July 17th, 2008
#553 - RPM
Last winter we had a mouse hanging out under some shelving in our kitchen. It was a tricky one. I set out a trap with peanut butter on it and the next day I would find the trap still set but all the peanut butter would be gone. The most surprising part was that the mouse actually chewed a hole in the baseboard inside a closet. I think it must have seen some old Tom and Jerry cartoons at some point. I imagine they are popular in the rodent community.
July 17th, 2008 at 12:05 am
Wow, I’ve never actually seen one of those traditional, baseboard-entrance mouse homes before. You had one hell of a traditionally-minded house there, Chris.
The Duck Has Spoken.
July 17th, 2008 at 12:06 am
Appliance week has gotta be one of the best so far! I havn’t laughed so hard at Biff in a long time! I can’t wait for tomorrows!
July 17th, 2008 at 12:07 am
Haha I remember the whole rat problem. My trap was simple sticky pad to which was a bit tricky to dispose. One touch to the pad and you’ll have one heck of a mess.
July 17th, 2008 at 12:10 am
hey - more perspective - giant mice? oh wait…
July 17th, 2008 at 12:12 am
oh i suppose i could tell the story about how my family puts a trash can in the garage with peanut butter in the bottom and will find a (live) mouse or two in the bottom after a night.
July 17th, 2008 at 12:14 am
He wants to make Rat-Cheese smoothies?
July 17th, 2008 at 12:32 am
I was thinking of putting the whole rat-cheese concoction on nachos and microwaving it. But that is just me.
Also, I think sticky mouse traps are one of the most inhumane things ever. Just awful. I hate mice. Snap their necks with traditional mousetraps, I do. But the idea of a mouse writhing around for however many hours it takes for it to die, just kind of irks me.
July 17th, 2008 at 12:50 am
“Biff learns that cheese-n-rat shakes are not a good source of nutrients or taste.”
July 17th, 2008 at 12:53 am
Heh, get a cat. We’ve got about seven living here (mostly strays that kinda adopted themselves into our household) and even though it’s a pain in the wallet, we never once thought about getting rid of any of them; after a while you get attached to them. Besides, they earn their keep. Haven’t seen a rodent in the house or on our property in over a decade.
July 17th, 2008 at 1:05 am
Mice are nothing. I live in an old Victorian house and we have a serious bat problem every year. I see mice as only a two dimensional problem, but bats can pop up/swoop down from any angle. I usually catch them in a net and let them outside, like this one here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/zeusandhera/2672194625/ They are actually kinda cute once you get used to them.
July 17th, 2008 at 1:33 am
I have mice in the walls and the roof. on rare occasion they get through the wall, by teleportation or something. there’s no holes in the walls. or the carpet. only one big enough for a 5 cent coin (australian money) in the roof. I need a 6-inch box of steel to hide in for me to get to sleep feeling safe. except for my fear that someone might cut off the air supply… oh well. good work on the comics, chris.
July 17th, 2008 at 2:02 am
My aunt has had rat problems. We use electric traps. They go in… and ZAP! Totally humane—it’s like an electric chair, instead of hanging.
How would Biff implement this? Put the blender in a bathtub with the bait, and switch it on when the target bites. No mess!
July 17th, 2008 at 2:09 am
This comic is a double features. It also serves as the explanation for the Pollockesque art on his ceiling.
July 17th, 2008 at 2:42 am
My cat eats geckos. That’s why we could never buy Geiko insurance.
July 17th, 2008 at 3:09 am
Ok, someone put the book of biff in the list of nightmare fuel examples.
July 17th, 2008 at 3:35 am
Totally nasty, how’s he going to make margaritas? I can’t imagine any amount of washing will make that blender clean enough again.
July 17th, 2008 at 3:54 am
I bought a couple of pet mice to freak my flatmate out. i like mice, as long as they’re kept clean. Anyway, I made a point of playing with them whenever she came home from work.
After a month or two, I went on a health kick and bought a blender for making shakes with. My routine changed slightly. She would get home, I would make a shake, drink it, then go play with the mice.
One day she came home to find an empty mouse cage open n the bench, and a very lumpy, pinkish, almost fuzzy something in the blender and me huddled in the corner, claiming that I just wanted to see what would happen.
She was still screaming even after I got the mice out of the shoebox under my bed and showed her the packets that the mince, tomato sauce, and catnip mice had come in.
I miss those days sometimes.
July 17th, 2008 at 3:56 am
That… is random. But also brilliant, for a given value of genius.
July 17th, 2008 at 5:16 am
We used to have a mice infestation in the student dorm I lived in. My neighbour was terrified of the things, so one day I heard a terrified scream from the kitchen to find her cowering in the corner and a mouse sitting on the floor.
Apparently, it had gone into shock because of her scream, as it didn’t move at all (except for breathing and shivering a little) so I just picked it up and got rid of it.
July 17th, 2008 at 5:21 am
I once had a pet rat and a pet bat I saved but they didn’t like each other at all.
July 17th, 2008 at 5:28 am
Kamorth’s post is funny ^_^
So…biff IS going to trap the mouse in the blender, right? o-o
July 17th, 2008 at 5:34 am
What on earth has happened to this site? Its a bit… busy….! Would like less of the in-your-face type adverts which clutter up the screen and detract a lot from the experience!
July 17th, 2008 at 6:40 am
Talk about a better mousetrap! Frappe!
Kamorth, you’re an evil genius.
