Now that's one spicy rodent!

Not long after a forest fire burns its way through acreage, the news media comes forth with a possible culprit. Sometimes its lightning (that would mean God did it? Or Electra Woman?), other times its bad cub scouts, or too often a deranged arsonist who likes the idea of a tsunami of flame working its way through the countryside. This time, though, the culprit is none other than a mischevous, kinda stupid and, currently, crisp squirrel. According to the AP, "Redding firefighters say the squirrel set off the blaze when it shorted out a power line, caught fire and dropped into dry vegetation." http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2008/10/14/state/n100513D39.DTL

Typing "flaming squirrel" into Google gets me 3,190 hits (granted, most of these are repeat stories, but it's still pretty impressive), which means that apparently squirrels are quite flammable and likely wreak havoc when they are aflame--enough to get notice on the world wide web. Restaurant names and Celtic surf bands aside (http://flamingsquirrel.net/), Flaming Squirrels are quite a hot item. As opposed to, say, flaming rats (834 hits), flaming hamsters (1,290 hits) and flaming gerbils (512). Only flaming queens get more hits, but then we all know they get around so much more than the average queen (8370 hits).

A year ago, a flaming squirrel in Bayonne, NJ fell from the sky (another powerline chewer) and managed to find its way into the engine compartment of a Toyota Camry, leading to an explosive ending. http://www.nj.com/hudson/index.ssf/2007/10/flaming_squirrel_ignites_car_i.html

And in July of 2005, a flamer (yes, tightroping on a power line) managed to start a brush fire in Oroville, WA. http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2002390256_webpyrosquirrels19.html

My favorite was this news item about a candidate for student government at Princeton. One of the things he had to do (as part of the vetting process, I guess) was to fess up that he'd poured lighter fluid on, and subsequently lit, a dead squirrel in a wacky fraterity (and booze-fueled) prank. http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/archives/2006/12/01/news/16814.shtml Those crazy kids!