|
|
|
|
|
| Urban Warfare
Posted: 7/14/2009 10:20:34 AM | | Get some old rags about a dozen of em. Soak in straight ammonia, then hang them up in areas were the little coons hang out not inside your home but near by the entrence..Not too close to your pets food or water dishes but near by same with plants..This works for several weeks they come back do it again..The Santa Barbara Animal Police told me this and it works very well.. | |
|
| Urban Warfare
Posted: 7/14/2009 12:56:26 PM | Dave, I remember that story. It was required reading in Year One at the Academy. I still keep a copy as a reference when plotting strategy. As far as I am concerned, the lessons we learned in studying your victories were the single most relevant thing I learned at my whole stint at Coon School, as we called the Royal Academy of Rodent Warfare back then.
Cheers to a fellow backyard vet.
 | |
|
| Spleen of Darkness
Posted: 7/14/2009 1:35:26 PM | Living room, shit. I'm still only in the living room. Every time I think I'm going to wake up back in the yard. After my first tour, it was worse. I'd wake up and there'd be nothing... I hardly said a word to my wife until I said yes to some question I hadn't even heard. When I was here I wanted to be upstairs. When I was upstairs, all I could think of was getting back into the yard. I've been here an hour now. Waiting for a mission, getting softer. Every minute I stay in this room I get weaker. And every minute Rocky waddles along the fence he gets stronger. Everyone gets everything he wants.
I wanted a rodent run, and for my sins they gave me one. Brought it up to me like broom service.
(With apologies, thanks and compliments to John Milius and Francis Coppola) | |
|
| Spleen of Darkness
Posted: 7/14/2009 3:18:19 PM | Stay still, old man. Stay perfectly god-damned still. Not a breath, not a shiver. Don't let the masked bastard see the cloud of your exhalation - it's so god-damned cold in this mud you can't feel your leg; or, what's left of it.
The raccoon ambles unsteadily across a segment of tank tread splayed open flat across the blasted field of battle. Here, an armoured vehicle shed it before coming to a stop some two hundred yards away, its hull peeled open by tiny furry claws.
It's coming this way. The son of a bitch doesn't see you yet. Stay still, old man. They got the rest of your platoon, but one only winged you before losing interest and engaging a Rubbermaid bin. You dropped to the ground, in that filthy bloody mud, and heard the sounds of your platoon being dismembered. They've been dead for minutes, but the screams still echo.
The raccoon sniffs at the reclined, mud-caked form it has encountered. It smells something sweet, and begins pawing at the limp body. Its loveable paws examine the downed fighter's sheathed combat knife, before finally coming to focus its adorable efforts on a pocket located upon the old man's load-bearing vest.
Trying to disarm me, are you, you son of a bitch? No, that's not it, that's not what you want... yeah, you bastard... take it... take the candy, you bastard! That's it...
The raccoon neatly gnaws through the candy bar's wrapper, delighting in the chocolate and wafer within - silently behind it, a form with a blade in hand began to rise from the stinking muck.
... that's it, you furry bastard... here's my chance... eat your filthy furry heart's content... this is for Bobby, and Leo and Shorty! This is for the garbage cans of North AmericaaaaaaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRGGGH! | |
|
| Urban Warfare
Posted: 7/14/2009 11:48:39 PM | | Oddly, I am delivering a live-trap to a friend of mine tomorrow who has issues with a raccoon entering her home through her cats door. | |
|
| May 15, 2038
Posted: 7/15/2009 9:08:29 PM | Finally, it is pleasant enough outside that Nurse Ratshhit allows our little club to meet in the park to embrace the warm, fresh, life-affirming clean air instead of the reclaimed, recycled, reconstituted chemical stew they pump through our dorms. Sure we get bits of it year 'round when we get outside for a smoke a couple times a day.
Nobody says anything when a veteran of the raccoon wars lights up a cigarette. You see the news and there's always a politician, or a rock star, or a billionaire being carted off to the chambers for possession of a cigarette. You never see a vet carried off. They wouldn't dare. Nobody says a word alright, but you can feel the eyes from behind the windows of the dorms - the barred ones as well as the others - staring at you smoking. Unchallenged. Thought about quitting the damn things once. Sure glad I didn't.
We gather to play backgammon, to chat, and to smoke. Rarely do we reminisce. Why FFS would we?
Once in a while, a grandchild will join us, here on a forced visit to a bunch of codgers. But then again, the grandchild does love one of the old codgers. And a child being a creature inquisitive as the great foe who slashed a hole through our lives, for none was unaffected by the end (we can always hope), will ask questions. Will see all the missing limbs, eyes, fingers, will see our military uniforms, will look at the badges and will ask.
And then we talk.
But we don't reminisce.
