Month: November 2016

As the saying often misattributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson goes, “build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.” The phrase is not literally about mousetraps, but about the drive to improve and perfect. And with thousands of mousetrap patents in the United States, it seems people can’t resist innovating new ways to slay vermin. (The Trap History Museum in Columbus, Ohio, has over 1500 different examples of mousetraps alone.) Nevertheless, the popular spring-loaded snap trap patented by William C. Hooker in 1894 remains the most popular option, aside from employing a feline hunter.

The variety of these mouse traps is astounding, and a bit harrowing, from electric cats to contraptions that approach Rube Goldberg machines. Here are 10 particularly ingenious examples.

1. DELUSION MOUSETRAP

The Nebraska State Historical Society recently shared their example of the curiously shaped trap, stating that the Victor Woodstream Corporation of Pennsylvania (best known for their snap traps marked with a “V”) still sells a version to confound wayward mice.When Nebraskan John H. Morris patented his trap in 1876, he stated that it could be used at “the entrance of stockyards.” Luckily for the cows, the elaborate trap—with its hinged door leading to a disorienting tunnel where a sort of seesaw closed the door—was apparently only ever marketed as the Delusion Mousetrap. Its ad explained the trap’s intricate process in rhyme: “The Mouse goes in to get the bait, / And shuts the door by his own weight, / And then he jumps right through a hole, / And thinks he’s out; but bless his soul, / He’s in a case somehow or other, / And sets the trap to catch another.”

2. THE GUN TRAP

Back in 1882, James A. Williams of Fredonia, Texas, patented a rather alarming device illustrated by a mouse confronted with a firearm aimed down its burrow. Williams stated in his text he was “aware that burglar-alarms of various kinds have been used, and which have been connected to windows and doors in such a manner that the opening of the window or door causes a pressure upon a lever which discharges a fire-arm; but in no case have the parts been arranged and combined as here shown and described.” It may have been a novel arrangement, but it did follow other artillery traps, such as the “cemetery gun” intended to stop grave robbers in the 18th century.

3. THE CAGE TRAP

In this trap patented by William K. Bachman in 1870, the mouse is responsible for its own undoing. The animal can go in the cage and step out, but if it gnaws through the bait on a cord, the door shuts. It’s a pretty basic idea, and unsurprisingly has many versions, such as one at the State Museum of Pennsylvania made of a couple of planks of wood and a metal wire.

4. CHOKER TRAP

Created in the 1920s, the Victor Choker Mouse Trap involved four entry holes, each with a loaded wire choker that would strangle any mouse that entered. Then you pressed a button and the bodies fell from the device, readying it to kill again. According to the Victor company, which is still in the extermination business, the trap evolved into their current Victor Tri-Kill trap, although as its name suggests, its slaying power has been downgraded from four to three.

5. ELECTRIC CAT

This “portable electronic mouse trap that has a housing in the shape of a cat” is only successful if mice are comfortable strolling up to the gaping jaw of a predator. When a 2006 Wall Street Journal article interviewed its creator, Brooklyn postal worker Charles Jordan, he’d only made a prototype, and it was shaped like a boring box. But when complete, per the 2005 patent, mice are lured by a “reservoir of a fragrance that smells like fresh cheese.” Upon entering, a motion sensor turns on a vacuum that sucks the mouse into a suffocation chamber. Then a “speaker informs a user when the collection chamber is full.” If you want to see it in action (sort of), Patently Silly has animated its patent drawings on YouTube.

6. BELL-RAT

As previously shared on mental_floss, this trap patented by Joseph Barad and Edward Markoff in 1908 is one of the more outlandish designs out there. Similar to the choker trap, a mouse entering would suddenly find itself collared. But rather than being strangled by the collar, the device around its neck held a bell. Then, in theory, this “bell-rat” would return to its friends and family and basically terrify them with the endless ringing. As claimed in the patent, bell noise is “very terrifying to animals of the species named and that if pursued by such sounds they will immediately vacate their haunts and homes, never to return.” And as for the “bell-rat,” it must run forever and never understand why it is suddenly such a bane.

7. THE TRAP DOOR

Back in 2011, the Smithsonian American Art Museum opened “Inventing a Better Mousetrap: Patent Models from the Rothschild Collection,” an exhibition that included this 1870 mousetrap model from John O. Kopas and George W. Bauer. Up until 1880, American patents were required to include a patent model sent to Washington, D.C., and you can still see the 19th century trap in the museum’s Luce Foundation Center. It painstakingly demonstrates, complete with a tiny mouse and bit of cheese, how rodents would plummet through spring-loaded platforms set up over trap doors.

