John's 770 Volt Rat Trap
                           (K) Kopylepht 1970,1997

When I was a kid, the city decided to fill in a ditch behind our property,
replacing it with a buried drain pipe.  This had an upside (better
drainage) and a downside - the rats that lived in the ditch started coming
into the neighborhood basements.

Well, we had an old house back then with a basement, actually more like a
really big crawl space, which could only be accessed from outside.  No
matter what we did, we couldn't keep the rats out, though.  So, my dad came
up with a great idea.

What he did was he got a 770 volt plate transformer from an old radio, and
connected one side of the secondary to ground (a copper pipe in the clay
under the house) and the other side to a cookie sheet.  The cookie sheet
was insulated from the ground by a couple of plastic-wrapped bricks.  On
the cookie sheet, dad put some cheese, peanut butter, other foods that
might set a rat's mouth watering.  Then he plugged the plate transformer
in - the transformer's primary was 110 volts.

Within 20 minutes he had his first kill.  When a really big rat fell for
the trap, it would momentarily dim the lights in the house!  Within a week
no more rats were being caught - either they wised up or we killed them
all; we'll never know.

The downside to this was disposing of the bodies.  Very few things smell
worse than burning rat hair.  The rat's front feet are usually burned up
too.

Needless to say, this was done far away from anything combustible.

Kids, don't try this at home unless you know what 770 volts will do to you
when you fuck up.