Three Hurt In School Squirreling

May 10, 2007. San Jose, California

"A child and two adults were hurt when a squirrel went nuts and attacked them after wandering into a San Jose elementary school classroom."

'Went nuts' -- get it? Ha ha ha, that's really funny ... NOT. I'll tell you what's funny: they tried to use humane traps to catch the little varmint. Mofo draws blood, and they're worried about hurting it?

Poor, Poor Pitiful Me

... these young squirrels won't let me be
Lord have mercy on me
whoah, woe is me

Well, I heard a squirrel in my garage
I ain't naming names
She really worked me over good
She was just like Jesse James
She really worked me over good
She was a real trap burglar
She went through all my crackers, Lord
and ate up my peanut butter

Closer To Home

October 10, 2008. Westminster, Colorado.

Apparently a squirrel has decided to take up residence in our attic. We hear it scurrying around in the mornings. At first I thought it was running across the roof; then I took a look up there and saw it half hanging out of one of our attic vents.

Now we like to think we're generous with our hospitality, but if you don't use the facilities, and your species has a predilection towards gnawing on electrical wires, and you don't pay rent, you can't stay with us.

I set a trap yesterday; apparently Home Depot sells them. (Who knew?) Well, the little mofo came down, swiped the crackers and peanut butter, triggered the trap and got away. Today it grabbed the bait again, this time without even triggering the trap. I guess I'll have to be persistent.

Squirrel Power Outages

It's worse than we thought.

"In Georgia, squirrel-related outages more than tripled from 5,273 in 2005 to 16,750 in 2006."

Not only are those numbers shocking (so to speak), but the rate of increase is ominous.

Of special note: "Hundreds of gallons of raw sewage poured into Mobile Bay in Alabama after a squirrel cut power to a sewage lift station there."

That must have been one nasty squirrel.

Getting back to the numbers -- isn't it interesting that Georgia Power knows the exact number of squirrel-related outages? So obviously that information must be going into a database somewhere.

$ select count(*) from INCIDENTS where YEAR=2005 and ANIMAL='squirrel'
$ 5273

If that's the case, I would love someone to run this query:

$ select distinct ANIMAL from INCIDENTS

Squirrel Causes Blackout

Lafayette, Colorado; June 12, 2008

Squirrel breaks into a fuse box, knocking out power to sixty homes and shutting off the traffic lights at Arapahoe and US 287. Not sure, but I'm assuming the intent was to cause an accident. Or maybe that was a diversion while other squirrels raised some mayhem in one of those sixty homes.

Curious wording in the article:

"The outage was caused by a squirrel that got into a fuse box, and lasted from 6:48 a.m. until 8:24 a.m."

The squirrel lasted from 6:48 until 8:24? I took that to mean that the squirrel got fried at 8:24, but Brodi envisioned a police standoff with the squirrel holding out until then, dodging bullets and yelling at the coppers to come and get him. We need clarification.