8. TEETER-TOTTER

Bill Oviatt stated in a 1997 issue of The Rotarian that the idea for his mousetrap “came to him in a dream.” Nicknamed the “Teeter Pong” as it involves a plastic PVC pipe containing a ping pong ball that rocks back and forth on a stand, he patented it in 1996. When a mouse enters the pipe, lured by some treat, it tips and the ball covers the exit. While the deadly teeter-totter isn’t yet mainstream, it did make it onto David Letterman’s show, although on the segment the mouse escapes the trap and flees in a taxi.

9. PEERLESS MOUSE TRAP

“Extermination is certain,” the 1921 advertisement for the “Peerless Mouse Trap” promised. Manufactured by the Automatic Trap Company [PDF] of Chicago, the trap involved mice climbing a structure and then falling into a deadly pool of water, a trapdoor resetting the whole thing as if no horror had occurred. Their promotional material could get downright Lovecraftian in its depictions of mice: “Their breath, saliva, and coat of fur are laden with germs and dirt that spread disease in their path. Increasing, as they do, out of sight and stealthily crawling forth to feed, their numbers are never fully apparent.” While the complicated invention of connecting chambers didn’t take over the market, it might be worth looking in your attic corners for one, as an example recently sold for over $100 at auction.

10. CLOCKWORK TRAP

A 2009 issue of Michigan Farmer [PDF] describes this trap, patented by one J. Gould, as having a succession of key-wound clockwork mechanisms that raised and lowered doors as a mouse entered a succession of rooms, doors slamming behind it. Gould’s 1873 patent text is incredibly elaborate, listing each platform, lever, spring, crank, box, and drop door that composed the puzzle-like device. As with many of these traps that assume a mouse is a robotic creature that will stop at nothing for some scrap of food, it seems unlikely that it would catch the dozen mice it was designed to hold. Nevertheless, its steampunk-esque style demonstrates that no matter the current technology, someone is likely thinking of ways to use it to rid their home of pests.

If you want to throw a really traditional Thanksgiving dinner, you’ll need oysters. The mollusks would have been featured prominently on the holiday tables of the earliest American settlers—even if that beloved Thanksgiving turkey probably wasn’t. At the time, oysters were supremely popular additions to the table for coastal colonial settlements, though in some cases, they were seen as a hardship food more than a delicacy.

For one thing, oysters were an easy food source. In the Chesapeake Bay, they were so plentiful in the 17th and 18th centuries that ships had to be careful not to run aground on oyster beds, and one visitor in 1702 wrote that they could be pulled up with only a pair of tongs. Native Americans, too, ate plenty of oysters, occasionally harvesting them and feasting for days.

Early colonists ate so many oysters that the population of the mollusks dwindled to dangerously low levels by the 19th century, according to curriculum prepared by a Gettysburg University history professor. In these years, scarcity turned oysters into a luxury item for the wealthy, a situation that prevailed until the 1880s, when oyster production skyrocketed and prices dropped again [PDF]. If you lived on the coast, though, you were probably still downing the bivalves.

Beginning in the 1840s, canning and railroads brought the mollusks to inland regions. According to 1985’s The Celebrated Oysterhouse Cookbook, the middle of the 19th century found America in a “great oyster craze,” where “no evening of pleasure was complete without oysters; no host worthy of the name failed to serve ‘the luscious bivalves,’ as they were actually called, to his guests.”

At the turn of the century, oysters were still a Thanksgiving standard. They were on Thanksgiving menus everywhere from New York City’s Plaza Hotel to train dining cars, in the form of soup, cocktails, and stuffing.

In 1954, the Fish and Wildlife Service tried to promote Thanksgiving oysters to widespread use once again. It sent out a press release [PDF], entitled “Oysters—a Thanksgiving Tradition,” that included the agency’s own recipes for cocktail sauce, oyster bisque, and oyster stuffing.

In the modern era, Thanksgiving oysters have remained most popular in the South. Oyster stuffing is a classic dish in New Orleans, and chefs like Emeril Lagasse have their own signature recipes. If you’re not looking for a celebrity chef’s recipe, perhaps you want to try the Fish and Wildlife Service’s? Check it out below.

Oyster Stuffing

INGREDIENTS

1 pint oysters
1/2 cup chopped celery
1/2 cup chopped onion
1/4 cup butter
4 cups day-old bread cubes
1 tablespoon chopped parsley
1 teaspoon salt
Dash poultry seasoning
Dash pepper

Drain oysters, saving liquor, and chop. Cook celery and onion in butter until tender. Combine oysters, cooked vegetables, bread cubes, and seasonings, and mix thoroughly. If stuffing seems dry, moisten with oyster liquor. Makes enough for a four-pound chicken.

