There is no term yet devised to confer the extent of my loathing for you. You are the most vile 16th of an ounce of unadulterated puss-oozing scum that has ever been unleashed on planet earth. You are the hemorrhoidal skid mark on the tighty-wighteys of human existence. You sneak into my house by the hundreds even though it is supposed to be airtight. Perhaps you spontaneously pop into existence created from some non-corporeal pile of ancient demon-bile that was left on my yard in ages past. But there you are. You fly into my refrigerator as soon as I open it and hide behind the mustard leaving your dusty trail of putrescence, polluting all my food by your proximity to it. You fly into my shower as I attempt to clean myself, crashing into my body and getting stuck, forcing me to spend twice as much time re-cleaning my self to get the powdery residue of your evil off. You dive bomb into my cooking forcing my to throw out a gallon of 95% finished Marinara. You fly into my sleeve leaving me no choice but to flail helplessly, and shriek like a little girl as your concentrated hideousness tries to defile my pure and holy skin. Then last summer you stepped up one more notch of repulsiveness and flew into my mouth around the campfire. Your cowardly ass then tried to fly away in the darkness thinking that I wouldn’t be able to identify you, but I know it was you. The war was joined long ago and you have the numbers, but I have the steadfast determination of a man fighting the true fight against the manifestation of hellish-horror that you are.
And I have many weapons. I have fly swatters and magazines and newspapers and even a mag-lite to smash you into ex-mothhood. I can use my hands to smash you halfway through the wall, or to snag you out of the air and fling your pathetic frail body against the floor to hear the satisfying thud of your miserable life escaping, Bwahaha you didn’t think I could catch you that easy, but I have been training my moth-catching reflexes for years. Your eratic flight patterns are of no use any more. I can use a can of hairspray, or paint, or polyurethane to remove your one advantage of flight, then drop you on an anthill and watch them rip you to pieces, as you struggle hopelessly against the entangling chemicals. I can also use a can of WD-40 as a flame thrower to fry every atom of your hellborn body into ash. I can even kill you when I am gone. I can put a bowl of water under a light and come to dance a maniacal jig over your numerous rotting corpses. Yes, you occasionally escaped when I only used soapy water, but now the bowl has hydrochloric acid, removing most traces of your noxious existence from reality. The false god of light I created for you glaring indifferent only to illuminate your death. I only wish you had a fully developed nervous system so you could feel every last degree of the excruciating pain I will visit upon each member of your abominable kind I can find.
You threw out a whole pot of marinara because a miller fell into it?
Y’know, if you’re making marinara from scratch, I’d be willing to bet that somewhere in your kitchen is at least one unused tablespoon. Said spoons are generally much wider across than the typical insect you have described. If one were to insert the spoon shallowly into the sauce, lifting gently after the entire spoon surrounded the moth’s swimming area, you could probably lift the moth (and any contamination) right out of the sauce. (They aren’t flies. They aren’t hanging around the toilet, dragging germs back to the cupboard. They are living in your cupboard in a package of nice, clean food that you bought and forgot to seal. Their ability to contaminate cooking food is negligible.)
Mind you, I hate millers with a passion that nearly runs as deep as yours. My refrigerator is chock full of flour and other grain products that I cannot place in the cupboard because they will be infested in less than a week.
But throwing out a good sauce 'cause a bug dropped in for a taste is simply phobic. (A good miller trap: whenever you enjoy a bottle of red wine, pour the last dregs into a small cup and leave out overnight. In the morning you can wash away three or four of the pests who are sleeping off their last binge.)
Er, you sure you’re talking about miller moths, tomndebb? Miller moths don’t breed indoors, only live a few days, and don’t invade food or any other such things. They’re BIG and UGLY, though.
Perhaps you’re thinking of meal moths, tiny moths that exhibit all the behaviors you describe.
Speaking of miller moths, here’s an interesting page with some tips on how to deal with 'em.
I admit that I was hasty in my assumptions about the particular moths in question. There are actually several varities of moths that are known (colloquially or regionally) as millers. They all have one common trait–a “dusty” smear from the scales on their wings.
It is certainly possible that wolfman has been forced to deal with a different variety than I have encountered. It would not surprise me, at all, to discover that the moths I’ve called miller for, lo, these many years, are better known in other places as meal moths.
My grandfather used to use those sticky-strip thingys, hung right under a light. That thing used to catch so many flies and moths that he would have to change it every couple of days.
It was like having your own personal black man standing out there with a flyswatter at all hours.
I got it, and it was hilarious. This might be the best new inside joke on the SDMB, partly for the mystification it will provoke in newbies. “Hi Opal” is just odd (and should be retired, IMO), but “your own personal black man” is just so… so… dark.
Heh.
Oh, and this:
You didn’t mention the paddle zapper. Kind of a pain to chase the bug around, and the one we have is on the fragile side (if I ever swipe and accidentally hit something solid, this baby will shatter). Those flaws aside, it’s oh so satisfying when you actually make contact, see the blue flash, hear the CRACK, and watch the instantly-dead insect go flying like a tiny badminton cadaver. I suggest you add it to your arsenal. Handy tip, hold the charge buttons down while you’re swiping, instead of just powering it up and letting them go; this maximizes the electrical discharge.
You are my new lieutenant in the battle against the assholic little bastards. I need to get one of those as soon as possible.(I hope thats not a joke and I’m being wooshed, cause electrical discharge would be a great new addition to my arsenal.)
I’ve killed them with snappers but a bottle rocket would be a great idea as well. Must work out the equations.
The paddle zapper is for real, I bought it for him along with some barbeque tools. Manly jobs: cooking with fire and killing bugs.
For ‘kitchen’ moths (I don’t know the specific moth species - but these are ones that eat flour and grains), I found that pheremone traps worked extremely well. I got rid of a very nasty infestation of kitchen moths in about two months without much fuss at all.
But after catching up on Pit threads–I couldn’t resist.
