jurassic perkiness

The first time we set the humane non lethal mouse trap, it took less than an hour to catch him.

Since he's returned, it's been four days.

For four days he's ignored the trap baited with cheese.

As I stare at the trap, the ghost of Jeff Goldblum from the vapid enough movie Jurassic Park appears beside me.

"He's learning," says Jeff Goldblum Jeff Goldblumily.

The printed instruction leaflet that came with the trap had recommended chocolate or peanut butter as bait.

I go to my kitchen.

From the top shelf I remove one of my secret stash of Cadburys chocolate Easter gugs.

"Okay Mouse," I mutter a al Jack Nicholson from the superbly cast but useless movie A Few Good Men, "you've just ****** with wrong marine."

the mousekins always ring twice

Ensconced in an armchair.

With a little pang I think of the mouse.

It's been a few days since we caught him and released him in the garden.

I've left the humane trap baited and open beside the piano since then just in case he gets tempted to come back for a recital.

I wonder what he's doing.

Foraging maybe.

Or playing cat and mouse with Pushkin.

Or snoozing in his nest in the hedge.

It's cold outside.

Oh gentle little thing where are you.

There comes a tiny scrabbling sound.

I freeze.

All cutesy cutesy thoughts evaporate.

The sound to all intents and purposes appears to be coming from inside my armchair.

I look at the dogs hopefully.

Neither of them are inside the armchair.

I look at the parrot.

He shrugs: "Not me Guv. I pooh on em. I don't scrabble about inside them."

The scrabbling sound continues.

No, it's not the curtains.

No, it's not from outside.

No, it's not Ernie's ghostly milk tops rattling in the grate.

I imagine the police arriving and doing a parody of  the sensation scene from When A Stranger Calls to wit: "The scrabbling is coming from inside your armchair," instead of "The maniac's phonecall is coming from inside your house."

The scrabbling grows indubitably existentially louder.

It is definitely coming from inside the armchair.

I exclaim like that character from the old Mae Leonard play On The Train: "She's here. With us now. On the train. She's coming back. Back to Farancreesht."

Substitute 'in the armchair' for 'on the train' and 'Kilcullen' for 'Farancreesht' and it kind of works.

More scrabbling, a bit frantic in fact. Maybe the mouse is hungry. Or he just doesn't like my parodies.

I was in fact about to move-on.org smartly to a parody of  Robert Ludlum's The Bourne Supremacy where the guy exclaims: "He's back. The assassin is back. Jason Bourne is back in Hong Kong," substituting 'mouse' for 'assassin' and 'Mousekin' for Jason Bourne and 'my living room' for Hong Kong, it was that kind of a moment, only I was no longer feeling that comfortable in the armchair and I decided to head out to the kitchen and give the mouse a bit of peace.

the permanency of empires

In the 1500s, the Aztecs, the Incas and the Mayans had whole empires stretching through the vastnesses of central and South America.

Their empires seemed invincible.

They built these empires on the worship of demons, murdering human beings in ritual slaughters as a part of their daily societal routine.

Their glittering cities, their magnificent armies, their ornate man made lakes, and their towering pyramids seemed a permanent part of the landscape.

Three hundred Spanish people with a few cannon guns, swept them all away in about five minutes flat.

I am suggesting that God had given the Aztecs, the Mayans and the Incas a whole continent to play in but that when they spurned him and worshipped evil, he put a stop to them very quickly.

They lost everything they thought demons could guarantee them.

In the 1600s, the richest city of the Americas was Port Royal in Jamaica.

No other city had its opulence or its power.

It was known as the pirate capital of the Carribean.

Built on piracy, murder, and fornication, it was a centre for the worship of evil.

On the 7th of June 1692, its seemingly invincible power was erased from the earth when an earthquake and tsunami engulfed it.

The pirate capital of the Carribean was wiped clean by the wrath of God in a single night. (cf; Raiders Of The Lost Ark.)

It took about five minutes.

In the 1700s, India, that vast teeming jewel encrusted region comprising modern India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, was ruled by various satanic cults (the Thuggee as well as the Hindu Kali cult) who sacrificed human beings to satan seeking to propitiate evil in return for power.

A few soldiers from Britain conquered the invincible empires of India in five minutes flat.