At the Dog Rescue where I volunteer, I’m the Rat Guy. I’m the only one who has no problem picking up rat carcasses. Rat poision is the order of the day, in the food shed. We make *DANG* sure to keep the dogs away from the shed when we put the poision out, but for a week afterwards, we’ve got random dead rats popping up all over the place, and in the oddest corners. *Someone* has to pick up the deceased rodents before a dog finds them and eats their poisonous bodies.
That would be me. :p
July 17th, 2008 at 6:53 am
BRILLIANT!!!!!!!!
July 17th, 2008 at 7:27 am
So, I remember in college when I was taking Advanced Differential Equations, my totally crazy professor gave us some great information about problems with mice burrowing holes in your walls and baseboards and such.
He said the way to stop it was to put a piece of glass or clear plastic over their hole. They’ll still see the hole there, but won’t be able to get through, and they will not think to make a new hole because there is still a hole there. Of course if you just plug it, there will be no hole and they’ll make a new one.
Not sure if it works, but it was certainly an interesting math class…
July 17th, 2008 at 7:36 am
There seems to be at least 5 buttons on the remote, but just four on the blender. Other than that, this is brilliant.
July 17th, 2008 at 7:44 am
It’s my experience that remotes tend to have more buttons on them than the devices they control.
July 17th, 2008 at 7:51 am
Poor mousey
July 17th, 2008 at 8:59 am
Wow, this is actually sort of a timely comic for me. Just yesterday I opened the back door for just a second, and before I can go out to the back porch, in darts a chipmunk. I made a homemade trap with a skinny cardboard box, a phonebook, and peanut butter, and later that evening the chipmunk showed its face while my friends were over. We were bored, so we spent some twenty fruitless minutes trying to catch it, just to entertain ourselves.
So this Biff comic has an extra layer of timely resonance with me, which makes the humor more relatable, and that’s cool. But all the same, I hope I never can identify with Biff’s troubles with housejackers and squid noodles.
July 17th, 2008 at 10:34 am
We had a mouse one winter after my dad cleared out our old firewood pile. Interestingly enough, the fat, lazy, no front claws cat caught it and brought it upstairs to lovingly deposit it at my dad’s feet. This of course, freaked the hell out of my mom, whom dad had to reassure the mouse was dead….until it jumped up and started running around! My mom jumped from the couch to the kitchen table and the cat chased the mouse back into the basement…where it wasn’t heard from until 3 days later when the younger, though equally fat, cat was found tossing it’s dead body about like a toy, and laid on top of it when my dad tried to take it away.
July 17th, 2008 at 11:57 am
@ Gato - wow. O-o
July 17th, 2008 at 2:35 pm
I hope the books aren’t covering the remote sensor.
July 17th, 2008 at 2:53 pm
I once say a schematic of a ingeniously efficient mouse trap.
It was basically a small box with a bit of cheese laid behind a razor blade, the mice would cut their own throat trying to reach the cheese.
Unfortunately, I can’t find any pictures of it on Google images.
July 17th, 2008 at 2:59 pm
good stuff. i want a remote controlled blender…it would be fun to make people think my kitchen is possessed.
July 17th, 2008 at 5:35 pm
Mouse traps are disguisting when the have been used……. guts and blood everywere….
July 17th, 2008 at 6:56 pm
That’s an, um, inventive use of a commercial-sized blender.
Gotta give props to Zeusandhera for the avatar - loved the Muppets version of the song - and Kamorth, for sheer maniacal genius.
July 17th, 2008 at 9:22 pm
RPM? Rats per minute?
July 17th, 2008 at 10:37 pm
Oh, that is wrong!
That’s just gonna have sick results….
July 17th, 2008 at 11:31 pm
Have you seen the blendtec blenders? they can blend anything……
http://youtube.com/watch?v=yVAaz9vFdSo&feature=user
the guy says,”"insert whatever he blended” dust, don’t breathe this” and the first thing that popped into my head was “Rat dust, don’t breathe this” =D Yeah..I’m lame hehe
July 18th, 2008 at 12:52 am
BIFF thought something was a frivolous purchase? Is this the same Biff who bought remote-control cheese?
July 19th, 2008 at 3:19 pm
I can’t help but think “if you build a better trap …” But that said, I agree with those who have said that traps are inhumane. As are poisons. As are those glue trap things. Rats are pretty bright - we had one come in here and was running around making a mess of things and it would not be coaxed into the humane trap, not even with peanut butter. It wasn’t doing any major damage, so we didn’t really mess about with it … until it killed our birds. Our zebra finches, and … even worse! … my cockatiel, who I’d had from the day after she was weaned from hand-feeding. I loved that bird. And the damn rat killed her - I had to hold and comfort the poor thing as she died. So we went on the warpath. No more Mrs. and Mr. Nice Pro-Rodent Guys - this rat was gonna die. So, we bought the glue papers. I didn’t like the idea, but we had to do something. You know that that rat did? He found some newspapers, and dragged them over the glue papers. It took a couple months, but my dog finally cornered the thing and I killed it with a sword.
True story.
September 15th, 2008 at 5:46 pm
We always have mice, have done for years. And they seem to be incredibly intelligent…. We got some humane traps. Basically the mouse goes in through a door and up a weighted ramp, so when it gets through the second door the ramp flips up and blocks the inner door and it can’t get out. It came back empty after a couple of days, but there had obviously been a mouse in there because the top of the inner doorway had been chewed just enough for a pair of tiny paws to get through and tip the ramp back down…