I have been hunting mice lately, or rather, I have been catching mice with a trap lately. We purchased, several months ago, a TomCat-Live-Catch-Mouse-Trap. I rarely shill products on my blog, but let me tell you, this is a great invention. It does not kill the mice, so there is no gore to clean afterwards. No poison is needed, and no children can smash their fingers in the trap. It is a long tube balanced on a fulcrum. The mouse enters to tube to get the bait, the tube teeters to one side and the trap door shuts.

The only bad part of the trap is that it does not kill the mouse. You must either free the foul beast or dispose of it yourself.

The first mouse we caught was weeks ago. He had been coming onto the kitchen counter, scratching and gnawing the fruit. It was as if Jill got up in the middle of the night and took a bite out of each of the bananas and then ran a fine toothed comb across the peels. Jill denied doing this, so we got the Tomcat mousetrap.

After we caught the first mouse, we were having some kind of party, so I didn't get a chance to deal with it right away. He sat in the trap for over a day. Finally, I had a plan to deal with the live-trapped mouse.

I brought the trap upstairs to the bathroom and held it open over the yawning mouth of the toilet. First the mouse's thin, black, spaghetti tail whipped around the outside of the trap, and then (all the while scrabbling) he slid into the toilet. I held the plunger over his head while flushing the toilet and he was gone. Afterward, my heart thumping wildly, I urinated (also into the toilet) and flushed one more time for good measure.

The trap smelled terribly and had mouse shit in it so I had to wash it out.

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The second mouse trapping went much as the first, only the second mouse preferred graham crackers and Rolos.

The second mouse also had the gall to cling to the inside of the plunger while I was trying to flush him away.

I got the 2nd mouse almost right after he got into the trap, so he didn't have enough time even to finish the bait, let alone stink up the trap with his shit. I still rinsed out the trap, though. Now it is clean for its next use.

Please forgive me as I deviate from the standard spiel about taking the train to school and what my kids are doing and belabor you with politics and policies. I've been thinking about the health care system (or lack thereof) in America lately, and, though no one but my friends will read this, will write briefly about it.

I want to begin by pointing out that the corporations that sell health insurance have the sweetest plum in the health care business. Who gets sick? The people who usually get sick are the young (insured by SCHIP - a government program), the old (insured by Medicare - a government program), and the poor (insured by Medicaid - a government program). Furthermore, if you happen to get so sick that you can't work, and you lose your job, you lose your insurance and the government has to pick up the tab. See a pattern here? If it's not profitable to sell you insurance, because you might get sick, the government has to provide for you.

Many people are afraid of 'the government' telling them what kind of health care they can access. "I don't want some bureaucrat in Washington...." Instead, what people have are the actuaries in the insurance companies authorizing and denying access to care. If you happen to want a really expensive procedure that might save your life, you better check the spreadsheet first.

The term 'Health Insurance' is a misnomer anyway. People with health insurance aren't insured against catastrophic medical costs. In fact, if you have catastrophic medical costs, it's in the corporations best interest to make sure you bear as much of those costs as possible. The corporations that are good at sticking you with the bill grow and thrive, those corporations that aren't get bought out.

Given the epidemic of under-insured people, and the obvious lack of insurance provided by the insurance corporations, we need to change the nomenclature. We should begin calling these corporations Health Care Distribution Companies.

Because that's what they are. You can get the procedures, visits with specialists, and medicine that your Health Care Distribution Company authorizes.

Last night I rode my excercycle in the basement, while doing laundry, while the robot was washing the kitchen floor, and at the same time I was watching a recorded lecture. I felt productive.

Today I went out for lunch and got myself a falafel sandwich from Maoz.