How to Spot a Psychopath

There are rats under our floor.

I don't care about that, per se. I think it's cute when I put the mouldy end of a bread-loaf in the compost bin and the next day the inside of it's all been eaten out into a cosy little cave-of-food.

(Anne does not think this is cute in any way at all.)

I think rats are cute too, even ordinary brown ones that want to bite you.

(Anne believes I may need to adjust my medication.)

Unfortunately, though, the rats keep weeing conductively on important parts of the heating system, and chewing other important parts of it.

There are four cats in this house.

So a solution suggests itself.

But that would (a) mean, at best, slow death by torture for little fuzzy creatures which I do not want to eat and (b) expose our own precious furry child-substitutes not only to the risk of loss of self-esteem, should they find themselves unable to catch even the doziest rats, but also to the dangers of the outdoors. Never mind being hit by cars; for all we know, there's some toxic something-or-other growing somewhere around the house that killed poor Mickey.

So from now on, no cat of ours goes outdoors unless escorted by at least six Secret Service agents.

But the rats have got to go.

So I purchased no-kill traps (from this guy; the traps are cheap and work fine, but they come flat-packed and must be cable-tied into shape). A bit of peanut butter on bread for bait, and bang, one rat was caught in almost no time.

Into the car (on some newspaper...) the trapped rat went, and he or she and I enjoyed a brief but stimulating drive to Kingsford Smith Memorial Park, from the verges of which the rat has by now almost certainly darted into somebody else's house.

When I got back, re-baited the trap and set it up again, I found a rat in the other trap.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

When I took that second trap back down, the first one was still empty. So I presume we have now caught the two stupidest rats, and will never catch another.

Perhaps we should get a goanna, or something.

I found this picture on Flickr while looking for something quite different. I think it's fair to say that almost anything is quite different from this picture.

I invite you to look at the picture for some time. Feel free to click through to the bigger version on Flickr. Turn it round and round in your head a bit.

Here's another angle:

In a moment, I will tell you how this strange tableau came to be. But you may prefer to read no further. Not because the explanation is as unsettling as the explanation for such a scene honestly ought to be, but merely because the explanation, like an explanation for a magic trick, may leave your perception of the world poorer than it found it.

I'm reminded of the Penn and Teller trick where Penn says that Teller, who just magicked his way out of a box he'd been sealed in, is about to do it again, but this time so that the audience can see how the trick is done.

Penn then commands the audience to make a choice.

They can close their eyes, and thereby preserve the mystery and astonishment of the trick.

Or they can leave their eyes open, and watch a middle-aged man get out of a box.

If you'd prefer to preserve the magic, do not scroll down.

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Greetings, fellow spoilers of jokes.

So far as I could glean from the comments on the Flickr picture pages, the explanation is:

There is something interesting inside the giant pig. Presumably real pigs.

The children have their faces pressed to windows, which allow them to see in.

You are not allowed to look through a window unless you first put on a tail.

The guy in the foreground in the first picture is probably not actually about to start butcherin' young 'uns.

The end.