Getting the Mouse out of the House

I usually blog over at A Fractal World which relates to the fiction site I run, The Fractal Hall Journal. I think the Fiction/SF/Giant Robot stuff should stay there, and the Music/Personal stuff move here. And so, I include the complete unabridged text of the last post:

On Rodent Extraction.

Due to the arrival of an unexpected guest in my bedroom (and not in a good way) everywhere I look I see movement out of the corner of my eye. It's like being in a 50s B-movie called Watch the Floor. I'm twitchy enough as it is, having spent far too much time playing Ghost Recon, hunched down in bushes scanning the skyline for wretched Commies.

Despite my uncomprimising Marine-style outlook on life, I'm not actually fantastically keen on summary execution of small mammals. Invertebrates? No problem, murderise the fuckers. Except spiders. Spiders eat flies, which makes them the Good Guys, and they also share a name with one of my favourite superheroes. It's this kind of arbitrary judgement you can make while at the top of the food chain. Bwa ha ha.

Much as I'd like to just open the kitchen door and let the chastised mouse scurry out, shamefaced, it's not going to happen so Steps have been Taken. I headed for B&Q's Animal Extermination aisle. Point; the packaging for the rat-traps show a picture of Civilisation's sworn enemy, the viscious, plague-ridden rat, hackles raised, teeth bared, hellfire glowing in its eyes. The mouse traps have a fuzzy-furred big-eyed innocent, more at home in a child's loving arms than chewing through my fucking stuff.

So I bought a couple of plastic supercharged doom-killers, Les Mmes Guillotines. Using scientific curiosity and a pen, I estimate the bite pressure of the mechanism to be c. 2 tons per square centimetre, i.e. slightly less than that of a Great White. As my flatmate pointed out, he is likely to be woken in the night by a cracking noise and a warm rain of arterial spray.