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May 22, 2013

John Thorne: They launched the 'Arab Spring' but now yearn for the good old days of a strongman

John Rosemond: 'Disciplinary math' adds up to parental successl

Warren Richey: Are prayers before public meetings OK? Supreme Court to decide
Rick Montgomery: Use of ADHD drugs as study aid raises concern on campuses

Brierley Wright, M.S., R.D.: 6 convincing reasons you should keep carbs in your diet

Eoin O'Carroll: Scientists examine nothing, find something

The Kosher Gourmet by Carole Kotkin: This soup is made from one of the great pleasures of spring: A wonderful pairing of rosy color and earthy tang

May 20, 2013

Richard A. Serrano: Is Meir Kahane's assassin now a changed man?

Hannan Adely: Town raises Palestinian flag at City Hall

Melissa Healy: Genetic copies of living people from embryos no longer science fiction
Morgan Housel: When smart investors do stupid things

Sharon Saloman, M.S., R.D.: Hunger games: Eat more, weigh less, without starving

Jewz in the Newz by Nate Bloom : Jews Inducted into Rock Hall of Fame; Anton Yelchin co-stars in New "Trek" film; Kutcher (but not Kunis) visits Israel; Jewish TV Star Praises Jewish Rap Star

The Kosher Gourmet by Cathy Pollak: WARNING: This WALNUT CAKE WITH PRALINE FROSTING, perfect for afternoon coffee, is addicting

May 13, 2013

Rabbi Nathan Lopes Cardozo: Why the giving of the document that would permanently change the world could only be done in desolation

David G. Savage: Church-state, literally? Supreme Court weighing public school graduation in a church

Emily Alpert: Recession dragged down birth rates for less-educated women
Morgan Housel: The deep downside of home ownership

Peter Teffer: Will Dutch police soon be stalking cybercriminals on your computer?

Heidi McIndoo, M.S., R.D.: Meatless 'meat' can have its own set of problems

The Kosher Gourmet by Diane Rossen Worthington: Celebrate! This must-try appetizer is delicate yet has depth of flavor: Corn-Leek Cakes with Caviar, Smoked Salmon and Creme Fraiche

May 10, 2013

Rabbi Berel Wein: Be all that you should be

Caroline B. Glick: The dirty little secret about Israel's Arabs

Mona Charen: Hawking's Moral Calculus: The man and the movement he embraces
Morgan Housel: The biggest retirement myth ever told

Sandi Doughton: Eyes may provide new insight into brain problems

Jewz in the Newz by Nate Bloom : The Great Gatsby's Jewish Ties; Jews in the "Time 100 list" List; People's Most Beautiful Women

The Kosher Gourmet by Linda Gassenheimer: A sweet-hot meal: Pear salsa spices up salmon

May 8, 2013

Peter Ford: Why China is welcoming both Israel's Netanyahu and Palestinians' Abbas

Warren Richey: Obama administration quietly backs out of appeal over new contraceptive mandate

Fred Weir: At Kerry-Putin meeting, US-Russia relations thaw --- a tad
Amanda Paulson: Study reveals sad truths about community colleges

Harvard Health Letters: Evidence weak that zinc, echinacea are beneficial

The Kosher Gourmet by Leela Cyd Ross : Almost too pretty to eat, this colorful salad with Sicilian inspiration will tickle the taste buds and delight your visual sensibility

May 6, 2013

Edmund Sanders and Patrick J. McDonnell: Think Israel's objective in Syria is to weaken Assad or embolden the rebels? Think again

Brian Bennett: Israeli airstrikes may show weakness in Syrian defense

Michael Ollove: Millions of ex-felons, parolees and those on probation are about to be entitled to tax-payer paid health coverage
Karen Kaplan: Most men can skip PSA test for prostate cancer, urologists say

Kimberly Lankford: How to track down a lost life insurance policy

Dream of Mars exploration achievable, experts say

The Kosher Gourmet by Susan M. Selasky: EGGPLANT WRAPS are an easy, sumptuous and scrumptious meal

