There’s a dead rat outside my door. Ew. I’m hoping a crow will come along and take it away. Or a cat. Or a dog. Or a swat team. Or the National Guard. Or the mayor. Or a wolf. Or a raccoon. Or a bald eagle. Or that neighbor with the very loud voice.
Butterflies and Wheels
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Did the slime pit leave it there? 😉
Yuk. I wish you better luck with that than I had with the dead ringtail possum in a garden on the way to the bus stop.
OTOH, my kids are now way too well-informed about the various stages of decomposition, which eliminated lot of the scariness of zombies, mummies and monsters and interestingly even the idea of people dying one day.
Aha! I bet it did. In fact I bet it’s one of them.
Here… I’ll pick it up for you. Bin or compost?
Bin! You can’t stick big dead rats in the compost. Ew.
Thank you very much indeed. I will go out and get a lemon meringue pie for you.
better a dead rat than a roadkilled skunk on your block. nothing, but nothing, will scavenge a dead skunk — not if its sense of smell is working right, anyway. (had to bike by one for weeks this summer, until time and road traffic reduced it to scraps small enough for the street sweeping machine to pick it up. the stench lasted for a couple days, but the carcass just never got touched, even after human noses couldn’t smell it anymore. this in a small town where we’ve got everything from feral cats to coyotes for scavenging…)
Oh I know, I remember those from my childhood. I grew up in the country, and yes, that happened.
CommonSense #7
Obvious troll is trolling.
The compost comment reminds me that my apartment complex added recycle bins next to our dumpsters about a year ago, and since they were new, and maybe because I’m in Texas, they posted signs to let us know what should go in the recycle bins and what shouldn’t. There in the “not recyclable” list was “dead animals.” I couldn’t imagine a scenario in which this would be under debate…
No problem with putting dead animals in the compost. They decompose nicely adding lots of nutrients. I wouldn’t suggest trying to squeeze a labrador in a backyard 70 litre compost bin but if you bury the rat in the compost you can minimize the smell.
Yes, it stinks for a little while but I live in a densly populated urban area and there’s all sorts of smells. My blind buddy who I only bump into at the bus stop because all buses smell the same and I help her out by waiting with her till her bus arrives, tells me smell is a big factor in knowing where she is and ephemeral smells like dead animals put her off the track.
Farms stink of all sorts of things
If you’re anywhere near New Hampshire, maybe Larry, Darryl and Darryl can help you out.
Maybe one of those homeless people that smell and ruin your day will eat it.
Yesterday, on our walk, my dog (AKA The Dark Poodle of the Apocalypse) discovered a dead rat in the gutter. It was clearly the Best Thing Ever, but somehow I managed to lure her away with a Pea-Nuttier and the promise of belly scritches.
Strange: there’s a dead rat in my (very small courtyard-sized) backyard. It’s been there a few days. I watched a pair of crows have a nice meal on it, but now I really have to do something about it, before the flies do.
When I rule the world, which should be pretty soon as it must by now be quite clear to doG that only I am competent to run things here, my first edict will be to make killing a skunk a hanging offense.
Rats I don’t know; here in rural VA we have lots of creatures but rats do not seem to be in evidence; maybe the coyotes take care of that?
PS: wasn’t the “Stratford” somewhere in Vermont?
See that one @ 12? Classic. That’s the kind of thing we mean when we point out how insane they are, how obsessed, how stalkerish, how tiny-minded, how stupid, how nasty.
I once mentioned – months ago – on Twitter that there had been a particularly pungent guy on the bus and that the smell was still in my head. It was basically just a slightly interesting observation about the way smells can linger well after they’re physically gone. (That is, the smell wasn’t still literally around, but my memory hadn’t caught up to that fact. That is interesting, obviously.)
They pounced on it as evidence that I’m a sneering elitist snob who spits on homeless people, that I had taunted the guy to his face, that his life was ruined while I sat laughing in my palace, blah blah blah. I hadn’t said he was homeless (how would I know?), or said or done anything to him, or said in the tweet what bus it was………..
And here it still is, months later, still being recycled by one of those geniuses – probably hoggle/felch grogan/the other atheist/amet/victor ivanoff.
Pa.thet.ic.
re @12: Good grief!! I didn’t know that back story and just passed it off as a stupid remark from some elitist moron. Come to think of it maybe that’s what it is! What deranged minds some of these must people have!
Also re:@12, I felt the same way – that it was just some weirdo coming and spouting idiocy. Maybe Ophelia should have refrained from explaining the backstory – he made himself look like more of an idiot without the explanation. 🙂
sailor – indeed! (Which makes it all the more creepy to be in their sights. It’s a circle. Their obsession betrays how deranged they are, and their derangement makes them creepy, and their creepy deranged obsession makes them deranged obsessed creeps, and…)
I thought Barf was mixing his hate memes… There was the stinky fella Ophelia mentioned but they also seemed quite keen on criticising Jens dislike of a homeless bloke masturbating in her presence and ruining her day…. Or to be accurate she was expressing resigned indignation that this was to be the start of her day.