Again, I am suggesting that God punished the peoples of that region for their allegiance to evil by allowing their empires to be overthrown by the much weaker much less numerous British.

In the present era, the Western world has become infested with satanic practices amounting to ritual human sacrifice in service to the devil.

I am referring to abortion, euthanasia, and assisted suicide.

The Western World is America, Canada, Britain, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and parts of Europe.

Other countries are now immitating our evils too.

It's not too late to repent and be saved.

We could just give up our murders, our thefts, our fornication and our sorceries.

All the faith traditions agree. If we repent God will have mercy.

I'd say we've got at least a full five minutes.

of mice and men

 

What can you say about a mouse who loved Bach and the Beetles and parrots and Jack Russells and sheepdogs and scuttling across the floor when I was kneeling in front of the Divine Mercy image and chewing up the  internal workings of the piano and scrabbling inside of armchairs particularly when I was snoozing in them and me?

Mousekin moved into the house a few days before Christmas.

He didn't exactly become part of the furnture although at various times he inhabited all of it.

He was a mouse of simple pleasures.

Nothing pleased him more than the anti mouse sonic device we plugged in in early January.

It was like he was listening to a Chris De Burgh record.

One of the easy listening good ones.

Satin Green Shutters.

Not Don't Pay The Nanny.

The gentle purple glow from the device added a psychedelic flavour to his forays between the brass box and his beloved piano.

The implication that the device was anti mouse bothered him not one whit.

He was a mouse secure in his mousehood and took nothing personally.

We fed him more than once.

Twice actually.

I left him down a dinner on Christmas Day and another on New Year's Day.

In between times he had to fend for himself, mostly preferring the piano and the skirting boards, but spicing things up on high holidays with bits of curtain and an occasional dollop of parrot pooh when he was feeling peckish.

The dogs accepted him and Beaky parrot and the neurotic Claudia budgie never complained which is as close as they come to accepting anyone.

This evening the hardware store finally took in a shipment of humane mouse traps from China of all places.

I bought one and read the instructions.

The trap consisted of a simple little glass case with a levered door that would close behind the mouse when he entered it.

The instructions said that the best baits would be chocolate or peanut butter.

Nonsense.

I'm not running a fancy restaurant.

He'll have cheese and like it.

I baited the humane mouse trap with some Kilmeaden cheese, the fillet of cheddar.

The instructions advised me to check the trap at least every two hours because some mice might get upset if left in it for longer.

A little vein on my forehead pulsed.

The product manufacturers must thinks us humanitarians is all nuts.

Every two hours my aunt Fanny.

As if I don't have enough to be doing.

I'm not working for the mouse you know.

When I went back to check the trap, after one hour as it happens, me and Mousekin got our first eye to eye encounter.

He seemed quite calm, not a bit afraid, exactly as I'd expected from all the times he shot by me at close range in front of the Divine Mercy Image.

At those times I would leap soulfully into the air while the mouse unperturbed followed whatever trajectory he was on, to wherever he was going without any alteration to his plans or discomfiture at my screaming.

Saint Gemma Galgani is reputed to have levitated in front of holy images.

I know how she did it.

Now me and Mousekin eyed each other.

He was a large brown fellow.

One could be forgiven for thinking he'd been working out.

He sat eyeing me like a pet.

Yes, much larger than the usual mouse.

I wonder.

I shook my head.

Best not to think about it over much.

I consulted the instructions.

"Release the mouse at least 500 metres from your house."

These people are mad.

I'm not going on a midnight hike through the woods with the mouse.

I brought him into the garden and let him go.

He disappeared with a lovely fluid motion into the grass.

It is February the 9th.

He's been with us since December 23rd.

I miss him already.

Later tonight I was telling my maiden aunt about letting him go and she said: "Why didn't you let him into the Maloneys' garden?"

The aunt had a certain mischievious glint in her eye proposing the property of drug dealers who live nearby and who have harassed me for more than a decade, as a release zone for the innocent little creature.

"I thought the mouse might catch something," I answered drily.

