Author: DOuG pRATt

Rats ‘n’ Bats

Here’s something very scary to see. A rat catching and biting into a bat! Mr. Rat carries it off, presumably to have Mr. Bat for dinner.

YIKES! What are the implications of that nightmare?

https://www.npr.org/sections/goats-and-soda/2025/11/08/g-s1-96931/rat-bat-virus-video

Last night, sitting at my drawing table, I heard something I’ve come to expect this time of year, when the weather gets cold. What I heard was the sound of a mouse crawling around in the wall between my office and what I’ll call the media room.

I set a non-lethal mouse trap that has worked for me in the past. This morning it hadn’t been disturbed. I decided to finally take more decisive action and go under the porch to see if I could find a likely point of entry, where the inside wall is located along the foundation. This gap looked like it. There’s even a crack there.

I’d heard that steel wool works as a mouse block. I have a supply on hand that’s used to polish the rim of my Thorens turntable platter. I stretched out half a dozen wads of it then packed it good and tight into the run of that gap.

Either the mouse is still in the wall and has been napping all day, or he left to take advantage of today’s 62 degree weather. If the former, is he stuck inside and will he find his way to the trap? If the latter, will he be prevented from getting back inside?

Political Medicine

On the Media has a series that, “explores what has unfolded at Harvard University since Donald Trump’s inauguration.” Part 2 covers the medical angle. This is of interest to me because, thanks to Harvard Medical School, I no longer have atrial fibrillation.

Jay Bhattacharya, an M.D. with a PhD in Economics, lost his intellectual way, and with it his credibility. He’s now NIH Director.

Bhattacharya opposed the Covid lockdown. His view was, “there wasn’t enough evidence of the virus’s lethality to justify stay at home orders.” The illogic of this highly educated man is appalling. Whenever has ignorance of a new disease been a good reason to not take preventive measures, until more is known about it?

Turning Right USA

“It’s cool to be conservative, hot to be the conservative chick. It’s the new trend.”

Why the push to influence college kids? Because the likelihood of getting young adults to “accept Christ” after age 19 is about the same as getting them started with smoking.

Some who attended the Turning Point USA rally were there simply to be part of a big event. Those who were drawn to the message of Christian tolerance and understanding will be disappointed when they come to see the politics inherent in TPUSA. They’ll reject the organization and perhaps also their faith.

Others will find their way to local, apolitical congregations. To them I offer my sincere best wishes. There will be, however, those who embrace TPUSA and its intolerant politics as their ideological home.

As I Used to Say at Work…

… “let’s swap all the tires until we find the flat one.” With “tires” being an expression for whatever the not obvious cause was of a technical problem.

That’s the situation I’m in right now. The power company sent a notice yesterday, warning of possible outages, due to high wind. So, I wasn’t surprised this morning to see there had been two of them. But then I saw that the router was offline.

Power was off, not only in the office, but throughout the finished half of the basement. Checking the power panels in the unfinished half, it was easy to see that one of the circuit breakers had popped. Resetting it once, twice, three times, didn’t work. So, something must have shorted out due to a power surge.

The first thing to do was see if Internet service could be restored. With a very long extension cord, I connected the office gear to a test outlet next to the panel. Success! That put me back online. Would the circuit breaker still refuse to reset?

Yes, it did. So, where’s the problem? I disconnected everything else, and tested the breaker again. It held! Yay!

Now the question is, what shorted out? I’ll test each outlet and, assuming they’re all good, reconnect everything one by one, to see what pops the breaker. But not right now, because I have a dentist appointment to fix this damn broken tooth.