July 06, 2004

• This bears a striking resemblance to classic negligence case Donahue v Stevenson (1932), which involved ginger beer and a snail. Although I forget whether Stevenson was the snail or the beer.
• This has been a well-worn urban legend for many years; I guess -- like the Kentucky Fried Beak -- the truth has caught up with the legend..
• It also bears a striking resemblence to something Bob and Doug Mackenzie once corked up.
• Wild mice in North America can carry some nasty diseases. Had a friend in grad school who found a grub in a can of corn, and a few years ago another acquaintance encountered a dead cockroach in a canned soft drink. These things happen, though rarely, thank goodness. Or no doubt we'd all be screaming like girlies.
• Wild mice in North America can carry some nasty diseases. We're safe. No known pathogen can survive in beer. Whatever else it did to the guy, it wouldn't kill him. I can't help but feel that the guy brought it on himself, though, for drinking such swill as Miller Light. *tips an Erdinger to Nostrildamus*
• I've found wasps in jars of jam, before.
• this makes me very happy i dont drink. but wouldnt he have noticed the mouse sooner, perhaps as he drained the bottle, or while he was drinking it and the mouse was floating about in his beer?
• Believe I've read the drowned sink before they surface, so perhaps this mouse hadn't reached the floating stage yet, humandictionary. With hindsight, we might think he might have taken a second look at what he was about to pour into himself, except that folk usually take it for granted all is well, and simply ingest.
• Miller--A person whose trade is the grinding of corn in a mill Grub in corn. Mouse in Beer. It all makes sense.
• Ick. Yech. Blech. Ugh. It makes me want to scream just reading about it. My nastiest brush with an urban legend was the rat-in-the-toilet. I woke up one morning and went into the bathroom and turned on the light and with my bleary eyes looked into the toilet and thought, "did I forget to flush?" Then, I rubbed my eyes and I saw a dead rat with its head sticking out of the hole at the bottom of the toilet. I was, like, totally grossed out, gag me with a spoon! For real, though, I was afraid to sit on the toilet for a while after that. I would always flush before going and never go in the dark. When I wake up in the middle of the night, I don't like to turn on the lights because it hurts my eyes, but I still make sure to peer down into the toilet for any lurking rats or lord-knows-what and then flush before sitting.
• Oh, and when I lived in Times Square on 44th street, I was almost struck on the head by a bottle thrown from a hotel window. I don't know if that's an urban legend or not, but I felt like I was in one. Damn kids joking around don't realize they could kill someone...
• The way the judge acted you'd think the mouse had burst through the bottle, sprouted wings, flew around the room breathing fire on his books, and telling him in a dark scary voice that he was going to hell. I can think of nothing less that would justify his demeanour.
• this mouse, is it GPS-equipped?
• but wouldnt he have noticed the mouse sooner If what I heard is true, he just grabbed the beer and stuck it in an insulated coozie before he started drinking. Still, you'd think that little bugger would have clunked around in the bottle.
• beeswacky- Sorry, that wasn't clear. But when he took a drink of the beer, he would probably have to tilt the bottle, and the mouse would fall forward. I'd think you'd notice if something that (relativly) large was being moved around in the bottle.
• I dunno, if you can maintain the illusion that Miller lite is beer, I'm sure ignoring a drowned rodent (and the taste!) is a piece of cake.
• This is why I stick to martinis. And to answer Q's query, yes it is GPS equipped. And it vibrates.
• From a careful read of the story, the implication is that the raw uncooked dead mouse was jammed in the neck of the bottle before he drained the contents, and only fell to the bottom when he clunked it on the sink after emptying the suds. Thus it didn't plonk about as he was swilling, but only acted as the brew's Mousefilter. (Hmmm.. good name for a blog...) All of this of course sounds rather unlikely, but I've heard of real situations in the UK where mice have ended up in milk bottles in very similar circumstances. I don't doubt that the mouse really was in the beer, but the whole clutching-the-head-screaming bit is a bunch of hooey. He's trying to establish that he was utterly traumatised in order to get the full impact from the ensuing legal wrangle. Oh, & thanks, Fes. :)
• I can't say I blame him for milking it, though. I'd be trying for a lifetime of (mouse-) free beer, if I were him.
• If I discovered I'd been drinking something filtered through a dead mouse, I'd be doing some screaming. And throwing up. A high school teacher of mine said he'd found a cow's eye in a tin of corned beef. I haven't been able to eat corned beef since.
• The way the judge acted you'd think the mouse had burst through the bottle, sprouted wings, flew around the room breathing fire on his books, and telling him in a dark scary voice that he was going to hell. Woah, I'm going to start drinking Miller Light!
• Miller Lite. Stupid goddamn deliberate misspellings... Their commercials suck, too.
• PigAlien -- be happy your rat was DEAD. Good friend of mine opened her toilet to find a live rat thrashing around. Many flushes later: no more rat.
• You never know someone's phobias. I have a deep and completely irrational fear of just a few things, but one of them happens to be dead small animals. I wouldn't be disturbed at all by a live mouse swimming around in my beer (though arguably it could be much dirtier or leave droppings), but a dead one floating in it would also leave me screaming. Only I would probably scream until I was hoarse, and be cowering on the other side of the room in the corner. Just reading the story has made me tense; my stomach has tightened and had there been a better picture, I think I might have even given a little scream or shudder (as I did for the glance of the fried chicken's head on scartol's link.) His reaction looks perfectly normal to me.
