I thought we, as a civilization, were going downhill. Smoking bans are spreading across the country. New York is outlawing trans fat. Chicago (and soon California) put the kibosh on foie gras. Apparently it’s cruel. (Too bad it’s oh so delicious.) But there is light at the end of the smokeless, healthy, svelte tunnel. Chicago has overturned its two-year-old foie gras ban. Does this mark a new bellwether? Does my future involve eating a plate of foie gras, followed by a doughnut fried in trans fat, and finished off with a cigarette over a cocktail? One can only hope.

Via Nationals Journal, this wonderful post from the St. Petersburg Times about Elijah Dukes‘ probation for a misdemeanor drug charge. The Nats told NJ’s Barry Svrluga Dukes was at the Nats’ training facility in Viera, Fla., rehabilitating his hamspring.

In fact he was cleaning out cages at Child magazine’s #1 Family Friendly Zoo in America, the Lowry Park Zoo. Coincidentally, Lowry Park is reporting possible closures in its Florida Wildlife Center.

Last time in Managing Your Rodent Infestation, we planted new snap traps, baited, once again, with delicious peanut butter. A while back, we switched to smooth butter after our mouse simply ate the chunks out of the chunky, leaving only the butter behind. Picky, picky!

Since setting our new traps, my roommate and I haven’t heard a squeak out of our as-yet-unnamed mouse. The traps are set, the peanut butter is creamy, but the mouse isn’t licking. What, wee rodent? Lost your appetite, have you? Or perhaps, sensing your impending doom at the hands of our advanced weaponry, you have retreated from our basement in order to seek your scrumptious protein-rich handouts elsewhere?

The mouse isn’t talking. But the public is! As it turns out, everybody’s a mouse extermination critic!

Read the rest of this entry »

I grew up in a rural area. I like hiking. I know how to put up a tent and start a fire. But the lovely people who live in Front Royal, Va., are good; they can smell the city folk from two blocks away. Last weekend some friends and I rented a cabin for a little R&R, which included a couple trips into town. Here’s what I learned:

1. Don’t Buy Firewood. This is a dead giveaway. After an unsuccessful fire from the soggy wood we chopped with random tools we found in the basement–including a mini chainsaw, a sledgehammer, and something called a wedge–we went searching for wood to buy. We found it at a 7-Eleven. And we got heckled. Actually, we got passively heckled. Two guys getting in their car had a very loud conversation that went something like this: “Shit! They’re buying firewood!” “Oh my god, I can’t believe it! They’re buying firewood?!” Not enjoyable.

2. Don’t Buy Fancy Coffee. OK, this one should be obvious. But if a town has a cafe, it seems reasonable to stop by it and buy a cappuccino. We did this. As we were walking down the sidewalk of this sleepy town, there were suddenly people hanging out every window (or so it seemed) making fun of us and our coffee. Much laughing ensued.

3. Don’t Take Pictures of the Anti-Abortion Signs. It’s hard to resist, especially with gems like: “If you can read this sign, you weren’t aborted.” But I’m pretty sure we got a nasty stare from a guy on his dirt bike.

4. Don’t Drive a Rented Chevy Impala. Enough said.

There is a mouse in my basement. The squeaky little guy isn’t too much of a bother, but it shits places, my roommate swears she’s allergic to it, and I fear it may breed. We’ve tried three methods of extermination since discovering our new roommate: First, we laid out poison; then, we set sticky traps; finally, we baited two snap traps with peanut butter. Here’s what we’ve found:

Poison: mildly uncomfortable at best! The only effect the posion seems to have on the situation is to make me nervous that the mouse will spread it around and feed it into my food supply … possibly intentionally.

Sticky traps: not very sticky! The other day, I dropped a take-out menu on the floor and accidentally palmed a sticky trap when I bent down to pick it up. I escaped handily. I didn’t even need to use my other hand to help free myself.

Peanut-butter-baited snap traps: delicious! Our basement mouse not only eats the peanut butter off our death machines: He licks them clean. The traps themselves don’t seem too interested in snapping. The scant information I could locate online concerning mouse tongue muscles suggests that they are “similar to limb muscles.” What does it all mean?

Can somebody help me out here? I am not covering my kitchen floor with upside-down duct tape. So, should we just go ahead and name the little guy and prepare to throw a mouse pups shower?

The Post’s New York correspondent David Segal attacks bedbug hysteria today, pointing out the problem with reporters calling pest-control companies looking for evidence of a resurgence of the evil little critters. He makes a compelling case that the return of bedbugs has been overstated, to say the least, in the press, noting that the New York Times alone has done 12 bedbug stories in the past half-decade.

My last year in New York was 2002, a year before the media fever, but as usual I was on the cutting edge—our apartment in Brooklyn got infested by bedbugs. It happened after a trip to Richmond, and I’ve always figured the shabby hotel we stayed in there was to blame. The first thing we noticed was bites on our legs, then small blood stains on the sheets. Then we started seeing them.
Read the rest of this entry »

You call that a bonsai photo, Wemple? THIS is a bonsai photo.

One of the District’s gems is the bonsai hut at the Arboretum in Northeast. It’s actually called the U.S. National Bonsai and Penjing Museum. You can gawk at those little trees for hours without so much as blinking.

Check out this gem:

Well, in the future, as it turns out, your access to this gem may be slightly curtailed, if we are to believe the awesome Mark Segraves of WTOP News. Segraves is telling us that budget cuts are imperiling the Arboretum’s staff and operating hours. If this actually comes to pass, and the U.S. National Bonsai and Penjing Museum becomes scarcer to me as a tourist, then some approps person on the Hill’s gonna hear from me!

