"It began as the Down East equivalent of a Texas tractor pull," said Maury Shepherd, the executive vice president of the C. E. Shepherd Company, a Houston manufacturer of lobster-trap wire and, with the monthly Commercial Fisheries News, a sponsor of six races, including this one.
The loans are still debt traps, wired to adjust upward explosively if and when rates rise again.
The traps were 4 l buckets with drainage holes, installed so the lip was flush with the soil surface, with plastic lids set slightly above the trap using wire stands.
When the weight of the mouse presses against the trap, a wire springs down and kills it instantly.
Just one example of predator control employed on grouse moors is the snare, a primitive wire trap, which traps and garrottes any animal unfortunate enough to be caught.
The place that President Obama visited on Sunday — my colleague Mark Landler's article about the trip is here — overlooks perhaps the most militarized patch of ground on earth, laced with mine fields, slit trenches, secret tunnels, sentry posts manned by edgy troops, booby traps, razor wire.
They constructed a T-shaped aquarium of opaque plastic with a male trapped behind wire gauze and invisible to the female in each arm of the "T".
The plot is skeletal, a bag of bones, spring-loaded with booby-traps and wired to the mains as it shuttles Radcliffe's widowed young lawyer around Eel Marsh House, the obligatory "old place cut off from the outside world".
With a text in Arabic complemented by diagrams taken from American military manuals, the document offers lessons for rigging explosives, setting and concealing booby traps, and wiring an alarm clock to detonate a bomb.
At one point, Basie charges him to set snare traps outside the wire of the camp; while Jim succeeds, thanks to the help of the his Japanese teenage friend, the real reason for sending Jim into the marsh was actually to test the area for land mines.
