Thursday, January 13, 2005

Does This Bug You?

I’m off on Monday for Mondo Luther King day, which cometh not a day too soon.  Man, January is dragging like Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie, but without the adorable owl glasses.  So I’m gonna try to throw down a post for today that will keep people occupied for three whole days. Is it possible?  In the words of the aforementioned Tootsie pop owl: LET’S FIND OUT.  Ahem. 

So, what would really capture the attention of the blogreading public?  I know what always focuses my attention: HUGE SCARY BUGS!  During my vacation in Maryland I heard about one of the hugest, scariest bugs ever anywhere, and it seemed to me that I’d be remiss in my duties to people reading this at work, trying to maintain their professional demeanors, not to gross, freak, and creep you all right out of your tender, tasty skin.  I’m not going to rank these, they’re all sufficiently hideous to be number “1” in somebody’s book - a book which should only be used for dropping on and crushing the following HUGE SCARY BUGS:

Bot Fly: I posted a story about these little critters back when I first started this blog.  The thing about bot flys is not that they are big ugly clumsy flies that swirl around in the air like drunken malevolent whiffleballs.  The problem with these guys is that they lay their eggs with the help of mosquitos: somehow the egg winds up on the mosquito’s proboscis and when the benign little skeeter punches through your skin to drink your delicious carmine blood, the egg winds up inside of you, where it grows into a maggot that eventually gets antsy (though not actually an ant) and eats its way out of your body to find its way in the wide wonderful world.  So what you wind up with is something that looks like a big nasty hive but is really a gestating insect.  It says on the linked site here that the adult bot fly does not have a working mouth, and that the larva ("called a warble” - isn’t that cute?) do not typically seriously injure the host.  Does that make it any less disgusting?  I’ll tell you when I’m done HATCHING HUGE HAIRY MAGGOTS OUT OF MY BODY.  So, get back to me on this one. 

Camel Spider: The good news is that they don’t run 35 miles per hour, and they don’t climb up onto camels and eat them from the abdomen on out, and they don’t hunt in packs, and they can’t operate heavy machinery or weapons.  The bad news is that they actually exist.  They are carniverous, though apparently don’t have a demonstrated predeliction for the savory tang of human flesh.  The thing is, I really don’t much like spiders, especially ones that are as big as my hand.  These guys will bite, but experts say the maceration of the flesh hurts worse than the venom, which, they claim, these buggers don’t even have, as if I’d believe that kind of story.  “No, baby, this won’t hurt at all.” Doesn’t that make you feel better?  (No.  It makes me feel like a spider the size of my hand is chomping on my delicate person; even without its injecting poison into me I think I’ll take a pass.)

The funny thing is, this is the bug that I heard about while on vacation at my sister-in-law’s house, and, disbelieving, I retired to her home office to go on line and investigate.  But the office was being used as a spare bedroom so there was very little space in there - the chair in which I sat was right up against a bed that took up almost the whole rest of the room.  So I found a site that features this hideous thing and I called people in to see it.  They piled up on the bed behind and around me, including 9-month-old baby Maile (rhymes with “smiley"), who’s okay with the image of the enormous solpugid and is just crawling around in the dim room with all her relatives.  She is behind me.  I’m focused on the computer screen.  She decides to stand up by pressing her tiny soft delicate hands against my back.  I AM SURE I AM UNDER ATTACK BY A THREE-FOOT SPIDER THAT HAS SNUCK INTO SUBURBAN MARYLAND AND EVADED DETECTION BY FIVE ADULTS, PERHAPS BY KILLING AND EATING THEM ALL.  I slowly turn to see her grinning at me.  Yeah, pretty damn funny, kid.  Next time, I get to be the giant spider and you can be the guy at the computer crapping his pants. 