If you’re using a turkey, the FWS advises that the recipe above provides enough for about every 5 pounds of bird, so multiply accordingly.

When bears cross paths with humans, just about anything can happen. Here are eight stories about encounters that probably didn’t go as either party expected.

1. BEAR CUB STICKS ITS HEAD THROUGH CAT DOOR.

Douglas Harder has grown accustomed to getting visits from bears at his condo in Sandpoint, Idaho. “You know it’s very common, I live up on a mountain and this is the wilderness,” he told ABC news. In the spring of 2015, a mother black bear and her two cubs made a habit of emptying the birdfeeder on Harder’s second-story deck.

The following August, he returned home from a brief trip out of town to discover that some local ursid had broken into his kitchen through a partially open sliding door. Once inside, the intruder scratched up a wall and gobbled up some junk food before taking its leave. No sooner had Harder cleaned up the mess than a bear cub shoved its face through his cat door. One night later, the cub gave the tiny door another try, allowing Harder to snap some hilarious photographs that made the rounds on American news outlets.

2. PICKY POLAR BEAR STEALS WINE, IGNORES MARMITE.

A film crew sent to capture new footage for the 2015 nature series The Hunt was caught off-guard by a hungry polar bear who made a habit of dropping by their cabin in Svalbard, Norway. Within a 24-hour period, the animal barged into the building on no fewer than three separate occasions. During these forays, it devoured nearly all of the team’s food supply, eating everything from their dried pasta to a jar of the producer’s olives. And at one point, the crew returned to find the bear sleeping peacefully by the doorway with some of their red wine smeared across its face.  One of the few things that wasn’t eaten, however, was a lone jar of Marmite—a yeast-based food spread whose slogan, appropriately enough, is “Love it or hate it.”

3. URSID LICKS YOGA ENTHUSIAST.

Kristen Jones of Knoxville was visiting her parents in Burke County, North Carolina last June when she decided to do some yoga on the banks of a nearby lake. Popping in her ear buds, Jones sat by the shore and began the exercise routine. That’s when her day took an unexpected turn. “I felt a sniff on my right shoulder and a lick up my neck,” Jones later recalled. Assuming that the neighbor’s dog had wandered over, Jones reached backwards to hug the animal—and received the shock of her life. As the Tennessee woman turned around, she spotted a full-grown black bear walking away. Terrified, Jones stumbled backwards into the lake while her visitor lumbered off.

4. ORPHANED CUB BOARDS RAFT.

Early in July 2015, numerous guests and staffers of the USA Raft Company on the Nolichucky River sighted a dangerously skinny bear cub patrolling the river’s banks all by herself. “There was no sign of a mama bear,” general manager Matt Moses told the Knoxville News Sentinel. “She was obviously malnourished and appeared to be in distress. My guides kept coming back to me and saying they had no idea what to do.”

The bear was just as interested in the rafters. With each passing day, the little creature grew more intrepid, walking or swimming closer and closer to passing rafts. After four consecutive days of progress, she finally clambered into the raft of Danny Allen, a veteran guide who delivered the underweight animal to Moses. The Tennessee Wildlife Agency was called in short order, and the cub was given some much-needed medical attention. Once she’d regained some of her former strength, the animal was handed over to Appalachian Bear Rescue, a care facility based in Townsend. By then, her story had gone viral on Facebook, where she received the nickname “Noli Bear” (“Noli” being short for Nolichucky).

5. BEER-GUZZLING BEAR TAKES NAP IN TREE.

Back in 2004, rangers at Washington’s Baker Lake found themselves dealing with a boozy black bear.  The trouble began when this critter opened up several unattended coolers on the campgrounds. As he foraged these campsites, the bear drank his way through the beer cans he came across—or at least some of them, anyway. “He drank the Rainer, but wouldn’t drink the Busch beer,” said resort bookkeeper Lisa Broxson. Reportedly, the ursine thief downed 36 cans of the former beer while deliberately ignoring all but one can of the latter. “

I’ve known them to get into cans,” Sgt. Bill Heinck of Fish and Wildlife told reporters, “but nothing like this… it definitely had a preference.” Noticeably buzzed, the bear didn’t put up much resistance when park rangers arrived to shoo him away. However, instead of leaving, he scaled a nearby tree and took a four-hour nap in its branches. Once the bear woke up, park employees were finally able to scare him off, only to see the big fellow come back for another round the next day. Undaunted, the rangers used donuts, honey, and—of course—two cans of Rainier to lure their bear into a humane trap. Following his apprehension, the four-legged lager enthusiast was successfully relocated.

