Dead trucks and super mice

It’s been one of those weeks you know? The kind of week that makes you just want to stand on street corners and yell “Buggrit! Millennium shrimp and fish!” (Okay, maybe not you but allow me my eccentricities.) It all got started last weekend when I burned out the engine in my truck. I was hauling all the gear down to a fencing tournament of course and I knew something was not right. The engine had a strange sound going and I was getting a bad feeling. It didn’t help that the low fuel and the battery light had come on. (since I had just put 10 gallons in the tank I knew there wasn’t low fuel so something else had to be screwy) When I pulled off the Interstate, boom, the engine shut off and wouldn’t restart when I tried the time tested method of taking it out of gear and then putting it back in. Much like push starting but at 50 mph. No go. When I came to a stop smoke/steam began boiling out from under the hood, the exhaust pipe, the vents, pretty much every where. We pushed it around a corner and began to transfer all the gear to another vehicle. Then we left the smoking corpse parked on the street in front of some houses in a not quite unsavory neighbor hood in downtown Savannah. I figured there were pretty good odds that I’d never see it again. Needless to say we were late for the tournament which slowed everything down because we were hauling the scoring equipment. Oh well. I actually fenced well enough at that event that one of the younger fellows suggested I burn a truck again before a major event. “Sacrifice pays off!” he said. Heh. Eventually after a few adventures we go the dead thing back home. (Including one meeting with a VERY nice police officer who did not ticket us or throw us off the road for pulling the truck at night on a trailer with no lights or license plate.) It is now at a shop and I am awaiting the word on how much it will cost to resurrect the old beast. Since it is a 1990 Isuzu with almost 300K miles on it I can’t complain too much. If it costs too much I have already seen a couple of replacement options. A motorcycle has been suggested but it is hard to schlep fencing gear, lawn mowers, firewood etc around on one so I need something a bit better. Something that can at least haul a trailer. There is a truck of the same make as mine with “only” 197K miles on it for sale near by that is an option. There is also a mid eighties Saab that needs a new transmission available. This is a possibility only because I happen to have a mid eighties Saab that has a good transmission but a bad engine sitting in my yard at the moment. That would be some work but might be doable. We shall see…

Now all of that Drama aside, I saw something Friday that just amused me. At Case Western University they have bred SUPERMICE. Really. Genetically engineered super mice. They are larger than normal mice(the first report on BBC I read said larger, the one linked says they are actually smaller YMWV), they are faster and stronger than normal mice. (They can run on a treadmill for almost 5 kilometers at a speed of 20 meters per minute. Not fast by our standards but this is a mouse!) They can also reproduce longer than normal mice. i.e. bear litters of new supermice when they are three years old which is like being in one’s eighties for humans)

Now here is where I begin to differ from many right thinking people. Because the thought of these little buggers escaping tickles me. And they will escape, they are mice. Mice always get out of the cage. Hell, they probably already have escaped. I know, I know, I should be shocked and horrified at the idea of genetically engineered rodents running wild but I’m not. Heck, maybe the supermice will get us before the zombies do…

Anyone read The Rats of NIMH