Giant Centipede: I’ve heard a lot of horrible stories about these armor-plated meat-eating nightmares-run-amok.  I’ve heard you can’t kill them by stomping on them - they’re too tough, it requires smashing a rock on their heads repeatedly like some kind of creature from Doom.  Except these actually exist.  I work with a hawaiian woman whose mother carried one around on her back under her clothes for hours without realizing it; they seem to have an affinity for the dark warm cloisters and crevasses with which my personal body, for one, is endowed.  They can eat geckos and they can whip their stingers around and they can grow to be eight inches long.  On the plus side.... if you’re not in Hawaii, you don’t have to worry much about them.  And what would paradise be, without a ragingly painful centipede sting every so often to keep you focused?  Right, it would still be paradise.  These guys are so freaky gross, they freak out the other gross bugs. 

Jerusalem Cricket: Once again, they say that these cheerful fellows are not harmful to humans.  Well they’re sure not harmful to this human because I get the hell away from them and anything that looks like them.  I sometimes encountered these while I lived in LA.  So, it turns out, they’re not really from Jerusalem.  I don’t even think they’re jewish.  Some folk apparently call them potato bugs; that’s enough to put me off spuds altogether.  What they are, is huge and armored and extremely scary looking.  Once, when Kel was working at a metaphysical bookstore full of incense-burning, groat-eating, starchart-casting wiccans on peyote, one of these giant bugs showed up in the employee parking lot.  Everybody ran out of the store to check it out as it cast a long sinister shadow across the pavement.  These were the sort of people, generally, who’d spout that “we’re all living together on the same planet” crap - but the general concensus was, get this freaking alien predator back on its spaceship and fly it the hell back to whatever godforsaken planet it came from.  The strange thing is, I rather like Jerusalem artichokes.  No relation, I guess. 

Vinegaroon: I read about these not too long ago and the idea of them so disturbed me that the idea of this post just germinated from that one reference.  So I don’t have any personal experiences or funny stories to tell about them.  They’re just enormous scorpions with powerful claws that can spray their enemies with a foul-smelling acetic acid excretion.  I guess they figure, if you’re too dumb to realize that it’s much, much grosser than you are, so gross that the extra grossness will rub off on you if you don’t back the hell away, then it will offend your nostrils and your sense of propriety so badly that only the clinically perverse would stick around to find out more about it.  And even though I happen to be clinically perverse, my particular perversions are non-entomological in nature, and yes, I know that word refers specifically to insects, but I will make it serve in this context because I am not sticking around to think of a better word when there’s a scorpion as big as my hand opening brazil nurts with its pincers and spraying me with ass-vinegar.  So sue me. 

Have a good weekend.  Check your shoes before you put them on - you never know what’s hiding in them.  And remember what MLK told us: Someday we will be judged by the content of our character, not by the size of our pincers or where we bury our larvae.  But until that day arrives, I am not going to let my daughter marry any of these creeps.  And I don’t even have a daughter.

Dan, I have got to say that this post did NOT make me chuckle. It actually grossed me out (bugged me?) so badly that, I’m sorry to say, I read the first two descriptions, then skimmed the remainder. Yuck. What was your reason for making this a blog topic again...?!

This gives me the urge to write something that gives the reader the warm fuzzies for my post today. Hmmm...must ponder good topic…

Have a great (bug-free) weekend, Dan!

dude, you’re leaving us with THIS on your site for three days ? that spider alone is enough to disturb my sleep over the weekend.  UGH.

I tried, I really did, to read the text. But the scary pictures of yucky bugs freaked me out too much. Sorry, I just can’t do it.

You are mean! :D

there’s a scorpion as big as my hand opening brazil nuts with its pincers and spraying me with ass-vinegar. dude, you made me laugh out loud—that’s the funniest thing i’ve read all day!

we’ve had potato bugs in our house and i’m kinda used to them by now, so that one’s out.  the giant spider and the centipede are both rude, and the maggot laying thing out of Aliens is pretty bad too.  but my all time most hated bug is one you don’t have here—the Wolf Spider.  we get these in our house for a three week stretch once a year and let me tell you… EEWW!!!  they’re huge, armored and lightning quick—kind of like a brown, three inch long tarantula on steroids, only about ten times faster then any tarantula could ever be.  i once watched Erin break a broomhandle in our living room, such was her fury in repeatedly smashing one of those buggers.  i shudder just thinking about them…

Thanks for the nightmares, Dude.

