02/23/22 – Updating On the Situation

Spacetrawler, audio version For the blind or visually impaired, February 23, 2022.

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2022-02-23-spacetrawler3

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The mouse is never to blame. Unless it’s chewed wire.

14 Comments

  1. Jude

    Mice and chewed wires, oh yeah. One old house we lived in had more than enough mice to populate both ships. Every winter, mice would move in en masse, coming in through cracks in the below ground level foundation. One mealtime, we looked up to see two mice playing on top of the stove. Another time, I went to turn on one of the burners to find it didn’t work. Later, we took the front panel of the control panel off to see if a breaker needed replacing (it was an old stove) only to discover the reason. A mouse had picked the wrong place to run across. It was electrocuted when I went to turn the element on and the current hit it. Trapped and fried on the spot. That was just one of many stories I could tell. My experiences with mice has left me with little sympathies for them.

    1. Rikard

      Where I used to live years ago in Scania, the old farmhouses from the seventeenth and sixteenth century were built with timbers filled with a mix of limestone slurry and mud and straw. It works, but you need to apply new lime every other yearor so.

      But the mice. The mice in the walls.

      We put down poison, but all it resulted in was decomposing mice inside the walls. The reek was something out of this world.

      Not to mention the cats and dogs would find dead or dying mice outdoors, swallow them and then be heartily sick all over carpets and what have you. One of the dogs always vomited discreetly and quietly on carpets, which she then folded quite into a neat package for you to find in the morning:

      “Who bundled up the kitchen carpet? It’s supposed to lie hereaaarghuhg retch gasp choke”

  2. KQY61

    Four years ago, a mouse chewed on a power line under the floor of our business. Got zapped and then didn’t draw enough current to trip the breaker. So he glowed like a toaster element. Burned a hole thru the flooring which then caught the place on fire. Burned it to the ground. In the 20 years I spent as a volunteer firefighter, I saw quite a few mouse induced fires.

  3. Night-Gaunt

    Mice, rats and roaches depend on us to feed them. To allow them to grow ever larger. If we should die or disappear tomorrow there would be a possible short increase, but once that food is gone, they will start dying in their millions from lack of food unless they start cannibalizing each other which can speed up the process till they return to that long ago population before humans came along 230,000+ years ago. Robot mice should never have been programmed to act like real mice.

    1. Zeebob Froomchik III, Esq.

      But the robot mice don’t eat anything, do they? And other than being eaten by Ruddock, we don’t have any clear idea of how long they live.

      And for that matter, talking and inventing fashion and questioning their reasons for existence aren’t exactly behaving like real mice (so far as science has currently discovered, anyway)… ????

  4. Pete Rogan

    I always liked Ciara’s deathless grip on the practical. Of COURSE the mouse wasn’t involved in the ship hijacking! No need to lump him in with the humans.

    I don’t know why I didn’t notice it before, but Ciara and Nogg happen to share a waistline. I find that strangely charming.

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