h a l f b a k e r yBirth of a Notion.
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Nor a very dilute solution.
You may recall, from earlier posts, that I am plagued by moles.
Not
the skin type, the lawn type.
I have used a variety of amusing and often violent methods to
eradicate these creatures, cute though they are; they are almost
as
cute dead, and are even cuter
when transported to someone else's
garden. The head-gardener has also had his share of the fun,
although most of his time is obviously taken up growing heads.
All in all, it's becoming a bit tedious and time-consuming.
So.
MaxBeGone Pest Control (inc; in no way related to MaxCo Pest
Control, whom you may have heard of in the news lately) is proud
to
introduce its Micromolar Mark 2*.
Fashioned from a simple, natural, microwave oven, the
Micromolar
is a fully autonomous lawn-roving robot, navigating your sward by
means of a series of boundary markers. Its soft rubber wheels
trundle it safely and quietly from random place to random place,
and
at each of these random places, it will pause for several minutes
before firing a powerful beam of microwave energy deep into the
soil.
Exposure times are carefully calibrated so as not to kill the grass
which is, after all, quite happy to endure a wide range of
temperatures. Indeed, by warming the soil, the Micromolar will
eventually encourage the grass to grow more lusciously.
Sooner or later, however, the Micromolar will strike it lucky,
which
is to say that a blissfully ignorant mole will strike it unlucky. No
sooner will the burrowing bugger, a few inches below the surface,
have said to itself "Is it warm in here or is it j" than it's evil and
molish brain will have been warmed by four degrees centigrade,
throwing it into a moline coma while the Micromolar finishes the
job.
*long story
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Annotation:
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You're ignoring the mutagenic effects of microwave radiation. Think you've got problems now? Just wait until Micromolar fires and doesn't quite finish off a pregnant mole. What you going to do about the X-Moles? Huh? |
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You can catch them and send them all to me. I kill nothing. |
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Robot, shmrobot. Too many moving parts. The documentary Caddyshack showed possible pitfalls in the use of explosives against burrowing vermin, but I think that was a matter of degree. The premise is sound. Underground explosives with a high brissance (been waiting to use the brissance, for right or wrong) should produce a shock wave lethal to burrowers. Much akin to fishing with dynamite. With luck, 8th will weigh in with technical tips on implementation. |
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// MaxCo Pest Control, whom you may have heard of in the news lately // |
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Oh, yes. How's the class action going ? Is the company still in Chapter 11 ? |
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By the way, who has jurisdiction on that one, the FAA, the EPA, or NASA ? Or are they still wrangling ? |
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Have all the pieces been found ? Leasing the ROV submersible must have been expensive, not to mention the cost of training the dolphins and importing all those truffle pigs from france. |
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Are they any closer to finding something that gets the stains out ? |
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Like the idea, by the way. [+] |
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// What you going to do about the X-Moles? // |
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The usual - sell them as weapons to the dictators of small, unstable mineral-rich countries. |
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Poor poor defenseless little nothings, [xen]. |
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//Poor poor defenseless little nothings,// |
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Then they have two choices. Either they can turn up on
schedule so I can catch them live and take them
elsewhere
without having to hang around for hours, or they can
bugger
off of their own accord. |
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My lawn accounts for probably less than two percent of
England, so it's not really that unreasonable to expect
them
to respect my privacy. |
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And - if microwaves were mutagenic, this annotation
would be being written by my lasagne, not me. |
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Couldn't this be done more efficiently from orbit?
Repurposed satellites from the American Star Wars program,
perhaps. |
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Look into falconry. You can have fun taking care of these critters. |
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In my distant and checkered past I worked at a plant that manufactured frozen food. I was the refrigeration and boiler guy. The plant was situated on the outskirts of civilization, where gophers and prairie dogs roamed. A co-worker of mine liked nothing better than pulling a container of 99 percent anhydrous ammonia (used as refrigerant) out of the high pressure receiver, running 30 yards out into the desert, and pouring it into a gopher hole. More often than not, gophers would shoot out of another hole, sometimes up to 20 feet away, like they were shot out of a cannon. Seriously, popping out about three feet into the air as if they were wearing jet packs. Yeah, mean, maybe, but it was funny as hell to watch. If moles are anything like gophers or prairie dogs, you may have a marketable product by setting up bleachers and charging viewers a fee for watching Mole Moonshots. It doesn't kill 'em, and you can get at least three shows a day out of the little suckers... just a thought... |
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How about owlery? Oddly enough, we have three juvenile
tawny owls who sit at the edge of our woods overlooking
the garden. However, they are completely failing to catch
moles. The three of them sit on this long, long horizontal
branch in a tight group, and spend all night jostling and
screaming at eachother. More than oddly enough, they sit
there quite happily while I walk around underneath them
with a torch. |
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Next time I get a mole, I may see if I can tempt them
down with it and see if they develop a taste for them. |
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We think you are going about this in entirely the wrong way. |
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The answer is obviously to recruit young, impressionable moles, and radicalise them with a carefully crafted and biased authoritarian religious world view. |
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Having convinced them that they are the Chosen Moles, it is but a small step to persuading them to strap on explosive vests and go down into the tunnels to randomly slaughter their innocent bretheren, without warning or compassion. Since none of them ever return to tell the new recruits "Sorry, guys, but we were wrong", success is assured. |
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//Have you tried ferrets?// |
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I don't think so, but I'll check with Cook. |
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////Have you tried ferrets?// |
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I don't think so, but I'll check with Cook.
// |
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Very nice, but be careful what you ask, you might be disturbed by the answers. |
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No seriusly, I've heard ferrets play merry hell with moles. |
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//I've heard ferrets play merry hell with moles// |
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We have stoats by the bucketload, and they can fit more
easily down mole tunnels. You'd think they'd make the
effort, but they don't seem to. Or maybe we have stoat-
resistant moles. |
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Maybe they're just a bit to big to go down the tunnels ? You could just get a very large number of stoats, and sort them according to size, until you only have two tiny ones left. Then you could decide which one was best to send down the hole. |
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But you might end up choosing the lesser of two weasels ... |
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We'll go away now, shall we ? |
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They're not weasels. They're stoatally different. |
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Well, we get a buzz from it. |
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