Build a better mousetrap...

I am honored to have inherited a large number of hand tools from my father. Just walk into your local Home Depot or Build 'N' Save and ask for wood-handled screwdrivers or planes and they will probably tell you such things were never made.

But they were, and I am here to tell you, the old tools feel better in your hand, and work better than the plastic ones.  And it's fun to use a screwdriver from 1927 to tighten a switch cover for a dimmable LED bulb!

Everyone knows that old is better...even a country mouse in England.

Over there across the pond, in the town of Reading, there is a museum called the Museum of English Rural Life, which is something I need to see someday.  

They have hundreds of old mousetraps on display, and there is one invented by Colin Pullinger that was displayed at The Great Exhibition in 1851 at Crystal Palace. Pullinger called it a "perpetual" mouse trap, and he was right...155 years later, it still works!

Ollie Douglas, an assistant curator at the museum, was startled recently to find a recently deceased rodent in the age-old trap. He figures the little guy was gnawing at the string that worked the see-saw mechanism, and after all these years, it still worked, much to the displeasure of little Mickey.

And here is why The New Yorker still runs their "There Will Always Be An England" feature at the bottom of some pages: 
the Museum, which is based at the University of Reading, announced that "the mouse could become a permanent feature in the museum, or be given a burial."

I know you're out there; I can hear you coffin.