We never reminisce. | |
|
| May 15, 2038
Posted: 7/16/2009 3:14:51 PM | Year: 2118
Exact date: Unknown
Lance Corporal Zack Blasterson stood over the sizzling carcass of a bloated mother raccoon, eyeing it through the advanced optics mounted atop his PPG. Squeezing off a few more searing blasts into the mass, he mused that one can never be too sure - having witnessed a pack of raccoons stumble into a field of anti-personnel mines at the break of evening, only to find most of the dead already recycled by the survivors into food, he was determined not to allow a single specimen past the border of the exclusion zone.
Steadily, inch by inch, neighbourhood by irradiated neighbourhood, mankind was reclaiming the very earth they ceded to the furry horde almost a century prior - the first of the raccoon wars was merely a feint, a test of humankind's defences in preparation for the coming wave. The holocaust occurred on May 14th, 2038 - and were it not for a few old codgers, veterans of the first war who remained holed up in a retirement home - mankind would have fallen that very day. Oblivious to the collapse of society around them by virtue of their aversion to television, they spent the day man's armies fell before the horde, whiling the time away on a game of cards. It was these men that began the resistance, and gave them all a fighting chance.
A crackle over the vox-caster. "Squad Epsilon reports movement ahead. Moving in to suppress." Finally, some action, he thought - they had been holed up in a bunker for weeks, awaiting the passage of a particularly voracious raccoon super-swarm as it made its way across the surface, picking it clean of anything remotely edible. Had they been caught in its path, they would have found themselves de-fleshed and stripped of their candy rations. Now, they strode through the ruins of the top-side wasteland, engaging pockets of stragglers who had gorged on too many discarded turkey left-overs and lagged groggily behind the greater mass. Here, candy bars became a weapon - left as bait, with cyanide pills jammed into the chocolate. There, men dropped more cyanide in puddles and bodies of tepid water. If poisoning the world was needed to reclaim it, then poison was on the menu. Crunching beneath their boots were the skulls of an entire generation, long ago fallen.
"Oh sssshh..."
Lance Corporal Blasterson watched the mauled remains of Squad Epsilon sailing in a high arc through the air. "Damn it!" he bellowed, already priming a plasma grenade, "I won't lose any more ground to these damned SPITEFUL raccoons!" The earth groaned under the impact of titanically adorable footfalls. As Blasterson came face to face with the cuddly colossus, its eensy weensy button eyes burning with feral procyonid hatred, he could only thumb the 'all-broadcast' switch on his helmet-mounted vox-caster.
"HUUUUNTER-KILLERRR!"
His scream was cut short by the arrival of kiloton-range magnetic artillery.
http://upload.0x1011.org/files/DoomCoon.jpg gragragh harrrgrahagh nargh | |
|
| From Battle School, Five Miles Above Earth
Posted: 7/17/2009 7:17:38 AM | Bean was the one I could count on the most, maybe even more dependable than myself. But never could I relinquish control to him. Never could I step back and allow him to shine. Then again, personal glory is not what Battle School is for. Nor is the notoriety especially welcome.
Graf played us all. Then again, didn't I play him? And the others? Still, I regret the fallout; he was a good man.
Being a third, I guess this is what I was bred for. Or at least, so went the hope.
Would I have done differently had I known the "game" was real? I don't think so, but that's a question that can never be answered. In both my most honest moments and my least, I admit that some part of me knew. That some part put the pieces together. That the fervor of the last, pitched battle was outside the purview of our usual skirmishes.
But at first, I can safely say, I was unaware. Unaware that the bodies on the screens were not simulations. That the good men and women who simply disappeared from the monitor were not just blips that no longer blipped, but real lives cut short.
Was it necessary? It can, has been, and will forever be argued. But I was there. I saw it all. The looseness, the fearlessness - I doubt it would have been there. I doubt our strange little experiment would have succeeded. I doubt mankind would have prevailed.
There is plenty of time to reflect on that as I travel the cosmos, looking for a suitable world for the noble race we all but wiped out in our ignorance.
I have a story to tell, in all its glory and all its ugliness.
All I need is the right canvas. | |
|
| From Battle School, Five Miles Above Earth
Posted: 7/17/2009 3:46:54 PM | * Walks out into thread *
Places hands on hips and looks around
hmmm...
Now I appreciate all the help you fellas are giving me with the raccoons, but mind, when you go off blasting away at them that you're not stepping on my FLOWERS. Y'all might wanna remember that when they were after the dog's dinner all I did was chase them out (ok, with a broom, but still). It was only once they started messin' with my flowers that things took a serious tone around here. So, don't be steppin' on my flowers in your zeal to get them critters!