I dunno how anyone uses Twitter for any period of time without looking a twit, the medium is open to moments of stupidity. Thank goodness the Slymepit is there to monitor every utterance and remind us of the futility of pursuing perfection.
No, Oolon, you misunderstand. My tweet about the smelly guy and Jen’s tweet about the masturbating homeless guy are the same thing. They are two examples of the same thing, which is that Jen and I are elitist precious whiny arrogant cruel princessy spoiled demanding entitled BITCHEZ.
@ 19 – no. Excuse my humorlessness, but I want to point out their deranged obsessiveness. I want to point out that they monitor our every visible word and move, and attack us on the basis of that monitoring forever. I want to point it out because I am so fucking sick of people who should know better who are still pretending that the real “bullies” and “witch hunters” are here at Freethought blogs.
I am tempted to try to start some kind of Twitter thing involving a casual conflation of hogglerdom and body odour..
#StinkyHaters, or somesuch…
I mean, hell. It’s just so easy. Practically writes itself. Opening salvo: ‘Notice how twitchy they are about this. Can we not work out why?’
Terribly irresponsible of me, I guess. I’ll resist.
I seem to recall you also mentioning someone peeling his feet or somesuch similar grossness on a plane seat adjacent to you, and a suitably hilarious ‘Really, dude?’ I do hope they’ve seized on that, too… If only because I’d like to add it to the meme…
Working tag: #StinkyHatersPeelingTheirFeet…
Seriously, body odour is one of those things, in sufficient concentration, that really does punch you in the gut, in my experience. It’s pretty hard not to react, and depending on the social constraints around you, this presents both comic and problematic challenges. I’m pretty sure I’ve got something somewhere in some Lounge thread about a produce department guy who was making it actually impossible for me to acquire potatoes or something. Hadda go over, do some other stuff on the far side of the store, then gingerly creep back, watching all around, to deal with the produce in question, and y’know, yeah, even in the grocery store with all that ventilation and refrigeration, there was still a definite spoor hanging where he’d been…
It isn’t some horrible classist thing. For all I know, this is just a good, eco-friendly dude who happened to bring his bike to work in the hellish heat of the drought that was on, then, and, probably, the store has no showers. But still, it’s: ow, y’know? If you’re not used to it, it’s a bit of thing, talking the stomach muscles into behaving and not making a huge face.
Cat pee, possibly in an inadequately cleaned box or due to an animal not always hitting the box, and carpets or upholstery still not dealt with as well as it could be, similar deal. Less in the gut, more in the nose, but the social problem is similar. You’re visiting someone, and you’re thinking as you walk in their front door: ‘Okay… I can make a polite excuse, somehow make this a really short visit, or maybe, say, could I pretend this is about a mild cat allergy, dreadfully apologetically request we open a window, and then I sit right next to it?’
And, yeah, noted, on the weird, long-term obsessions. The dynamic is as scary as it is familiar: we have decided we hate this person. We shall make this hatred the centre of mass around which our band of brothers swings. Let’s hope they don’t pass away or retire or anything so inconvenient as all that while we’re still holding meetings, as it may actually be harder to keep swinging around our hatred of their memory.
Yup, Foot Guy. Stuff not to do in public – floss your teeth, search your head for lice…and pick your feet. Foot Guy was on the Charlotte-to-Seattle leg of my return trip from DC in May. That was a looooooooooong flight.
May I please add this to the list of ‘stuff not to do in public’? Telling your friends at full volume and in lurid detail – in a crowded coffee shop – how your husband likes you to do him with a strap-on whilst wearing Marigolds to enhance the reach-around. Honestly. Put me right off my cream eclair.
Free speech? I’d have paid her to shut up.
Lot of riff-raff on airplanes nowadays. I can (barely) remember when flying was still a moderately pleasant way to travel, most of the time…..these days I go by road or I don’t go…..although now I come to think of it my wife did do her toenails somewhere along I81 in PA – fortunately it was in the hilly part so I had to pay lots of attention to the road.
@Ophelia; yeshue – I’m appalled. This is a whole subculture I’ve been fortunate enough to avoid so far…..how long before I piss one of them off, I wonder?
Next time you open your door you’ll find a dead crow.
Then a dead cat. Then dog, swat team, national guard, mayor, wolf, racoon, bald eagle and then your neighbor.
I bury those nasty smelly things in the manure pile. I trapped one in my chicken yard the other night. A big white one. I let the chickens have it.