Just understand that spiders are always in your house. Always always always.
You mostly only see them when they are out looking for mates, that’s all. So what you are doing is providing selection pressure to create a race of super spiders that are either:
a) too big to squish
b) much better at hiding
c) have a deadly poison and can take you out first
d) all of the above
So you just go ahead and keep squishing the spiders you see.
I just scrape them up with a box and chuck them outside. I don’t like bugs, so spiders are my friend!
Either way, we’re part of the natural order of things, helping along evolution and all and so it’s all good.
I used to squish them, but as I get older and wiser, now I have a can of orange-scent smelling poison stuff I just spray on them and then scoop them up with a paper towel. Much less mess. And orangy fresh!
My former Bay Area house got invaded by spiders in 2003 or so that were big enough to make me think they were reptiles or wall-crawling mice. It’s one thing to see an exotic insect in an exotic country, but to find one on your own dining room wall in your relatively tame home town is a little surreal. I believe their bodies were over an inch long and half an inch wide, and their legs were relatively longer than the one at the top of this thread. Someone from the Cal Academy of Sciences identified it for me as one of the Zoropsis spiders, but not any of the species that are in Wikipedia today I don’t think (unless the name has changed or something). I’ll post a picture tonight (looks like this).
Over time, eight more appeared. My neighbors never saw any, so I figured a brood must have hatched under my house. Every single one got relocated to a nearby park or field, and they finally stopped appearing after a month or two. They never really moved around when we could see them. They just sort of materialized, but were also pretty easy to catch.
Dude, had you just slain them instead of moving them, eventually Terrorantula would have spawned and he would have dropped some pretty phat lewt you could use later on in raid groups.
Everyone knows that 5-man Terrorantula drops are for noobs.
It’s pretty obvious that you haven’t really gotten over your fear of spiders. A Spider Glass? With capital letters? I just use whatever’s lying around, as long as it’s not sticky, and rinse it out afterward. Spiders aren’t millipedes.
err… what’s wrong with millipedes?
This calls for a repost of my black widow spider post from last summer.
Motherfuckin’ don’t tell me not to kill motherfuckin’ goddamn shit-sucking fuckball spiders, motherfucker.
We have a back porch with a sliding door that opens out from our bedroom. We had our little girl’s wading pool out there. She’s 19 months old and the best human alive.
Fucking hot day, my wife’s out there with our sweetie pie, and she screams and bangs on the door. I open it and she hustles in with our little one, and says, “Huge black widow. Right there. By the pool.”
I go out there, and there’s a huge-ass spiderweb alright. I tear it down, and fucker comes crawling out. Easily an inch and a half across, body half an inch large. Black fucking widow spider. Biggest one I ever saw. Two feet from the wading pool.
I smashed the hell out of it. Over the ensuing two days we killed NINE MORE BLACK WIDOW SPIDERS outside our house, one more in the garage, another in the sun room. Then we called the goddamned exterminator.
Fucking thing could have bitten my baby girl and sent her to the hospital in total fucking agony.
So yeah. MOST spiders are all nice and fluffy dandy. But some motherfucking spiders – the big black fuckers that can’t even make a decent web, but fuck me if they don’t have a blood-red hourglass on them, and what the fuck is THAT about – I will hunt to the end of the earth.
[quote] What are the symptoms of a spider bite?
A black widow spider bite gives the appearance of a target, with a pale area surrounded by a red ring. Severe muscle pain and cramps may develop in the first two hours. Severe cramps are usually first felt in the back, shoulders, abdomen and thighs. Other symptoms include weakness, sweating, headache, anxiety, itching, nausea, vomiting, difficult breathing and increased blood pressure. Young children, the elderly and those with high blood pressure are at highest risk of developing symptoms from a black widow spider bite.
Fuckers.[/quote]
I used to have a pet jumping spider. It was cute.
I once found one of those scary hairy spiders in the house. I was freaking out and figuring out how to take care of it with the stuff I had on hand, when all of a sudden the family dog walks up and ate it. That sorta freaked me out even more.
From Paul Bowles:
“I disturbed an agitated centipede.”
“Don’t kill it.”
“Someone should.”
Why the hell not. To me it is the most abominable of all creatures.
What hideous dead-end led to the creation of a centipede? If you can’t stand it, kill it!! With every other [animal] almost I say don’t kill it: snakes, lizards, any decent life form. But you’re not a decent life form anymore. Centipede legs is sprouting outa you.
It maybe that I am lazy, but that’s a lot more work than say using a can of Raid or a sandle to solve the spider problem.
I let my wife know that there’s a spider in the house, give her the general coordinates, and then cower on the couch until she deals with it.
Holy shit, here are Burroughs and Cronenberg on the subject:
William, are you interested in insects?'' says Cronenberg, mostly for my benefit, a question that causes Burroughs to regard the two of us warily.Not entirely,‘’ he finally says. After a few minutes of completely addled discussion, Burroughs exclaims, ``Oh, insects! I thought you said ~incest~.