Mole cricket. We used to get these in Florida. Seriously freaky. I thought I had found some sort of undiscovered...THING.

Oh, and P, I know of what you speak. I lived next to a pond in Florida. I would lock myself in my room and night and would literally be scared to leave it because I KNEW as soon as I walked into the living room there would be one there. As soon as I would walk out flashes of lightening would streak around. I walked out and there was two fighting. There were several around them cheering and jeering them on.

I learned to spot the females because they were bigger and always had millions of babies on their backs. If you smash them the babies spray EVERYWHERE and you perpetuate the cycle even more. It was horrible. The day my baby was on the floor and one was on her hand was the day I made plans to move.

It still makes me shake.

thanks for the horrific post, dan!  i’m glad that i always turned to you to kill the spiders in our bathroom when we were kids.  i had so much faith in my big brother....i knew he was the guy who could do the deed.

once, when i was working for a small theater company in pleasanton, ca, i was working in an empty office-park building, turning it into a suitable performance space.  my work went very late one night, and i decided to sleep there instead of driving home.  my dog clyde and i bedded down in the corner of one of the “offices”, and when i woke up in the morning, i was eye-to-eye with one of those potato bug-jerusalem cricket thingies.  i freakin’ jumped out of my skin.  your photodoes not do them justice, since you don’t see their googly, ugly-ass eyes.  i was shaking for the rest of the day, and have no idea what happened to the bug.  i ran away.

oooooh bugs.  I always found that the manhattan yellow pages was quite efficient for squashing the mongo roaches that would occasionally show up.  I only had opportunity to do this twice, but it happened both times that I was on the phone with someone that I couldn’t yell about having seen a huge bug zip across the floor.  So I would wait, phone book in hand and let it drop at the right moment.  Splat.

Did I mention that although I have a minor in entomology, I have no compunction about squashing big roaches? 

Ditto on centipedes.  Spiders that are relatively small I can co-exist with.  Hairy ones get relocated.

all i can think to say is EEEWWWWWWWWWWWWW.

Ugh… as they call them WATER BUGS… yeah, my arse!!! They are huge, disgusting roaches that have no fear of you whatsoever.  I’ve encountered them twice, once when I lived next to a school and warehouse… it literally chased me out of the bathroom and all around the kitchen.  Nightmares!  When I first moved out of the dorms, we rented a house located in an alley… one night me and my four other roommates tried desperately to kill one.  One entire can of Raid later, we dropped a huge biology book on it and took turns jumping up and down on it… can you believe that we picked up the book and it walked away?!?!?!  I HATE bugs!

That spider is creeping me out. No more long weekends for you.

And I thought these things existed only on “Outer Limits!”

By the way, are we going back to putting maggots on open wounds to eat any infected areas?

Nice way to alienate your audience, Dan.  Your problem is, you have too many chicks reading your stuff. I like bugs, but in the interest of keeping your readership, you might want to post more about pink socks, daffodils, and hearts.

Or, if you wish to compromise, write about bugs WEARING pink socks. That, I can handle.

But the real reason I am posting another comment is to express my bug blog bewilderment. I have noticed TWO other blogs THIS WEEKEND who have posted on bug-related topics. The first blog I can no longer remember (it will come to me in the shower, I’m sure); the second is here: http://www.stonesoup.co.nz/chinashop.

Do you think this rash of bug discussion is because of the stage of the moon or something? Why? WHY, I want to know!

yeah greg, because that’s all us girls like to talk about.

Up till now, I have not attended to Dawkins, thinking it unnecessary to break a butterfly upon a wheel. But Mr Mackie’s article is not the only indication I have lately met of serious attention paid to his fantasies. by free poker