Hey, I did that once, and afterwards, when I tried to say How Doth the Little Busy Bee, it came out all different. Now I can’t remember things as I used, and I don’t keep the same size for ten minutes together.
We’ve secretly replaced the marijuana in these stoners’ joint with a live caterpillar! Let’s see if they notice.
If you are so inclined, you can go back and read about our scabies experiences:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=218618
I just learned this summer that those aren’t ladybugs, or even relatives of the ladybug. Ladybugs are good – they eat aphids and have other benefits.
The things you’re seeing are Japanese beetles, and they’re bad news. They’re not native (never would have guessed that based on the name, would you? ;)), and they bite. They have also spread a number of diseases, and farmers/orchard growers and taking some desperate measures to keep them out. Nasty little things. My house was full of them earlier this year, and I’m still turning up a few living ones each week.
My own, personal gross stories don’t hold a candle to any of these. There are scads of times I’ve walked into populated spider webs in the forest. There was the time I dipped into my contraband bag of Cap’n Crunch with Crunchberries at summer camp, ate a handful, dipped in again and realized the entire bag was swarming with ants. There was the cockraoch cooked into the middle of my eggroll at a restaurant. There was the cicada that bounced off my forehead when I was waitressing at the cooks opened the back door one summer night.
I think my favorite story happened to a fellow camper at the same camp as the ant incident. We’d gone on an overnight and spent the night next to a pond. Several girls went swimming and came out with leeches attached, but that wasn’t the grossest part. The grossest thing happened the next morning, when Francie woke up and we all noticed a slime trail leading from the grass, across the tarp, onto her neck, across her face and into her hair on the other side of her head. Hopelessly tangled in her hair was a huge-ass banana slug. One of those foot-long living mucus specimens that thrive in the Pacific Northwest. She freaked.
Ah, good times. Good times.
I guess I have some repressed memories too: I forgot about the time I was getting into my shoes when my sock began to tickle. It was a roach in my shoe.
Okay, now just to let you all know, I am horribly terrified of spiders. If I so much as see one from across the room I’ll get this instant flight reaction. I’ve cried on more than one occasion after finding a spider in close proximity, or when someone who knows of my fear tries to put one near me “just to see what I’d do”. I’m also just as scared of dead ones.
On to the story:
Yes, I live in Kansas. Laugh all you want but every year this local family cuts paths into a giant field of corn in the shape of an angel/quail/gorilla whatever, creating a really huge maze that’s a couple of acres on each side. Anyway, a bunch of friends and I went one year at night with flashlights, planning on having some fun, maybe scaring some people, you know the usual stuff. Well, I guess some spiders really like to make their webs across corn stalks.
You know what spiders I’m talking about. They are brown, with long skinny legs and really huge round abdomens. The creepy ones that you’ll find in dusty windowsills and corners of old houses. Except the corn maze spiders were the size of quarters.
Anyway, they liked to make their webs fairly high up on the stalks. My 5’3" friend walked through the maze like nothing. Well I’ve got a good 6" on her, and I swear I hit every spiderweb in that maze WITH MY FACE. When I hit one, I’d let out a horrid scream and flail around and fall to the ground. It was terrible. My friends were like “Oh my gosh whats wrong, are you okay? what happened?”, actually thinking something was horribly wrong with me. I hit AT LEAST 5 webs like that. shudder
Cut to later that night. I’m home and in bed after a long night of “fun” in the corn maze. Do you ever feel like there is something crawling on you at night, so you flick on the light and pull back the covers only to find that nothing is there? Well that is a nightly occurence for me and I had never actually found anything crawling on me, it was just paranoia getting the better of me. Until that night. I totally felt something crawling up my leg, and up my shirt onto my back. Of course I freaked out and flipped onto the floor in some sort of ninja maneuver, and hit the lights on. Ick. There in my bed were the twitching remains of one of those big ass spiders. SICKSICKSICK. Makes me cringe just thinking about it.
I had a fly go down my throat while running cross country practice on a hot summer day. It “stuck” to the back of my throat, just far enough down that I could not remove it, and stayed there, fluttering and trying to get loose until I finished the 4+ mile run and got a drink. NOT fun at all. pukey face (I have allergy problems, and that day I had plugged up sinuses, so I had to breathe through my mouth.)
I once purchased an eggroll from a vending machine, only to find a dead gnat inside the eggroll. Needless to say, I haven’t bought any more machine eggrolls. :eek:
:eek: Well, now that I’m scarred for life by that thought…flaming wasps…faint
As I am not afraid of anything creepy or crawly- I am going to risk the ire and damnation of the previous posters and confess my very best revenge story.
After a long fall week-end of receiving repeated beatings by my bully older sister, I was pouting and hiking in the woods behind my family’s home. I came across a praying mantis egg case . I figured maybe 30-40 baby praying mantis-es (plural?) might be incubating inside, or maybe I had found an old case that had already been emptied of its progeny. Either way, worth a try.