CONSIDERATIONS OF A POSSIBLE WAR BETWEEN ISRAEL AND IRAN

1. The government of the Islamic Republic of Iran is unlikely to attempt any land invasion of Israel. Word on the street in the Middle East is that the Israelis can wipe out any number of marching or mechanised land armies with drone strikes. The Iranians would never even get to see a hair of an Israeli's head. They would die in the desert. They won't do it.

2. Any government in alliance with Iran will be conscious of the lethality of Israel's defensive capabilities. They will know the probably fate of a ground force seeking to invade Israel. A land invasion is not going to happen.

3. The activation of Iranian proxy armies (Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, and the Assad regime in Syria) does not create an impressive military capacity. Hamas and Hezbollah have each lost about 90 percent of the effectiveness they deployed twenty years ago. President Assad of Syria hasn't been feeling too well either after the ten year civil war he's been through in his own country. Iranian proxies may still be activated in  Lebanon, Gaza and Syria. But they will not have a good time. Iran's proxies in Yemen the Houthi militia are worthless as an offensive asset. Hezbollah, Hamas and Assad sleeper cells may find overseas Israeli assets and Western assets generally in Europe and America and elsewhere to be more vulnerable to attack than Israel itself. In the event of war between Israel and Iran, these attacks on Europe and America and elsewhere by Iranian controlled sleeper cells will happen.

4. Internal threats to Israel from the West Bank have been reduced significantly (again by a factor above 90 percent of what they were) by the erection of a wall barrier defence.

5. The possibility of opportunistic attacks from Jordan is also being somewhat reduced at the moment by the placement of barriers.

6. In any conflict we may predict that the Islamic government of Iran will attempt to attrite Israel from afar using rocketry and anything else it can throw.

7. Israel has no territorial ambitions over Iran or anyone else. But in the event of hot war, it might take territory from Syria or Lebanon if those two  parties allowed, or took part in, attacks on Israel from their soil. Without outside interference, Israel could conquer both of these in a movie moment.

8. If Iran takes out some Israeli cities through whatever missile capability it has or through some other method, Israel's response would be to devastate political and military power centres in Iran. The Iranians know this. Some of them don't care.

9. If Iran has found opportunistic allies in its quest to destroy Israel, ie either Muslim Brotherhood run Turkey or the resovietising Putin regime in Russia, or both, this would present a dilemma for Israel.

10. There is some likelihood that elements of the political and security administration in nuclear armed Pakistan would attempt to facilitate Iran in a war with Israel by supplying Iran with nuclear weapons. If these are used, and Israel in the aftermath of such a strike retains offensive capacity, she will destroy Iran.

11. Israel has a population of above 9 million persons and a land area above 22,000 square miles. Iran's population is above 82 million persons and her land area is put at 636,000 square miles. The Israeli population would be substantially united in any war of survival against the government in Iran which has repeatedly threatened to wipe out Israel. There might be some hindrance of the war effort in Israel from sincere pacifists, from leftists and from sleeper agents (controlled by Putin or others) among the Judiciary, media and political elites. This would have negligible effect on the Israeli war effort but it wouldn't help. There are growing signs of substantial disaffection among Iran's broader population and its government. Estimates suggest many many millions of Iranians are deeply unhappy that their government possessing ten percent of the world's oil for most of the past forty years, has still managed to deliver dire poverty to its people and almost permanent enmity with the rest of the world. Ordinary Iranians are not particularly keen to pick a fight with Israel which I am suggesting most of them believe will spell doom for Iran. We should be aware that when the Iranian government some months ago laid down giant Israeli and American flags along a street thoroughfare for university students to walk on as they entered their campus, most people there refused to walk on the flags. Those few who did walk on the flags were roundly jeered as traitors and government hirelings by the thousands of Iranians who were refusing to do so. Footage of this incident is available on the internet. The Iranian people are much better than their government. After forty years of impoverishment and dictatorship, there are many millions of Iranians, perhaps even a majority, who regard their own government as their real enemy. So the larger population does not necessarily confer on the government of Iran an advantage in going to war with Israel. The vastly larger land area does confer some strategic assets to the Mullahs. Their hope has been continues to be that through rocketry they can turn the small piece of real estate which is the State of Israel into a sea of fire, while their own vast heartland, as large as Western Europe by some measures, is somewhat protected by its very size. I would repeat one of my earlier phrases. If the Mullahs try it, they're not going to have a good time.