In THIS COLUMN, Unca Cecil contemplates arson as a means of disposing of creepy-crawlys.
THIS WOMAN combined Cecil’s pyromania with a stunt from an old James Bond movie to kill, not roaches, but spiders.
With predictable results.
The best laid plans aft time go agley. But hey! The spiders are dead! Cecil was right again!
“The best-laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men
Gang aft a-gley,”
Robert Burns
Remarkably similar to the method we used in the basement of my fraternity in college. In Corvallis, Oregon, they have these enormous Oriental cockroaches that are three times the size of the puny German brown roaches common to the rest of the country, some up to 2 inches in length… There was a rumor that they had escaped from pesticide research at OSU. But anyway, we would squirt them with lighter fluid and watch their flaming carcasses scurry around the concrete floor, only causing consternation when they found their way under the sofa. The wild thing was, some of them survived and escaped into cracks and crannies. We recognized them later by their scorched carapaces, marked for life in the endless war between human and arthropod.
Since reading this column in the first Straight Dope compilation, this sentence:
…has never failed to crack me up.
“Gang aft a-gley” is Scottish for “get pregnant”. 
not