and go nap or something. Their dog didn't want to eat the rats and didn't have to because if you bring in enough dead rats, a farmer will give you better food.
63: Read that as William Shatner and it works.
I knew I didn't want mousetraps in my office.
This is only logically follows "DEAD MOUSE! DEAD MOUSE!" if seeing a live mouse would have made your heard beat something fewer than a million beats per minute, which seems unlikely.
Read that as William Shatner and it works.
This is true, but Shatner never won a nobel prize.
Did he? It's not on his wikipedia biography anywhere. But it doesn't say that he didn't win one, either.
I'm finding 67 quite brilliant. That may mean I spend too much time here, or that I need to go to bed.
Or you need to start editing everybody's Wikipedia page to say if they won the Nobel prize or not.
75: you think that's brilliant? The original was this.
77: Did you remember that? Because if so, that's quite amazing. You'd do well in a maze, I bet, with or without cheese at the end.
"Despite all my rage, I am still just a rat in a cage."
78: Predates me. But I judge 19 & 20 in that thread to be the culmination of the most famous comment sequence* in Unfogged history and those two are frequently referred to. Of course all of the archives are special, but some are more special than others (the whole thread is good for background information and tone, and cock jokes, of course).
*I recall that redacted comment 9 gave some even more specific context when I first read it.
79: Pwned by those raging dudes, Simon & Garfunkel:
Like a rat in a maze
The path before me lies,
And the pattern never alters
Until the rat dies.
Indeed, that thread (which predates me too) is among the most canonical of Unfogged threads. I think it would be difficult to understand this site without having read it and a few others from that period.
81: That was the Golden Era. Before my time, naturally.
I always wanted to know what the redacted comment in that thread was. Also, comment 18 in that thread is way better than 19, with no offense to apo.
Possibly I once knew what the redacted comment in that thread was. When was it redacted?
In case bob needs to feel any more guilty for killing rats.
Holy time machine. Following the thread from 77 led me to the original post led me to the Crooked Timber post it was quoting led me to ask "why does the name Ted Barlow sound familiar" led me to the lightbulb archive.
God bless the dawn of political blogging.
78: I think that reading that thread (by a link, I didn't lurk back that long) and that specific comment was what tipped me over from occasionally dropping by to "I'll read this site until its servers crumble".
If there were an Unfogged musical, that comment would be the crowning number.
Or something. I'll stop now.
Huh. I just noticed that Crooked Timber has a post about whether intellectual property should be considered property, whether or to what extent freedom is involved, and so on.
The very idea of commenting there is exhausting. I only subject you folks to my rants as a way of showing my love.
88: Holy time machine.
And your mention of Ted Barlow indirectly led me to some vintage John Cole @ Balloon Juice from back in the day before he had his Road to Damascus moment.
Back when he'd write things like: Great News! Chris Muir's Day by Day comic strip is returning tomorrow.
91: you shouldn't mistake your erection for love.
30 and 36 - urgh and ick.
I once found a dead rat on my doormat (inside) and picked the mat up (whilst squealing), put it in a box, in the car, and drove the whole thing straight to the tip. It had left a baby rat stuck behind our kitchen cupboards scrabbling about - eventually it got into a drawer, which I then opened and when it jumped out one of the cats got it.
I would kind of like some rats in my garden because my terrier would love to kill them. But I don't suppose procuring them for his entertainment is quite ethical.
some vintage John Cole @ Balloon Juice from back in the day before he had his Road to Damascus moment
Oh, hey, when was that? I've asked those lovely people over there once or twice to give me a time frame or something, and they're all like, I dunno, RTFA. Anyway, I've been curious to read a bit of Cole's transformation, but without even a keyword to start an archive search ["I'm not a Republican any more! I have seen the light!" doesn't work] it's a bit too much of a slog, and/or my curiosity hasn't extended quite that far.
A friend of my dad's was trying to stop drinking, but he had this long list of circumstances in which he could have a drink. One of them was finding a mouse in a mousetrap.
95: The Terry Schiavo affair was his breaking point.
asilon, for future reference, if you see a rat in Britain you're legally obliged sort of meant to report it to the council.
97: Ah. Not what I would have thought. Thanks!
98: First they took over health care, now they control all rodent-relations? Did Thatcher teach you nothing?
I am pretty sure that this guy is in charge of all rodent relations.
Poor mouse. Which book did him in? Was it a German idealist, or a Russian existentialist? The death, unfortunately, was very likely to have been tediously slow.
104: Are we sure it's a mouse, and not a large insect with an apple lodged in its back?