May 3, 2013

Rabbi Nathan Lopes Cardozo: Human Courage and the Unavoidable, Disturbing Text

Steven Emerson: Attorney General Fights CAIR in Court, Lauds it in Public

Mediterranean diet helps beat dementia: study
Harvard Health Letters: When to be screened for a hearing problem

Jewz in the Newz by Nate Bloom : Iron Man's Jewish Connections; Marc Maron's New TV Show; Martin Landau Grows Up with Israel; Shalom, Allan Arbus

The Kosher Gourmet by Diane Rossen Worthington: A sweet surprise for Mother's Day dessert

May 1, 2013

Jonathan Rosenblum: An Improbable Journey to Orthodoxy

Jonathan Tobin: Blame Obama, Not Israel for Syria Push

Kids, kittens the Same? With employee perks at struggling Internet pioneer Yahoo! it's hard to tell
Halena M. Gazelka, M.D.: Mayo Clinic Medical Edge: What you need to know about implanted pain relief devices

Sandy Kleffman: Artificial kidney offers hope to patients tethered to a dialysis machine

Jessica Shugart: When it comes to math, MRIs may be better than IQs

The Kosher Gourmet by Mario Batali: The celebrated chef on how high-maintenance ASPARAGUS RISOTTO need not be

April 29, 2013

Roy Gutman: Poland's new Jewish museum celebrates life, doesn't revisit Holocaust

Mark Clayton: Terrorism in America: Is US missing a chance to learn from failed plots?

Kim Murphy: Boston Bomber's 'Svengali' Revealed
Morgan Housel: He's rich, smart and old: Listen to him

Thomas Salinas, D.D.S.: Mayo Clinic Medical Edge: The safety of amalgam fillings

Harvard Health Letters: Tomatoes and stroke protection

Pete Spotts: Tiny satellites + cellphones = cheaper 'eyes in the sky' for NASA

The Kosher Gourmet by Diane Rossen Worthington: Swing into spring with lemon cream pie

April 26, 2013

Rabbi Abraham J. Twerski: The world is a mirror

Caroline B. Glick: Time to confront Obama

Clifford D. May: Defense in the Age of Jihadist Terrorism
Kimberly Lankford: New strategies ease pain of paying for long-term care insurance

Howard LeWine, M.D.: Ask the Harvard Experts: Too much ibuprofen?

Sharon Palmer, R.D.: How to feel your best -- with plenty of energy, a healthy weight and optimal mental and physical function -- without driving yourself batty

Jewz in the Newz by Nate Bloom: Jewish Major Leaguers, 2013; New Movies and Comedy Show; Shalom, 'Lumpy' (Leave it to Beaver)

The Kosher Gourmet by Emily Ho : A bright and cheerful salad to herald the warmer months ahead

April 24, 2013

Steven Emerson: Boston Bomber Exposes Islamist Secret

Morgan Housel Admit it: No one has any idea what's going on
Harvard Health Letters: Can you get headaches from headache medication?

Kerri-Ann Jennings, M.S., R.D.: How to easily get more Omega-3s in your diet

Melissa Healy: Pot in a pill: All the pain relief without the smoke

The Kosher Gourmet by Susan Russo: Chipotle Chili Butternut Squash Soup is bold, zesty, hot

April 22, 2013

Ken Dilanian: Counterterrorism's future is unclear

US man departing country arrested on terror charges
Barbara Williams: An unorthodox but growing treatment in a 9-year-old's battle against cancer

P.J. Skerrett, M.D.: How to recognize a good whole grain product

Jewz in the Newz by Nate Bloom: Teen actor Jonah Bobo in New Flick: Hunky James Wolk on Mad Men; Erich Segal's Daughter Writes Prize-Winning Jewish Novel


