In the recent Mailbag article http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/mmosquitobee.html, SDSTAFF Doug or SDSTAFF Jill wrote, “Regardless of Lileth’s insistent lies and perpetuation of an obvious myth in this Straight Dope column, trust me–it doesn’t work.”
Well, I have to chime in and say it DOES work. As described in the original article, (http://www.straightdope.com/columns/970822.html) the mosquitos don’t so much explode as rupture, but the effect is still plenty cool to teenage boys. (I did this occasionally back in my junior high days.) Unfortunately the west nile virus has shown up in my vicinity (Utica, NY) so my idea to videotape this happening to disprove the doubters will have to be postponed indefinitely.
Sorry, I didn’t realize I was getting into the middle of a feud. I don’t frequent the message boards… I simply took advantage of the “Comment on this answer” link at the bottom of the mosquito/bee article.
Sorry, arcuri, I din’t realize it was your first post. WELCOME! … My apologies, I was just joshin’.
It’s NOT true that Jill will sneak up behind you at dusk and try to bite you on the arm. Nor is it true that Lileth tried to explode Jill by tensing her mussels.
The truth, of course, is that Lilith tried to explode Jill by using several kilos of nitroglycerin. She wanted something more thorough, but couldn’t get ahold of the plutonium.
I have to chime in here too, and say it does work.
Not by just flexing the muscle–I’ve never gotten that to work, but if you pinch the section of skin on which the mosquito is sucking, it does send more blood into the little feller and he pops. I’ve done it on several occasions.
To be specific, I used to place my thumb and index finger on opposite sides of the mosquito, press down onto my skin and pull my fingers away from each other, while tensing the muscles beneath. They’d rupture within a few seconds.
Why do it? I derived some short-lived sick pleasure… I always felt it was just desserts for the irritation they caused.
We did the mosquito “exploding” trick all the time at camp. We found that the skin-stretch method worked best.
One friend of mine had the muscle tone to attempt the muscle-tension method. He waited until one alit on his forarm (less fat, more tension from the muscle possible). She got quite big, but in the end, my friend couldn’t keep up the tension. She flew off, really slow (heavy load plus 10,000 ft elevation). I wasn’t about to let her get away with it, so I clapped her between my hands. It’s amazing how so little amount of blood spreads out when squished out of a mosquito. It looked like I’d just done surgury.
No brag, but I got some serious muscle tone and I know boys with even seriouser muscle tone. We’ve tried it and ended up with just bad mosquito bites and you could hear these tiny chuckles and “thanks, loser!” from the squites as they flew away. So I don’t know about this “stretch the skin” trick, but it’s obviously not the same thing. Maybe it works, but I’m not ready to make an ass out of myself by trying it. That’s Lileth’s job.
Overhearing a conversation at work today one guy was telling the other how he used to do this when he was a kid. I was skeptical and thought I’d check the dope which led me to this 17 year-old thread. Since we’re now in the age of youtube and everyone is carrying smartphone video cameras with them I thought that there had to be a good video of this somewhere.
And my searches came up empty.
Can anyone provide proof of this besides anecdotal evidence? A video would be nice.