Last night, I awoke in the darkness to the sound of a low buzzing near my ear. A woman who was temporarily sleeping in my apartment was attempting to reach me by telephone. Though I questioned why she had called me from such close proximity, I answered.

“Hello,” I said.

“I found a mouse,” the woman informed me. As we were both stationed within the apartment, I could hear her voice clearly without the aid of the telephone. Still, we did not abandon the mechanism. “It ran under a pile of clothes,” she added.

Months earlier, my landlord spoke of a similar class of rodents that had invaded his home in search of shelter and food scraps. He informed me that though he had once been pestered by the vermin, he and his housemates had since been able to systematically locate, isolate, and delete the creatures. A housemate explained one particularly cruel game they had played: “All I had to do was corner the mouse into the sink,” she said. “Then, I took hold of the spray faucet and shot the mouse until it had drowned.”

I did not relate this to the woman over the telephone. “What should I do?” she asked me.

Several years ago, while living in the Los Santos province of Panama, I found the helix of my ear caught between the jaws of a large and brazen rat. I had been sleeping soundly at the time–lost in the midst of a strange, hallucinatory dream, the specifics of which I do not recall–when the rat approached, squeaked violently, and bit. After the modest flow of blood from my head confirmed that I was not, in fact, still hallucinating, I located a man outside my domicile for help. The man offered me illicit drugs, an oversized conch shell with which to conceal a gaping, rat-friendly hole in my bedroom wall, and an outdoor hammock as a temporary bed. I accepted two of his offers.

Back in my apartment, I considered the mouse. I had no drugs, nor shells; my sole hammock was folded deep within my closet, out of use during the cool winter months.

“Sleep on the futon,” I suggested to the woman. “I will call my landlord in the morning.”

Typically the only panda trolling the 1515 14th Street NW galleries on an opening night is the fashion blogger who goes by that name. But “15 for Philip” drew supporters from far and wide, including, I suppose, jungles or zoos or wherever it is that pandas reside.

The show at Curator’s Office is a portraiture jam dedicated to local patron and collector Philip Barlow, so our furry friend has gotta be an artist. Sources say performance artist Kathryn Cornelius (who has work in the show) donned the costume to show her affection for Barlow, a claim Cornelius steadfastly denies. (That she was in costume, not that she doesn’t appreciate Barlow.) In any case, this figure was too short to be Cornelius. So Who Brakes for Philip Barlow? This writer has a hunch that it was another performance artist, Nilay Lawson.

Spend a few months in this career, and you quickly learn an enduring truth about the American public: it cares way more about animals than people. Quadruple murder, who gives a shit? Bodies on the sidewalk…meh, keep walking. But, if a dog ever dies–with even the slightest hint of foul play–people go ballistic. Debates ensue. Accusations are hurled. Judgments are set in stone.

On that note, listserv e-mails have been pouring into my mailbox nonstop about the dog killed by an MPD officer on Christmas Eve. Fox 5 News originally reported the story on Dec. 26. As Amanda Hess wrote yesterday, “An internal investigation into the incident is pending: The officer claims Scooby lunged, while the dog’s owner says Scooby was sitting still.”

But, that was only the beginning.

A Police District 3 yahoo listserv writer kicked off the conversation with this post:

“The officer’s behavior indicative of recent pressure from within MPD to increase enforcement of leash laws in DC. This is the second time an officer has shot a dog under questionable circumstances, plus there have been senseless arrests of individuals walking their dogs off leash. However, killing a dog in such a manner is not only cruel, but inhumane. I hope the ASPCA or the American Humane Society will conduct their own investigations as to the officer’s actions, as I believe it will be more credible than any MPD internal investigation.”

Soon after came this post:

“I was and continue to be outraged at the situation… …I wonder why there have been no comments yet from [Assistant Chief of Police Diane Groomes]….. the owner of the dog (Scooby) and witnesses in the immediate area all say the same thing: the dog was not aggressive and wasn’t threatening the officer….. what a shame!”

Oh no you didn’t just pounce on Groomes! Ask for some of this woman’s attention and you’ll get a tidal wave of it. Since this e-mail, not one, not two, but seven e-mails from her have landed in my mailbox. Here’s the first:

“I posted this shooting on the 2d listserv since it occurred there…I would also like to correct the statement that we are “arresting” dog owners for unleashed dogs… a citizen is subject to a fine of $50.00 which they would pay at the Police Districts…. We do not arrest for this type of infraction…. We can query 2d and 3d on the number of citizens cited for this violation (CO SOLBERG and CO MCCOY –pls forward your statistics on citations issued for unleashed dog please for 2007 so we can get this out to the public.”

Back to some classic pet gifts. Here, Hammacher Schlemmer gives us two whoppers on the same page!

First you got the doggie water fountain, which is quite something. The innovation here is that when your doggie’s snout gets withint striking distance of the spout, out comes the water. How is this an improvement on the old, trusty water bowl? Well, let’s let Hammacher Schlemmer answer that one: “A built-in proximity sensor detects when your dog gets within 3′ and activates a constant stream of water that greatly reduces the risks of intestinal diseases commonly contracted from contaminated standing water.”

Note, too, that the device shuts down after four minutes, saving Rover from the threat of the dreaded canine hyponatremia.

If you and your dog are managing hydration issues competently, please see other ideas on this same H-S page, including a contraption called “The Safe Outdoor Playground for Pets.” The idea here, according to the promotional language, is that your indoor cat can enjoy the great outdoors with the assistance of this cage. And then there’s the double-decker cat stroller.