• Swan: Well of course you can find cow's eyes. And lips and nostrils and hide and .... Well, let's just close the curtain on this, shall we? Pig: Two friendly words of advice-- Night light. Seriously, you're never too old for a night light in the bathroom. They're wonderful for when you have to get up in the middle of the night. Just enough light to see the rats in the toidy or find another bog roll, but not enough to hurt your eyes or disturb the zzzzzzzs. Get the kind with the sensor that will turn itself on and off. You can thank me tomorrow morning.
• Mmmhh... now that you people mention it... everytime I swing around a Guinness, there's this SPLOSHING, CLINKING SOUND.... : )
• "I have a deep and completely irrational fear of just a few things, but one of them happens to be dead small animals." You are the biggest feckin pussy that ever walked Glub's Green Oith. The little bastards can't hurt you while they're alive let alone while they're dead. You should be ashamed of yourself. You should be less likely to admit such a heinous failing on the internet as admit you love sniffing wimmin's knickers off of their lines at night, you filthy fucking pervert. You disgust me. Please kill yourself messily post haste. p.s. this was a joke: I am scared of spiders. Specially the ones that drop in the bath. And here, they have ones the size of wall clocks.
• Forget an itty bitty rat in the can, i've been traumatized by the sight of a live PYTHON in the toilet bowl. Talk about screaming like a girl...i screamed like an effing banshee and ran all the way downstairs with my knickers round my ankles! Only God knows how it got there! And it lay there, all calm and collected, like nothing could faze it! I still get palpitations just thinking about it! Anyways, my knight in shining armor, a.k.a. daddy, saved the day. After trying unsuccessfully to dislodge the bugger by flushing several times, he finally grabbed a stick and yanked it out! To this day i cannot use the can without inspecting it thoroughly for reptiles and other critters!
• ramix wins. I was going to share my story about sticking my toe in a shoe and finding a dead mouse in it, but never mind.
• I think maybe I'll shit in a baggie from now on. Wouldn't help with explosive diarrhea, though...
• Oh my god, ambrosia, you just reminded me that a similar thing happened to me once. I don't remember what it was, but it was alive and moving around in my shoe. I think it was a cockroach or some other kind of bug. GROSS! And, for the record, if I discovered a mouse in something I had just drank, I would scream for a couple of minutes too.
• Knew a retired gentleman who worked for a number of years for a large brewery and bottling plant in my home town. They had shifty-eyed goofballs show up regularly claiming to have found the most ridiculous things in their beer bottles. Beer was so cheap to produce that they usually just gave the claimants a free case and sent them on their way. The brewery workers never believed any of the claims because they knew that the bottle cleaning equipment blasted the inside of each bottle using water jets with enough force to pulverize anything in the bottle, shortly before re-filling. The workers had actually tested this on occasion. Of course my favourite stories concerned the job rewards of working at the brewery. Everyone got a free case of beer a week, and certain jobs carried extra bonuses. If you volunteered to scrub out the inside of the huge fermentation kettles - incredibly hot, humid, long, miserable work - after the job was done you got to stand under the beer tap at the end of the production line for as long as you wanted.
• About ten years ago, my cat vomited into my father's shoe... just before he put it on. We were amused, he was not.
• I hope your father wasn't sick on your cat in return, in an attempt to teach it a lesson.
• humandictionary, I agree the mouse's corpse should have slid forward...unless it were stuck by some horrid processes (don't, for god's sake, tell me about this) of decomposition to the bottle's bottom. *runs, gagging as well as with scissors*
• Now that you bring that up....that might just be exactly what happened. Or could beer act as an adhesive under these circumstances? And I say he's either a big nitwit or milking this for whatever its worth. Or possibly both...
• Just for you Fes "Strange Brew" in all it's glory (Scroll down to scene Five and just keep on going)
• This movie was filmed in 3-B. Three beers and it looks pretty good, eh.
• ::shudder:: I'm sorry, but there is no reaction extreme ENOUGH upon finding a dead rodent at the bottom of your drink. I nearly wigged when a tiny little mouse jumped out of the silveware drawer years ago. When I was finished screaming like a little girl, I went straight out to adopt my first kitten. Good times.
• I have an inherited fear of mice -- my mother's mother put mousetraps under her bed and she would hear the traps snap shut in the darkness, followed by much squeaking and movement under the bed -- and the one time, when I was flatting, we found a mouse in our hot-water cupboard, I screamed my head off until my flatmate picked it up by the tail and threw it out the window. Even thinking about it, my legs want to curl up on the seat under me. Oh, and who has been to the 3-D "Honey, I Blew Up the Parents" or whatever it's called at Disneyland? Puffs of air under your seat that feel like mice running between your ankles.
• A gecko almost drowned in my teapot once. I use a large round glass one to hold water. Poured it out on the sink, waiting for it to run away. The poor thing must have been swimming for hours, it was so exhausted, I had to help it up the side of the sink. I was so scared my mom was going to come into the kitchen and start screaming for me to kill it.
• My sister found a contact lens in a Mars bar when she was about 12. Bit right into it. Where I went to college, there was a burrito stand called Cuco's (squidranch knows what im talking about), where several people I know had less than pleasant culinary collisions with the local fauna, but kept going back because they liked the food. Another friend of mine got a rusty screw in a bag of weed, but I think thats different.
• These stories are great. I either feel bad or fortunate that I cannot contribute a good story. So, I will contribute a 2 crappy ones. Several years ago, my housemate's cat pissed in my shoe. I didn't notice it until I put them on as I was heading out the door for work. And, the housemate didn't even offer to clean my shoe... A few years later, another cat pissed on my Vespa engine as I was rebuilding it...