6. BEAR GETS ITSELF TRAPPED INSIDE CAR.

On the morning of July 28, 2016, David Meurer of Evergreen, Colo. walked down his driveway en route to a church meeting. Along the way, Meurer couldn’t help but notice that the door of his wife’s SUV was slightly ajar. Closer inspection revealed an even bigger surprise: Somehow, a good-sized black bear had crawled into the car overnight. With Meurer watching, the intruder abruptly made its presence known to the whole neighborhood, shaking the vehicle and honking the horn as it thrashed about in the car’s cabin. The racket woke up a neighbor who cracked open the SUV door and then banged on some pans to scare the animal off.

7. CUB CATCHES FORTY WINKS AT PIZZA PARLOR.

Palmer High School in Colorado Springs nearly went into lockdown mode last year when a black bear cub was sighted near the grounds. However, when Blanca Caro, the school’s police resource manager, set out to locate this potentially dangerous animal, she couldn’t turn up anything on campus. So she ventured into the surrounding area.

While walking down Boulder Street, Caro was approached by a perturbed pizzeria employee who told an amazing story. Apparently, the bear had waddled into the eatery through a side door and made a beeline for the prep room. Foregoing the pizza ingredients, this hungry little critter lapped up some cinnamon bread icing before taking a nap on the backroom shelves. An officer from Parks and Wildlife arrived in short order to tranquilize the adorable freeloader. Nicknamed “Little Louie” after the pizza shop he’d invaded, the bear spent four months at the Wet Mountain Wildlife Rehabilitation Center before being released into the wild in January, 2016.

8. LAID-BACK POLAR BEAR PROTESTS PAPARAZZI.

In his 2011 book The Great White Bear, science writer Kieran Mulvaney retells the true story of a polar bear who took umbrage with the flash unit on one very expensive camera. Former marketing director Robert Buchanan helped found the conservation group Polar Bears International in 1992. Now a world-renowned organization, PBI has come to play a big role in expanding our scientific knowledge of the Arctic’s most charismatic predator. As part of this research, its members have captured hundreds of original polar bear photographs over the years. Today, PBI cameramen snag ursine close-ups from the safety of a wooden cage. However, as Buchanan explained to Mulvaney, the process used to be a lot more complicated. “Before we built the cage, we tried to take photographs with a camera that was on the end of a long pole that I’d lower down [from a height],” Buchanan said.

One day, things went awry when the camera’s flash went off right in a bear’s face. Naturally, the animal didn’t appreciate this startling burst of light, but its reaction was rather low-key. Rather than swipe at the camera, the bear calmly extended one arm. Then, with a single outstretched claw, it touched the lip of the camera’s lens. “[He] didn’t try to hit it or anything,” Buchanan recalls, “…he just hooked that claw in there and was not going to let go of that camera.” In vain, the conservationist jerked the pole around, desperately trying to free his camera. But the bear stubbornly clung on, moving its paw in concert with the unit. After fifteen minutes of tug-of-war, Buchanan was about to give up when something remarkable happened. “I’d just written off that camera, and then he looked up at me as if to smile and… took the paw off as if he was saying ‘Just don’t flash me.’”

Buchanan was more than happy to comply. “They’re very smart,” he observed. “They’re just incredibly smart.”

When Hayao Miyazaki announced his retirement (again) following the debut of The Wind Also Rises in 2013, he told the press: “This time I am quite serious.” That proclamation lasted a grand total of three years. As the Anime News Network reports, the 75-year-old Japanese animator is coming out of retirement to complete one last Studio Ghibli film.

Though technically retired, the Spirited Away director has spent the past few years working on exhibits for the Ghibli Museum in Tokyo. One such project, “Kemushi no Boro” or “Boro the Caterpillar,” was born from an idea that’s been knocking around in Miyazaki’s head for two decades. When he developed it into a computer-animated short for the museum, he wasn’t happy with the final product. Now he’s looking to realize that vision as a feature film, an endeavor he hopes to have completed by 2019.

Miyazaki is waiting to receive a green-light from the studio, but that hasn’t stopped him from going ahead with the animation himself. The story, which follows a caterpillar “so tiny that it may be easily squished between your fingers,” will still be made into a short for the museum. The project has a year’s worth of work to go before it’s ready to screen.

Miyazaki has teased his exit from filmmaking several times in the past. After making Princess Mononoke, Japan’s highest-grossing title at the time of its release in 1997, he announced that the film would be his last. We all know how that went: A few years later he returned to animation to direct Spirited Away, the movie that broke that record and earned him an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.

[h/t Anime News Network]