From a recent Dave Barry column...
 
 A question homeowners as well as professional maintenance personnel are
 constantly asking is: "What is the correct method for disposing of a gopher?"
 
 The answer is: "Not the method that was attempted recently by maintenance
 personnel at Fowler Elementary School in Ceres, Calif." I learned about this
 incident from a major front-page story in the April 5 Modesto Bee, sent to me
 by many alert readers. What happened was, a student found a gopher on the
 grounds of the school, which has a chronic gopher problem. The gopher wound up
 in the custody of three janitors, who put it in a bucket in a small, poorly
 ventilated utility room.
 
 I will give you 300 million guesses as to what they decided to do next.

 Wrong.
 
 What they decided to do was freeze the gopher to death by spraying it with a
 product called (I am not making this up) "Misty Gum Remover." This product is
 designed to be sprayed on the gum wads that are found on the undersides of
 school desks. (They are stuck on right at the desk factory.) The product
 freezes the gum, making it easier to chip off. Misty Gum Remover is not
 specifically designed to send gophers to that Big Hole in the sky, but the
 Fowler Elementary custodians had successfully used it for that purpose on more
 than one occasion, feeling that it was a more humane disposal method than
 others they had tried, including whacking the gophers over the head with
 rakes.
 
 So at this point, we have nothing more than a routine case of three custodians
 trying to freeze a gopher to death with gum remover - the kind of thing that
 (ask your kids!) goes on in our nation's schools every day.
 
 Then one of the custodians decided to light a cigarette. As an American, I
 place full legal blame on the Misty Gum Remover manufacturers for not putting
 a label on their product stating: "DO NOT SPRAY THIS PRODUCT ON A GOPHER IN A
 POORLY VENTILATED ROOM AND THEN LIGHT A CIGARETTE."
 
 You have probably guessed what happened next.

 The Misty Gum Remover fumes exploded in a blast that blew the three custodians
 out of the utility room and injured a total of 19 people. The gopher - I am
 still not making this up - lived. According to the Bee, it was taken into
 police custody and released in an empty field, where I imagine it will spend
 the rest of its days whimpering and gulping down tiny gopher Valiums.
 
 The moral of the story, for both homeowners and maintenance professionals, is
 that if you must dispose of a gopher, you should use the method recommended by
 leading authorities such as the Archbishop of Canterbury, namely, mail it, in
 a secure package, to Madonna, who will certainly find a fashion use for it.