Voodoo Time Dot Com

So I mentioned ants in my previous post. As it turns out, our new apartment is loaded with them. They live in the kitchen, or more likely under it. We’d been living in ignorance of them for most of the week until we set out a bunch of bananas on the counter one afternoon. The next day, our kitchen was covered in ants. They were trying to carry the bananas away on their little backs, and I think some of them were even working together trying to open the refrigerator door.

Neither my wife nor I have a real problem with ants per se. If we see a few around, we generally leave them alone. Unfortunately, where there are one or two ants, thousands lie in wait just below the surface. If they would just live in happy little families of four or five, I’d be cool with them. But living with ants is like living with all of Manhattan under your sink. And once they start getting into everything, the vermin must die. But being as we had just moved in, we had nothing handy that even nearly resembled bug spray. The previous tenants had left behind some spray starch (who uses starch anymore?), so I hosed them down with spray starch. It worked. (Though later experimentation proved that almost any chemical sprayed in sufficient quantities will do the job.) That not only killed the ants, but left them frozen in place across our counters and cabinetry. The scene was reminiscent of some kind of myrmecological Pompeii in the wake of Vesuvius. My wife wiped them off with a paper towel. I wanted to leave them there as a warning to others.

Instead we bought some ant bait. The idea behind this is that it smells and tastes like something ants like to eat, so they swarm all over the stuff, and take it back to the nest to share with the group. Only, the joke’s on them because it’s made of poison! Anyway, they jumped on that like a hobo at Thanksgiving dinner. At first I kind of felt bad for tricking them like that, but I got over it. It’s really stupid when you think about it. What if you were walking around and found a triple-scoop ice cream sundae on the ground? Would you eat it?

This kind of thing is precisely why humans don’t typically eat random stuff they find laying around on the ground - with the exception of mushrooms, which are close enough to poison as far as I’m concerned. Things that only grow directly on top of moist dead things do not have any business in my mouth.

Bye for now.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 5th, 2003 at 4:46 pm and is filed under Funny. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.