The Sole of Destiny

I recall I was nattering to m'colleague Andy - as to be found at The Breezy Call blog, see the list on the left - about nice this 'n nice that and distressing t'other... Matters turned to accidents of geography, where animals' paths cross to devastating effect. (Forgive the voiceover tone of that last sentence. I've been engrossed in the BBC's excellent documentary number Planet Earth, Attenborough's foray into the natural world - see it while it lasts! Pretty soon it'll be aerial shots of Polar bears swimming in ironic Busby Berkeley circles through rapidly melting chunks of icecap - and I wanted to set an appropriate tone of reverential awe and fatalistic acceptance...)

Andy related that he 'terminated a woodmouse', although without any prejudice, let alone extreme.
'I was walking along a path not far from my house when it panicked and scurried out from its safe hiding place on the side of the path and under my irrevocably descending right boot. I have fairly small feet, so it is hard not to see Darwin's hand in its self-deselecting rush to the only certainly-deadly place for miles around. Its demise and my role in it left me in a very morbid and philosophical mood for much of the rest of the walk, and I wasn't even smoking anything which might encourage such a profound state of mind.'

I had to commiserate. I'm lucky in that my interfaces with rodents extend as far as ignored humane mouse traps with bits of cheese in - or, more frequently, crowbarred open humane mouse traps with no bits of cheese in and a thank you note in scratchy mouse hieroglyphs [three fat mice, one with a quill, one doing a thumbs up [somehow], one rubbing its tum, a block of cheese with a tick next to it.] However, I've crushed many a snail in my cack-footed blundering about, which is always unfortunate, not least for the flattened gastropod peeling itself off the paving slab. Not so much a run-in as a walk-in (which is worse, it's in slow motion and all the more agonising. N o o o o o o o o o o o o...).

All things considered - unless you're considering becoming a Jainist monk - best to ask not for who the foot falls... it is for this reason that astronomers are a much-undervalued section of the scientific community, particularly meteor watchers.