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mice in the spice cabinet
Monday, December 12 2016
We've had a mouse infestation for weeks in and around our kitchen's gas range. This is evidenced by frequent mouse sightings as they leap from the counter into a gap behind the burners. There are also occasional mouse turds strewn across the nearby counter. These mice have drawn the attention of the cats, who can frequently be seen sitting on the floor in front of the stove. But I've never actually seen mice down there. In the past, the mouse problem has been contained to the stove and the two runs of counter on either side of it. Today, though, Gretchen saw a mouse dive out of the spice cabinet above the counter to the left of the stove. There's actual food being stored up there, so that's a bad development. It's possible a mouse could leap up there off of one of the containers below if the cabinet door is left open; hopefully there is no entrance chewed through the wall.
Normally we'd put out humane mouse traps, but I think the traps we had were old and nasty and Gretchen threw them out. We opened up the top of the stove to see how had it had gotten in there. In the past they've built nests there, but we'd made it unliveable by sprinkling paprika all over the floor of that space. The paprika was now mostly gone, but there were no nests either. There were, however, a great many mouse turds, and the metal had corroded significantly since we'd last looked at it, presumably from mouse urine. Happily, there didn't seem to be any fresh chewing on the wires under there that supply high-voltage jolts of electricity to the gas sparkers. That's evidently not something mice do in a space they use only for relieving themselves. We vacuumed up all the turds and sprinkled in some fresh new patrika. And then vacuumed up turds on a corner shelf where we store our pots and pans (some of which also contained turds). We also thought about blocking holes in the stove and into the wall, but I never mustered the energy to actually do any of that blocking.
I'd been terribly disappointed with the recent HBO production of Westworld for a range of reasons: its pokey pacing, its pretensions, its dated conceit, and its loopy (and ultimately vapid) meditation on the meaning of consciousness. So tonight I decided to see the original 1973 movie on which it was loosely based. The old movie immedatiately demonstrated promise, what with its straightforward exposition and gloriously retro-futuristic early-1970s technology: green text-only monitors and the occasional primitive graphic animation. At times it felt like a discount version of 2001: A Space Odyssey, but then there you were in the 1970s version of the wild west. Unlike in the HBO remake, there was no exploration of the inner-lives or memories of the robots of the park. Their rising up is a consequence of unforseen technological complexity issues of the sort more familiar in recent times, though it's not in a way that suggests the attainment of conscious, the arrival of the singularity, or any such modern concepts. In the context of that 1970s world, the park works as a real place with real robots in a way that seems so dated in the HBO remake. Also, Yul Brynner makes for a great (and almost sympathetic) robot. It's clear that his character was the prototype for Schwarzenegger's Terminator (which was also a great cinematic robot). That said, there were plenty of stupid things in the 1973 movie. For example: the guns are supposedly designed to only shoot at things that are cold, thus sparing the lives of warm-blooded actual humans. But if the robots are all cold, why did our human tourists have no complaints about the temperature of the robot prostitutes with whom they had sex?
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