I opened sis’s door quietly, asked her if she had called my name, (“Doubtful!”) and tossed the egg case under her four-poster bed.
Temperature dropped a little that night, and the old oil furnace kicked on. (vent under her bed)
About 10ish the screams started- must have been about 200 of the pale pink minature mantis (manti?) crawling all over the bed spread, the shag carpet, the curtains.
Payback: I am a bleeding heart vegetarian type and insisted on rescuing all the babies and spent about 3 hours gathering the helpless things into a mason jar before I would let the parents bomb the bedroom.
Yeah, they knew it was me. bwah ha ha ha ha ha
Might as well break my lurk with this one.
So, one day I’m eating a tuna fish sandwich for lunch. I’m eating at my desk, working on a programming project, and I run out of steam before I finish the sandwich. I don’t want to interrupt my groove, so I look for a place to set the plate aside – no room on the desk, as it’s cluttered with notes, but there’s nothing on the hutch. So I put the plate - with the half-eaten sandwich - on top of the hutch, trusting my code-bedazzled brain to remember to bring it to the kitchen later. (Smell that? It’s impending disaster. Oh, and rotting tuna.)
Cut to a couple of days later - hot, humid summer days, mind you - and I wake up in the middle of the night and decide to do some work. I stumble over to the desk, flick the desk lamp on, sit down, and begin coding. A couple of minutes later, I hear a tiny >plink!< somewhere on the desk. I look around, but I can’t see what caused it, so I rationalize it away and continue typing. A few seconds later, another >plink!<. As I’m sitting there thinking, “Now, that one I didn’t imagine!” something resembling a grain of rice falls from above, bounces off my forehead, and lands on the desk with a >plink!<. It appears to be moving, and I go in for a closer look. It’s a maggot. Writhing and wriggling in all its repulsive glory. As I’m trying to shake my brain out of screensaver mode, another two maggots drop onto the desk - one landing on my hand - and I jump up and hit the overhead light. Big mistake. >plink plink plink plink plink!< Atop the hutch the plate is teeming with mill - well, hundreds of maggots. Apparently they were attracted to the desk light when I first turned it on, so a few spilled over the edge trying to reach it, but now - with the bright overhead lights on - it’s a tidal wave of maggots hurling themselves over the edge of the plate with lemminglike glee…
I don’t know if you’ve ever rushed around with a garbage basket trying to catch maggots spilling from two opposing sides of a rather long desk hutch before they hit the carpet and burrow in, but if you ever get the opportunity - well, I’d pass if I were you.
I didn’t eat tuna fish for a long, long time after that. I’ve had it since, but, well, it just doesn’t go down quite as easily anymore. I can live without it.
Maggots are good for protein!~ 
My grossest insect-related story ever
Me and my now-ex-step-dad were unpacking a bunch of stuff out of a house that no one had lived in for 3-4 months. We didn’t finish the work in one day so we just camped out in the house for the night.
I slept on the couch.
I woke up in the middle of the night and it felt like I had a big booger in my right nostril. I crammed my pointer finger up their as far as I could but I couldn’t seem to get the booger, so I sat up wondering if their was any TP in the house when my booger started thumping in my nose.
I got really freaked out.
I promptly found an old t-shirt and blew my nose, and, to my horror it was the biggest flipping moth I have ever seen in my life. And it was in my nose.
To this day I am very happy that I didn’t decide to snort it in…
shudder
Oh, I am REALLY enjoying this thread (short of the bee and wasp sting stories: insects, spiders and maggots don’t bother me EXCEPT for bees/wasps/hornets, which scare me to absolute death on account of the sting factor). Well anyway, I hope earthworms count, so I can tell MY tale. Heh heh heh.
I grew up in a suburban house, lower-middle class neigborhood. The next door neighbors had, among their five kids, three obnoxious boys who used to come to OUR yard and do destructive things. When I was in 7th and 8th grade, I belonged to my junior high school’s botany club, Grow Your Own Thing. I had been doing especially well with house plants and finally got my mother’s permission to try to grow tomatoes and potatoes in the back yard. In 7th grade it was a disaster because of the aforementioned obnoxious brats coming from next door and stomping/otherwise ruining my little garden. When the 8th grade outdoor “growing season” started again, I made another attempt.
I was outside digging in the dirt, preparing to plant, when the little bastards from next door showed up in my yard. We exchanged some very nasty and profane verbiage, I got up and unsuccessfully tried to chase them out, threatening to tell their mother if I ever saw them in my yard again and if my garden was ever wrecked again too, I’d just assume they’d done it. They paid me no heed but the youngest one asked me if there were any worms in the dirt.
"Of course, you f***ing idiot,earthworms LIVE in the ground!"
"Then I dare you to eat one," said the middle one.
I proceeded to turn their attempt to gross me out into a major serious backfire. I pulled a worm straight up from the ground and swallowed it whole, then I grinned at them. One by one, I easily pulled SEVENTEEN MORE straight out of the ground, swallowing some, chewing others (with my mouth pointedly open) while they all stared in shocked horror. When I held up the nineteenth earthworm, I smiled again, opened my mouth, and they all ran away screaming “EWWWWWWWW!!!” I put the worm down, giggling. The little creeps stayed out of my yard from then on, and that year I managed to grow some tomatoes (I don’t recall anymore why the potatoes didn’t grow, only that they didn’t).
