How to Find a Dead Rat & other tips.

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More tips from a Bygone Era.

1.HOW TO SAVE COAL.

A good handful of washing soda dissolved in half a bucket of warm water & thrown over 120lbs of coal & allowed to dry,will make the coal last half as long again.

2.HOW TO GET MORE LIGHT FROM YOUR CANDLE

a)Use mirrors to reflect as much light as possible.

b)Fill up a large glass jam jar or two with water & place in front of your candle.The candle should be a maximum of 2/3 rds the height of the jar to give a good effect.The water-filled jam jars act as a series of lens & magnifies the light.(This works,it is an old tip from a lacemaker)

3.HOW TO PLUCK A FOWL EASILY. Pluck it very fresh having immersed in very hot water for a short period beforehand.(All except game birds that should be hung)

4.JAM POT COVERS Plain white paper dipped into milk & pressed down make good covers as they dry like parchment.

5.TO BANISH COCKROACHES Sprinkle ground rice around their haunts.They eat greedily & it swells inside them & they die.(presumably by explosion!)

6.TO KEEP WINDOWS FROM STEAMING UP.After cleaning them then apply a soft clean rag moistened with a small amount of glycerine.This will also free windows from frost.

AND FINALLY HOW TO DISCOVER A DEAD RAT. To locate a dead rat in a room catch 6 blue bottle flies(meat flies)& slip them into a jam jar.Let the flies out in the room where you suspect the rat is and sit down whilst they buzz around.Within an hour they will have scented the rat & be buzzing round one spot.That is where your rat is.You need only take up one floorboard.(This cracked me up!)

-- Chris (griffen@globalnet.co.uk), March 23, 1999

Answers

PS.I should have added that British rats(the four legged variety that is)love chewing on plastic and soap.So you need to watch out for all those plastic storage bins kept outside.

-- Chris (griffen@globalnet.co.uk), March 23, 1999.

Another great post, Chris. Don't know about the cockroaches and ground rice, though. The New Orleans cockroaches eat tons of rice and just get bigger. Avoiding squishing them on a twilit sidewalk in sultry August is difficult--not that you're concerned about their health, they're so big the squishy stuff is hell to get off your shoes.

Did a bit of a study on roaches once. Found out the large flying variety is called Bombay canary in India. Can you just see it? British officer type, sitting on the verandah with the memsahib, sipping a G&T. Dark shape buzzes by, and plummy tones are heard: "I say, lookout, old gel, there goes another Bombay canary!"

-- Old Git (anon@spamproblems.com), March 23, 1999.


Old Git,

In Florida they call the roaches Palmetto Bugs. When I told an acquaintance that, he asked, "What do they call the mosquitoes -- Birds of Paradise?"

-- Don (whytocay@hotmail.com), March 23, 1999.


Chris:

I appreciated your tips, especially regarding increasing candle power.

I wonder if the rat catching scheme would work in the cold Winter. I haven't seen any flies in months, so maybe I should lay out rice for the rat to let it survive until a new batch of flies hatches in the Spring, in which case I can then substitute poisoned rice, and, well, this is getting too silly...

-- dinosaur (dinosaur@williams-net.com), March 23, 1999.


To kill cockroaches, just use a mortr bomb. It is much easier.

-- jerry (jjj@Jjj.jjj), March 24, 1999.


Another rat and mouse killer is supposed to be: mix flour and cement powder 50:50. Put it down as bait. The animals eat, fill up. Cement hardens and they die of terminal constipation. No, I am not joking, but I admit I have't tried it -- on myself or any pests. It might work on cockroaches, too. In Oz, we call then "cockies", but that is also a term of endearment for Aussie farmers, but in their case it is "cocky" or "cockys" as in our giant Cockatoo parrots. Don't ask me why, tho.

-- David Harvey (vk2dmh@hotmail.com), March 24, 1999.

Thanks, all of you. I need a good laugh once in a while, amidst all this gloom & doom. Plus, who knows, some of these ideas might actually work.

-- chuckling (in@the.office), March 24, 1999.

hey gang-I can personally vouch for tip #3, how to pluck a fowl easily. Dipping them in boiling water loosens the feathers. The down side is that wet chicken feathers stick to your hands and stink worse than sewage. Getting 'back to nature' is not as romantic as some think. your chicken-pluckin' friend, Linda

-- newbiebutnodummy (Linda@home.com), March 24, 1999.

When do you kill the chicken? Before or after immersing it in the boling water? (Seems like it might complain less if it were well-marinated before immersing in boiling water.)

But you're forgetting that boiling water could be in short supply if the troubles last a long time. Couldn't I save time, trouble, and the heat to boil the water (and the water itself) by eliminating a few apparently redundant steps from the procedure? See, it appears I could start the water heating in the pot first, then remove the excess (non-edible) parts from the chicken first while the water is heating up, then immerse the chicken in the water to remove the feathers and drown it at the same time, then let the chicken stay in the water and cook while the feathers float to the top and can be easily skimmed off.

Two ingredients - chicken and water - one pot, no problem. I mean, sure, the chicken might complain a little, but really, that's to be expected.

-- Robert A Cook, PE (Kennesaw, GA) (cook.r@csaatl.com), March 26, 1999.


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