Jewish World Review March 18, 2008 / 11 Adar II 5768

Technological warfare against mice won't work. Try cats

By Paul Johnson


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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | Ralph Waldo Emerson is quoted as saying: 'If a man write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mousetrap than his neighbour, tho' he build his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door.' I don't know about the first two commodities. There are too many authors churning out words, and who cares for a sermon these days, let alone the preacher? But mousetraps that work, that actually catch mice! Now you're talking, Waldo! I hear nothing, these days, but complaints about mice. What's the word? Infestation? Epiphytic? Zymosis? Pandemia? There has been nothing like it since 10th- and 11th-century Germany, the time of the Pied Piper, when mice were directed to 'get' objectionable people, like the Rhine-pirate Freiherr von Göttingen, Archbishop Hatto, the robber-baron Count Graaf, Bishop Adolf of Cologne and Bishop Widerolf of Strasbourg — all without exception eaten by armies of mice down to their whited bones. Rhineland mice had a contemptuous saying, 'As common as prelate-meat.'


Mice can begin to mate at seven weeks, and reproduce throughout the year, with an average of 5.5 litters and 31 young per female per year in buildings and 57 in farms. Some mice are very small — adults only three inches long including tail and weighing less than half an ounce. Hence Shakespeare often uses 'mouse' as a synonym for tiny, as in the Dover Cliffs speech in Lear, 'The fishermen that walked upon the beach/Appear like mice.' But their numbers make them formidable. Mice population explosions in the Central Valley of California in 1926 and 1941 produced up to 80,000 an acre. The fact that the first was caused by unusual heat and the second by unusual cold cast doubt on claims by the Greens that the present outbreak is (of course) the result of global warming. France between 1790 and 1935 had 20 mouse plagues.


Rodents like the same food as humans and each can easily consume its body weight in a week. They played a major role in destroying the Soviet Union by consuming over 40 per cent of all food produced by a system which took months to get food from the producing to consuming areas — the greatest, perhaps the only, beneficiary of Marxism was the rat. I suspect that research would show a marked correlation in a modern society between the number of bureaucrats and rodents. In a decade of New Labour, a million desk-officials have been added, and the current mouse afflatus is one of the consequences.


People, especially women, often scream at the sight of a mouse and can't abide going into a room where they think a mouse may be. But, until the 19th century, 'mouse' was a term of affection used by men for wives and girlfriends. Edward III called Queen Philippa his mouse. Henry VIII thus addressed both Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard, before he put them in the Tower mousetrap. Hamlet's father-in-law called Queen Gertrude his mouse, as the Prince remarks just before he stabs old Polonius to death through the arras. Indeed, in the decade in which the play was written, the term was common among lovers, thus the lines from Albion's England: 'G-d bless the Mouse, the Bridegroom sayd/And smakt her on the lips.'


Mice were out of amorous fashion in the rational 18th century, but came back thanks to Beatrix Potter. Her patronage of mice had its effect on Walt Disney, who studied her work, and then picked Mickey Mouse as his super-hero. One of his motives, however, was that a cartoon mouse was reducible to a series of circles, which made it easy to draw rapidly at a time when all images in a movie cartoon were hand-drawn. Disney employed more than 2,000 artists in his studio (more than all the studios in Florence throughout the Renaissance, 1450-1525). His first feature-length movie, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1936-37), required over three million drawings to make. So the Mickey circle-mouse was an efficiency symbol. He was also more popular than any other film star in history, receiving over 600,000 fan letters in 1935, the largest number ever recorded in Hollywood, or anywhere else. Now people may look down their noses at Mickey Mouse, a name which indeed has acquired all kinds of opprobrious verbal overtones, but if you take the trouble to look again at the first Disney talkie, Steamboat Willie, made in 1928, the year I was born, you will see that this form of tuneful animation was one of the few and rare genuine revolutions in the long history of art, a new kind of art indeed. Mickey Mouse made his specific appearance then and was at the heart of this new form of human aesthetic ingenuity. Three quarters of a century later, it has proliferated into countless forms of animation and graphic anthropomorphisms all over the world, to the harmless delight of our much-battered humanity. It was one of the few good novelties of the cruellest and most destructive century — and it all came from a mouse.


