About this site

This site is not about rodents. I like rodents. They're intelligent, clean, and mostly just trying to get by.

Just Rodents is a sister site to Vermin of the Internet, where internet grifters and digital nonsense are treated as specimens for clinical dissection. Here the format is looser: essays, investigations, and the occasional extended rant about online scams, pseudoscience, and the gap between what things claim to be and what they actually are.

I'm Paul. I'm 71, retired and live in the Italian Alps. I have strong opinions about grifts, fraudsters, and the kind of people who say they found their wives on bathroom floors in pain at 2:47 on a Tuesday morning and then try to sell you a back massager.

The rodents in the domain name are symbolic. Most of us are just like rodents, scurrying around trying to find a bit of cheese without getting caught in a trap. The people I write about here are the ones who make the traps and bait them with hope.

Then there's Steve, my hypothetical gerbil. He's the only one here with any real focus. He'll occasionally appear at the top of a post to tell you what it's about before I wander off into a story about a 2400 baud modem or a bee hotel. Steve is more efficient than I am, but his paws are too small to operate the keyboard, so you're stuck with me for the actual writing.