Mouse Burns Down House

[hm0504]

"A US man who threw a mouse onto a pile of burning leaves could only watch in horror as it ran into his house and set the building ablaze....":
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4593682.stm

[hm0504]

"A US man who threw a mouse onto a pile of burning leaves could only watch in horror as it ran into his house and set the building ablaze....":
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4593682.stm

[luvnaturism]

I heard this before and it's an interesting story. But I did wonder if it was true, so I checked it out.

http://www.snopes.com/media/notnews/mousefire.asp

Apparently the homeowner involved told two different stories to the press. In one of them the mouse was alive and ran into the house. In the other the mouse was dead when tossed on the fire, and the house fire started from burning embers.

We'll probably never know, but I'm voting for the second version. It's hard to imagine that burning fur on a mouse could start the house on fire, but easy to imagine that some embers from his house blew onto the roof. Cedar shake or shingle roofs ignite easily.

[Ken Palmer]

I too remember this story vividly. If this was indeed a true story, I had a hard time finding sympathy for the homeowner. That was a cruel thing to do to a small harmless rodent. All he had to do was simply toss it outside and it probably would have been glad to stay there. It looks like the mouse got a measure of revenge on his way out!

Ken Palmer

quote:

Originally posted by hm0504:
"A US man who threw a mouse onto a pile of burning leaves could only watch in horror as it ran into his house and set the building ablaze....":
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4593682.stm

[NakedGary]

This little grass snake cause a whole bunch of trouble!

NEVER BRING PLANTS INTO THE HOUSE !!!

Grass Snakes also known as Garter Snakes (Thamnophissirtalis) can
be
dangerous. Yes, grass snakes, not rattlesnakes.
Here's why. A couple in Sweetwater, Texas , had a lot of potted
plants. During a recent cold spell, the wife was bringing a lot of
them indoors top protect them from a possible freeze.
It turned out that a little green garden grass snake was hidden in
one of the plants and when it had warmed up, it slithered out and
the wife saw it go under the sofa. She let out a very loud scream. The
husband (who was taking a shower) ran out into the living room naked to see what the problem was. She told him there was a snake under the sofa. He got down on the floor on his hands and knees to look for it. About that time
the family dog came and cold-nosed him on the behind. He thought the
snake had bitten him, so he screamed and fell over on the floor. His wife
thought he had a heart attack, so she covered him up, told him to lie still
and called an ambulance. The attendants rushed in, wouldn't listen to
his protests and loaded him on the stretcher and started carrying him
out.

About that time the snake came out from under the sofa and the
EmergencyMedical Technician saw it and dropped his end of the
stretcher. That's when the man broke his leg and why he is still
in the hospital.
The wife still had the problem of the snake in the house, so she
called on a neighbor man. He volunteered to capture the snake. He
armed himself with a rolled-up newspaper and began poking under the
couch. Soon he decided it was gone and told the woman, who sat down on the sofa in relief. But while relaxing, her hand dangled in between the cushions, where she felt the snake wriggling around. She screamed and
fainted, the snake rushed back under the sofa. The neighbor man, seeing her
lying there passed out, tried to use CPR to revive her. The neighbor's wife,
who had just returned from shopping at the grocery store, saw her
husband's mouth on the woman's mouth and slammed her husband in the back of the head with a bag of canned goods, knocking him out and cutting his scalp to a point where it needed stitches.
The noise woke the woman from her faint and she saw her neighbor
lying on
the floor with his wife bending over him, so she assumed that he
had been bitten by the snake. She went to the kitchen and got a small
bottle of whiskey, and began pouring it down the man's throat. By now the
police had arrived. They saw the unconscious man, smelled the whiskey,
and assumed that a drunken fight had occurred. They were about to
arrest them all, when the women tried to explain how it all happened over
a little green snake. The police called an ambulance, which took
away the neighbor and his sobbing wife. The little snake again crawled out
from under the sofa. One of the policemen drew his gun and fired at it.
He missed the snake and hit the leg of the end table. The table fell
over and the lamp on it shattered and as the bulb broke it started a fire
in the drapes. The other policeman tried to beat out the flames, and fell
through the window into the yard on top of the family dog who, startled, jumped out and raced into the street, where an oncoming car swerved to avoid it and smashed into the parked police car.

Meanwhile, the burning drapes, were seen by the neighbors who
called the fire department. The firemen had started raising the
fire truck ladder when they were halfway down the streetThe rising
ladder tore out the overhead wires and put out the electricity and
disconnected the telephones in a ten-square city block area (but
they did get the house fire out).

Time passed! Both men were discharged from the hospital, the house
was repaired, the dog came home, the police acquired a new car, and
all was right with their world.

A while later they were watching TV and the weatherman announced a
cold snap for that night. The wife asked her husband if he thought they
should bring in their plants for the night.



That's when he shot her.



SEE YA!

[luvnaturism]

Gary, that's an oldie--but it's still fun to read.