But the very next day, I was out walking my mother’s dog and “Mrs. Smith,” their mother, came to me and accused me of ruining their family’s dinner. Turns out Mrs. Smith had served spaghetti for dinner and not only couldn’t the boys eat it, but all they could talk about at the table was how I ate all those worms right out of the ground, which grossed the rest of the family out of their supper too.
MYUUUUHAHAHAHA!! O Sweet Revenge! >;-)
Yersinia…How’d they taste? 
Not surprisingly, they tasted like dirt. The ones I chewed were gritty. The ones I swallowed were slimy. Haven’t eaten any since, but if I was given a really good reason, I’d do it. Certainly I don’t regret having done it when I was a kid.
OK, so it’s not really about insects, but I tell this story every chance I get, so a new audience is always welcome (lucky you).
In the 10th grade, I had to prepare an insect collection for a science project. A well meaning neighbour heard about this, and mentioned it to someone in my church who runs a small grocery store.
Said shopkeeper phoned me at home one afternoon and said, “My friend, I have a good spider for your collection! It came in a shipment of bananas from Brazil.” Unwilling to point out that NO, spiders are not insects, and driven by the typical male desire to investigate something vaguely gross but equally cool, I jumped on my bike and road to the store, upon which I was handed a little plastic jar. I opened the jar, and found myself face to face with a LARGE (my guess is about 7-8cm wide), hairy, ugly spider. I poked it a little, prodded it a little, and fed it a grape, all to no avail. I thanked the shopkeeper, shoved the jar into my backpack and road home. The spider died overnight, probably due to a good dose of old-fashioned bug poison.
I didn’t really think about that hairy little bugger until the next summer, when I was visiting a museum in Alberta, Canada, with my family. This museum had just opened a new exhibit (entitled “Creepy Crawlies” or something similarly inane), and lo and behold, they had my spider in a large glass aquarium. I showed the bug to my father, who checked it out and agreed with me. A elderly gentleman walked up behind us, and proceeded to vehemently disagree with my story, claiming that there was no way such a spider could have found it’s way into my town. I pointed out that it had arrived amidst a shipment of bananas from Brazil, at which point he asked if it had ever acted aggressively.
Anyway, the long and short of the story is, this hairy beast, which I poked and which lived in my room overnight, was a Brazilian Wandering spider (check it out at http://triffophoto3.tripod.com/tpo/id8.html).
These little wretches can apparentely kill a grown man in 4 hours with a bite, and are known to attack without provocation.
So, having cheated death, when I arrived home, I dug out the old project and squished the carcass, just to be sure.
I don’t have any nasty bug stories, but I do have a story about the Fucking Strangest Insect I Have Ever Seen.
About a year ago, I was over at a friend’s house in the Student Ghetto. Beautiful old houses, usually with at least 3 people living in them, it seems. Anyway, she’s giving me the tour, and we finally get down into the basement. I’m looking around, then puzzle over this metal futon frmae (why would you only have the FRAME?). Then I look to the floor below the frame and - what the fuck is that?
Not being afraid of bugs, I lean down and call Sam over. Here we are, two girls, trying to figure out what the fuck this thing is. Including legs, it’s about the size of a quarter, is black with red-tipped legs, and looks like a cross between a crab and a spider. I’m not usually one for killing bugs (I usually put them outside), but all I could say is, “That thing looks EVIL. Kill it. Yuck.”
So, Sam proceeds to step on it. Doesn’t even look t be phased. Apparently, this spider-crab thing can withstand about 120 pounds. Step again. Nope, still going. She finally has to STOMP on it and we both hear this loud crunch.
I never did find out what it was. No one else knew either. I’m just glad I haven’t seen another one since then. Ug.
Was lying in bed, much more asleep then awake, when I felt something skeetering across my chest. My natural reaction was just to swat it. Kinda like that old prank where you tickle a persons nose with a feather in the hopes that that swat it with their shaving cream laden hand. Well I ended up smearing it across my chest because I was so sleepy. The feeling jolted me awake and I quickly turned on my light. Turns out it was a centipede of some sorts and I managed to smear it all over my chest. There was little bug guts and legs all over, ick.
[dooley]
You pick your nose.
[/dooley]
Actually, so do I, come to think of it.
Spiny orb-weaver, Gasteracantha cancriformis ( Plate 6 ). The spiny orb-weaver spider is one of the most colorful and easily recognized spiders in Florida. The dorsum of the abdomen is usually white with black spots and large red spines on the margin. Females are 5 mm to 10 mm long and 10 mm to 14 mm wide. The webs typically contain tufts of silk, which may prevent birds from flying into them.
http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/IN017
For how tiny these little guys are, I have seen webs stretching over 10 feet in length.