(LOL, you guys are a hoot) | |
|
| From Battle School, Five Miles Above Earth
Posted: 7/17/2009 7:40:43 PM | | lol, thanks for starting all of this Margo! It's been pretty entertaining imagining the guys in their fatigues & camo for night patrols of the perimeter and sneaking behind enemy lines... | |
|
| I don't know what bloody year it is! It's years later, k? How about the year 20whowantstoknow?
Posted: 7/17/2009 11:03:15 PM | We should have wiped them out completely! We were weak! Didn't anybody watch the other half dozen Planet of the Apes movies? Those were the ones that actually had something to say beyond Charlton Heston in turns speaking ruefully, heroically, stoically, disdainfully about civilization only to see the ultimate ultimate ultimate ultimate ultimate ultimate effect of it all in one of the most obvious twists in the history of cinema! But still so well done that it transcends itself to be one of the all-time great movies. Ironically, it stands as a more than adequte stamp of the times in which it was created.
But I digress. Were this a thread about movies, I might have chosen to explain that the foreknowledge was also used as a strength to create poiniency (anybody know how to spell that?) in the final revelation, and then compare and contrast similarities between that fictional movie and perhaps Thelma and Louise, comparing the common themes of just how stupid death is and applying it to the reality of whatever we call life. Individually, that is. Not in some morose manner.
And life for some is pretty cheap.
Bloody Rax! I'll be damned if I'll celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of the day they got the right to vote! I spit in disgust! Also, a lot of the time I either can't help it or I don't know I'm doing it. But this time, I say again and I do again: I spit in disgust! But not that last one. Sorry.
Integrated into our society my asz. Living among us for decades now. Starting their own businesses. Taking our jobs. Running for, and more and more often winning office! WTH? We're letting them make the decisions now?
Thieving little vandals. I wouldn't trust one with my fart. The government services alone to keep their young off the streets and promoting healthier tree lives is almost one-twelfth of our total budget! That makes no sense to me! We don't want 'em roaming around cuz they're untrustworthy, sneaky, murderous, filthy, lying, thieving rodents. So we pay for other stuff to keep them occupied?!? Community centres, playgrounds! Drug addiction programs! Free counselling! Even an office where they can go and get the government to help them get jobs that should be going to people.
WTF? Isn't that called extortion? If they want better lives at tree with their families, then they should do something about it themselves. I don't ask them to solve my problems for me.
Besides which, why do we want these gnarly, snarly varmints who we can't trust among us in the first place? I mean, if we have to bribe them, why do we even want them?
Problem is, nobody remembers anymore. You don't even see passing reference to it in schoolbooks any more. People don't even remember computers anymore. This is just about the only one left now. Thank goodness the last out of of the internet didn't turn it off. But that's what's wrong with society today. They don't remember what these bastages are like. They don't remember. They don't know.
Of course, now, it's too late. They've been "among" us for too long. Whole neighbourhoods have been taken up by them. Our kids - my great-great-great-great great-great-great-great great-great-great-great-great-great grandkids (thank god for the unforeseen effects of long-term viagara usage! although, it's a curse, too, cuz there are NO women one tenth my age around. And a world quickly filling with men like myself is getting quite grumpy and needs daily naps!) go to school with their young now! Not just the same school, the same classes! And two of the teachers in that school are Rax as well! Teachers! What are they going to teach? How to be treacherous, unclean, chickensh1ts?!?
Big surprise, really, though. Look how close we came to having a Rax as Prime Minister. What's this world coming to! I know it's not a popular opinion, but thank god for that random truck traveling down that secluded rural highway at 3:13 am that fateful morning. I don't know if I believe all those conspiracy theorists out there who keep flapping their gums, but if they're right, then let me buy each of the people involved a beer.
Just the other day, my great-great-something-or-other-grand-daughter called me a "bipe!" When I found out what she meant, I was angry with her. "But you are!" she accused me. "You ARE biased against Canadian-Raccoonians!"
"Of course I am!" I bellowed. "What p1sses me off is that you think it would bother me!"
Now she's not talking to me and I don't care.
She's actually off marrying one of them as I type this, celebrating the anniversary by doing so.
Think I'll go take another viagara and try to remember why. | |
|
| i'll MOIDER da bums!
Posted: 7/23/2009 8:17:07 AM | | itsmargo, raccoons are heinous beasts and of the devil. do you know that a raccoon can yank a full grown chicken through the bars of a cage that are only an inch and a half wide?? my dogs have killed at least one coon this year. i had mercy on the 2nd, who was in the swimming pool. it was a mistake! all-out war has since been declared. they are too smart to enter a live trap baited with raw chicken, but hey radio shack has a nifty little night vision camera with an audio alarm and a 300' range, and i have a loaded shotgun and an ax to grind. vengeance is MIIIIINNNNE! | |
|
|
|
Home
login 