The most awful creature to me is the centipede,'' he says. A number of them crawl slimily through the movie version of ~Naked Lunch~.I don’t go into hysterics or anything, but I look around for something to smash it with. I used to live out in the country when I first moved here, and there were a lot of centipedes in the house, and I set out to kill them all. A program of genocide. I’d wake up in the middle of the night, and I’d know there’s a centipede in this room. And there always was. And I couldn’t go to sleep until I killed it.‘’ Although he never hunts mammals and is even somewhat of an animal activist, Burroughs is quite an expert on killing bugs, having once held a job as an exterminator.
William's use of insects as metaphors is generally negative,'' Cronenberg points out.When he says someone has insect eyes or an insect voice, it’s not a compliment. Now, in my movie, you can tell I’m a little more well-disposed toward insects, because the typewriters, which are insects, are almost like cats, really. They came about because when I write at night with the light on, insects come and land on the page.‘’ This is clearly a fond memory.They're relating to you somehow. People are obsessed in a public way with life on other planets,'' he says, a subtle reference to Burroughs, who is so interested in the idea of alien visitation that he has struck up a friendship with ~Communion~ author Whitley Strieber.I’m saying that right here on earth we have the most alien life-forms we’ll find anywhere, and most of them are insects! How they survive and what their life cycles are like is incredible.‘’
Burroughs is unmoved by this aria for bugs.
Your insect typewriters are kind of fun,'' he concedes. But touching bugs in general is not his thing at all.I hate the touch of spiders,‘’ Burroughs says. ``A biology teacher at school had a tarantula, and I couldn’t touch the thing, even though tarantula bites are not dangerous. The most deadly spider is the funnel web spider of Australia.‘’ This leads to the two trying to one-up each other on ghoulish facts of nature.
There's a spider in Virginia called a brown recluse,'' says Cronenberg.And when you’re bitten, the tissue just starts to deteriorate and spread. It’s very dangerous.‘’
Brown recluse!'' says Burroughs as we continue our stroll through the yard.There are cases of people who have these huge lesions down to the bone. I’d much rather be bitten by a black widow. They make you desperately sick, but at least it’s not deadly for a healthy adult.‘’ As long as we’re on the subject, I ask them to choose the best method of death in the animal kingdom.
Well, you'd want it to be quick,'' says Cronenberg,and as painless as possible. So, what, a Gaboon viper?‘’
``I wouldn’t choose a viper at all. Any of the vipers are apt to be painful, they have both hemo- and neurotoxins. Cobras have neurotoxins.‘’ Burroughs indicates that this is preferable. Cronenberg shakes his head.
Cobras are not very good at getting it into your bloodstream,'' he says.They don’t have injector fangs.‘’ His hand mimics a snake repeatedly biting his other arm. ``They actually chew, and dribble it into the cut.‘’
They have plenty to dribble, believe me,'' says Burroughs. At this point, I've stopped looking for snakes.With the blue-spotted octopus, people are usually unconscious.‘’
``That sounds good,‘’ says Cronenberg, beaming.
``It’s a tiny little thing only about that big. No one’s ever survived it. DOA in one hour. Puffer fish have the same venom, and it’s also used to make zombies. The flesh of a puffer fish is supposed to be an aphrodisiac and a gourmet sensation, but one tiny part of the liver, one milligram… there are several accidents a year.‘’
Well, that's the obvious choice then,'' says Cronenberg.Strangely enough, we have puffer fish in our movie. Hanging there in one shot.‘’
As long as we have death by nature settled, I ask them by which weapon they would choose to die.
I don't think about dying by a weapon,'' Burroughs says as we walk back to the house.I think about killing someone else with a weapon!‘’
``I guess that’s the difference between an optimist and a pessimist,‘’ says Cronenberg with a giggle.
I hope the word you want is “purulent”? Not that either sounds like much fun.
My labrador saw me chasing after a millipede on the kitchen floor once and rushed over and snapped the thing up. As the dog was looking at me, the bug crawled out of the side of his mouth, up over his muzzle, then down the other side of his mouth. He jerked his head slightly, snapped his jaws shut and swallowed, then looked at me with an expression that very obviously said “Was that cool or what?!”.
LMAO that’s nasty!
A long time ago when we got our new Doberman who was about a year old we heard him barking up a storm in the backyard. We rushed out and saw him cornering two toads. Before we could react he scooped one up with his mouth and swallowed it whole. We stood there in disbelief looking at each other with WTF!? expressions.
Within 30 seconds he starts doing a vomit reflex and soon thereafter he upchucks that live toad.
I read once somewhere that for 99.9% of humans, you will never be less than 9 feet away from a spider at ANY point of your life.
