The word of the day for June 29, 2008 is "vermin" — noun — 1 a: small common harmful or objectionable animals (as lice or fleas) that are difficult to control. b: birds and mammals that prey on game. c: animals that at a particular time and place compete (as for food) with humans or domestic animals. 2: an offensive person.
I found a spider in the toilet bowl yesterday afternoon. I'm not sure what she was doing—it was hard for me to tell, what with eight legs to watch—perhaps a cross between the breast stroke and the butterfly. It hardly matters. I flushed her and her big sister that I caught in the bathtub right on down the drain. I'm not frightened of spiders unduly, you understand. It's just that the brown recluse, which is endemic in these parts has a particularly nasty bite. I've seen the photos, so if you're interested in that sort of thing, try the ask.com gallery. Yes, both of them I flushed were brown recluse spiders. I understand they have a close relative in the Northwest called a hood spider, which is more the outdoors type. My son introduce one to me that had come in on some garden greens while we were at his house.
For the most part I'm happy to let arthropods, rodents and reptiles alone. If they don't come into my house, I don't bother them. Flies, I try to shoo out an open door or window. If I see other vermin or their leavings indoors, it's all-out war. Mom always said there was no shame in getting [vermin] The shame is in keeping them. Snakes are a bit harder, as they aren't so easy to trap. Malthion will kill them, but you don't want that in the house. It's easier just to keep stopping up all the cracks and holes to keep them outside in the first place.
Our quote for the day is from Terry Eagleton (b. 1943), British critic. Ideology, introduction (1991):
What persuades men and women to mistake each other from time to time for gods or vermin is ideology. One can understand well enough how human beings may struggle and murder for good material reasons—reasons connected, for instance, with their physical survival. It is much harder to grasp how they may come to do so in the name of something as apparently abstract as ideas. Yet ideas are what men and women live by, and will occasionally die for.
;^) Jan
2 comments:
We do not have venomous spiders over here so I picked them up and take them outside.
http://journals.aol.co.uk/jeanno43/JeannettesJottings/
... first, that is a very good and thought provoking quote ...
... in the big city, it is strange how you can walk and not see anything other than squirrels and the like, go a few blocks and you can see signs where the vermin obviously life and in numbers ...
... and then there are the four legged and winged one's, not simply the ones that walk upright ..!
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