Of Mice and Zen

My wife has inadvertently confirmed that we share our house not only with two cats but also with an unknown quantity of mice who are apparently having a fine time.

“Isn’t it the cats’ job to address that?” you might ask. But at their age, they’re basically retired.

So we've begun to look into professional services. We've found businesses offering promises of eradication for various costs (none cheap) by assorted means, chief among them traps and bait.

For “bait,” read “poison.” One business - - the most expensive, as it turns out -- spurns that chemical approach, which it says creates the potential for walls filled with decomposing rodents.

But among the “traps” that eco-friendly exterminator employs is something known as a glue board, which offers the potential for slow starvation. Not exactly the kind of entry we want included on our karmic permanent record.

Nonprofessional advice has included setting our own conventional, spring-loaded traps. Supposed advantage: a quick, merciful demise. Obvious disadvantage: need for mouse carcass disposal.

Other advice is for a live trap. Advantage: clean karmic record. Obvious disadvantage: need for live mouse disposal.

But we have no more inclination for the de-mousing job than our cats do.

Instead of any of this, we would like to hire a guy to come along with some sort of hypnotic flute and lure our small visitors to a sylvan wood where they could live out their days in harmony with nature.

Applications accepted.

Where'd You Get That?

I don’t understand why so many people wear clothes that advertise the store they bought them from. Then again, they may not understand why I would wear a hat that advertises my choice in beer.

I believe that some sort of balancing force of the universe makes you take on the qualities you criticize in others. So I have decided to start criticizing people for their good looks.

A problem with listening to golden oldies radio stations is that after all the Beatles and Kinks and Dave Clark Five and Otis Redding and Simon & Garfunkel and such sooner or later you’re going to hear “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.”

Overheard wisdom from unseen philosopher in Penn Station men’s room: “EVERYbody has a song he can sing better than anybody else. EVERYbody has a song he can sing better than anybody else. EVERYbody...”
Overheard response from unseen critic: “Shut the FUCK up!”

Current favorite movie line:
“Sometimes the things that may or may not be true are the things a man needs to believe in the most.” Robert Duvall, “Secondhand Lions.”
Previous favorite:
“To the tables everyone, and stuff yourselves!” from “The Adventures of Robin Hood” (but not spoken by Errol Flynn)

Between Keats and Yeats I sometimes forget which to rhyme with Bates.

I don’t think my ego is looking out for my best interests.

I pretty much need a blood relationship not to find a talkative child annoying.

Disaster, Circa 1965

I was reading a New Yorker article about whether our brains are wired for mathematics (apparently, yes) when I came across a reference to “new math,” followed by the apposition “now widely thought to have been an educational disaster.”

I flashed back. I was a participant in this educational disaster, in the seventh grade.

I remember learning about number systems other than our so-called base 10, like base 2. We learned about set theory, including the empty (or null) set, and Venn diagrams, which could describe the overlapping (or intersection) of sets, and functions and properties and ...

I could go on, but I sense that you are falling asleep.

So imagine having that kind of stuff rattling around in your head at age 12, with the unspoken but clear implication from the teacher that if we Americans don’t all get this and get it pronto, the Russians are going to beat us to the moon.

The Russians, as you are aware, did not beat us to the moon.

But apparently the new math played no role in our success. And as well as I can remember, it was not in the curriculum beyond that one year.

Still, parts of it continue to rattle around in my head, though much closer to the back. For instance, this is how you would express my age in base 2: 110111. Base 3? 2001. Base 4? 313. While both addition and multiplication have commutative and associative properties, subtraction and division do not. And do you know what is the set of numbers overlapping two sets of prime factors, the first for 42, the second for 79?

Ha! This is a trick question! 79 is a prime number! There is no overlap (expressed by the null set, alternately {}, or the Greek letter ∅).

I could go on. But I’m falling asleep.