That such a small and pitiful creature should help to cheer us up will have been no surprise to the poets, who have made much creative use of the mouse in all ages. Horace and Virgil liked mice. Shakespeare picked on them to make points more than he did on any other animal. Shelley was keen, too, and Chaucer has one crop up constantly, especially in the Wife of Bath's Prologue of the Canterbury Tales, where he reflects the mediaeval notion that mice like liquor ('Thou comest hoom as drunken as a mous') and are faithless ('I holde a Mouses herte nat worth a leek'). Only Burns devoted an entire poem to a mouse, but it is one of the best ever written and contains an observation of bitter truth, 'The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men/Gang aft agley.'


The word 'mouse' can mean many things, especially in English, German and Chinese — a black eye, a beggar, a precision instrument, a birthmark, a form of poison, a lock, a computer control, and several kinds of nautical knots and rigging; and the term is used in geology, botany, surgery, fishing, engineering, optics, butchery, hawking and medicine. All the same, mice, whether scamperers, burrowers, ricochetals or all three, are always on the brink of getting out of control. They can live anywhere and adapt themselves perfectly to life in the minute crevices of human societies. They are our doppelgängers. Rodents form half of all mammals and keep pace with the population explosion — ten billion of them. Mice are difficult to keep under. Their only effective enemy is the cat, as Chaucer noted 600 years ago in the Manciple's Tale, because cats hate mice and love to eat them:


Lat take a cat, and fostre hym wel with milk
And tendre flesh, and make his couche of silk,
And lat hym seen a mous go by the wal,
Anon he weyveth milk and flesh and al,
And every deyntee that is in that hous,
Swich appetite he hath to ete a mous.


A fierce cat has taken to haunting the purlieus of my house in Notting Hill. He is reddish brown with a touch of heliotrope and his eyes flash lethal fire. He originally came to kill birds, especially the family of robins which are my joy, but he has now obviously constituted himself mouser to the Johnson establishment. And very successful he is. We are now mouse-free.

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Previously:

03/03/08: What is a genius? We use the word frequently but surely, to guard its meaning, we should bestow it seldom
03/03/08: Fiction as a crutch to get one through life
02/26/08: Impatience + Greed = Trouble
02/13/08: Shakespeare, Neo-Platonism and Princess Diana
02/07/08: Where Industry Has Failed Us
12/19/07: People who put their trust in human power delude themselves
12/12/07: What is aggression?
12/04/07: Pursuing success is not enough
11/07/07: Are famous writers accident-prone?
10/31/07: Courage needed to disarm Iran
09/20/07: Who Will Say ‘I Promise to Lay Off’?
07/24/07: Greed is safer than power-seeking
04/02/07: Benefactors must be hardheaded
03/07/07: American idealism and realpolitik
11/28/06: Space: Our ticket to survival
10/24/06: Envy is bad economics
10/11/06: Better to Borrow or Lend? Rethinking conventional wisdom
08/22/06: Don't practice legal terrorism
08/08/06: A summer rhapsody for a pedal-bike
08/03/06: Why is there no workable philosophy of music?
07/11/06: Historically speaking, energy crisis is America's opportunity
07/06/06: The misleading dimensions of persons and lives
06/06/06: First editions are not gold
05/23/06: A downright ugly man need never despair of attracting women, even pretty ones
04/25/06: Was Washington right about political parties?
04/12/06: Let's Have More Babies!
04/05/06: For the love of trains
03/29/06: Lincoln and the Compensation Culture
03/22/06: Bottle-beauties and the globalised blond beast
03/15/06: Europe's utopian hangover
03/08/06: Kindly write on only one side of the paper
02/28/06: Creators versus critics
02/21/06: The Rhino Principle

© 2006, Paul Johnson

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