Tonight I am releasing ONE MILLION spiders on to the SDMB

[bbs2k]

Frank, I seethe with the rage of one thousand hot spider farts. I hope spiders invade your house, bite you on the bum, and steal your car! The next spider I see I will name Frank just so I get a little more satisfaction from squishing it under a newspaper!

Link

@Frank

If the OP is serious, it’s a bad idea; if the OP is joking, it’s a bad idea.

Thread closed.

While I agree with the first part of what you say, I disagree with the second. I thought it was pretty funny at least, as well as doing no harm. And while it wasn’t until the thread was up the entire day that I acknowledged that I was openly not serious, many people did pick up the hint that I was just joking.

Let’s try a test, replace “huntsman spider” with “gremlin” and see how painfully tongue-in-cheek I was behaving:

I acquired three gremlins from a rare pet dealer in Somerville. They’re quite fearsome in person I must say. I figure I’ll put one in the bathroom behind the toilet, and I’ll try to coax the other to stay behind the clock in the main lab area.

In truth I thought it was funny because in reality this is my worst nightmare. Someone noted that in the past I’ve admitted openly that I have a tremendously irrational fear of spiders. I was basically just living the fantasy of the most horrible thing I could imagine someone doing to me vicariously through the boards. And some members responded with what I was looking for, which was basically whatever the most terrible thing possible you could do with a spider.

@ScareyFaerie

Could you get one to sit right beside the lightswitch so that whoever turns the lights on will realise just how close they came to actually touching it?

@LOUNE

They’re also notorious for dropping onto your head, without warning and getting tangled in your hair.

@lieu

Duh, in the lab security retina scanner.

@Autolycus

Hmm… You could put one in a co-workers coffee mug and glue its legs to the inside maybe. If they are really tired, they might not even notice the spider until they drink down to the bottom!

All ::eek::

Which was what my intent was. All spider/bug threads generally turn into a shock contest. Each member coming to contribute some type of horrible story in which they were scarred for life while the other members read it, report that they wished they didn’t read it, but go on only to be shocked some more. It’s true of me, I can’t turn down a good bug story even when I know I’ll just be giving myself the hebbie-jeebies. That was the direction the thread had turned, with members contributing stories of bird eating spiders, pics, and stories about tarantula hair. It was like any other good bugs/spider thread, except the twist of having a villain OP.

I’m sorry if I offended any folks who thought I might honestly try to pull this stunt off and felt bad for all those involved (coworkers + eight legged freaks). Which is why when I woke up this afternoon and saw that some people still weren’t sure the first thing I did was come clean, and that yes, I was just joking. But as Richard Parker pointed out I did say some really silly things to infer I was just being facetious:

@Richard Parker

@Anaamika

How is it clear please?

Well, aside from the fact that anyone with an ounce of common sense would realize that this is a terrible idea, you mean?
I suppose it was the mention of the “rare pet dealer,” the “affinity to clocks,” the story of him having to wrangle one back in, the extraordinary size of the individuals mentioned (large even for huntsman), the refusal of the OP to answer the question of whether he’s joking…all of which is potentially explainable, I guess, but in the context. C’mon.

Oh well, you can just ignore this if you’d like. I’m just ranting because my thread was closed, so I had the free time.

~bbs2k (At work, still with a job)

Disclaimer: No I do not want** Frank ** to really be bit on the bum by a spider. I can understand closing a thread with such a dubious OP. And yes, I cannot imagine someone with enough stupidity to actually do what I asserted in the OP of that thread. And while I am very scared of spiders I do not like killing them, and I do not endorse something that puts such an interesting arachnid in a certain death scenario.

Also, “preview” isn’t working for some reason, sorry for any gross errors.

[pool]

On preview we can actually see most of what you said, quite funny.

[bbs2k]

I started a thread asking about it in the About forum, hopefully this will be sorted, original title was “Tonight I am releasing ONE MILLION spiders on to the SDMB”

[Giraffe]

@bigbabysweets2000

I started a thread asking about it in the About forum, hopefully this will be sorted, original title was “Tonight I am releasing ONE MILLION spiders on to the SDMB”

I changed the title for you.

[bbs2k]

One mod fixed the coding, and another one fixed the title.

Now onward to the pitting of your brother-at-arms Frank!

[Frylock]

“Infer” means “Draw a conclusion.” You mean “Imply.”

-FrL-

[Giraffe]

@bigbabysweets2000

Now onward to the pitting of your brother-at-arms Frank!

Go right ahead. Do you want us to hold his arms while you hit him?

[Inner_Stickler]

The noble act of a true brother.

[Autolycus]

Umm… you know… sir… with today’s inflation and things, 1 million spiders is just not such a big deal anymore.

[bbs2k]

@Frylock

“Infer” means “Draw a conclusion.” You mean “Imply.”

-FrL-

I also screwed up the thread title in a panic after I started a blank OP. I’m chalking up a sloppy post to:

@bigbabysweets2000

Also, “preview” isn’t working for some reason, sorry for any gross errors.[/SIZE]

And

@Giraffe

Go right ahead. Do you want us to hold his arms while you [DEL]hit[/DEL] throw large tropical spiders at him?

(deleting mine)

[Maastricht]

bigbabysweets2000, humor is a strange thing, innit? But I see what you mean.
I got so worked up about your OP because of the memory it triggered. My brother, aged eleven at the time, once scared the beejezus out of me, his kid sister, by planting a big spider this way. It was fake, but the little sadist would have done it with a live one if he had been able to lay his hand on one. My bro’s prank involved a long piece of rubber band hanging from the toilet ceiling, and a big very lifelike rubber spider, and is was funny to everyone but me.
I really have to pour some sugar in the tank of his new car some of these days. That will be a hoot.

(Hmm…yep, using humor this way does have a certain appeal… )

[bbs2k]

@Maastricht

My bro’s prank involved a long piece of rubber band hanging from the toilet ceiling, and a big very lifelike rubber spider, and is was funny to everyone but me. [/SIZE]

It would have probably scared me too. I guess why I thought my OP was so funny (even though few else did) was how anti-me in real life it was. If someone told me that these spiders lived in Massachusetts, I’d move.

One small inspiration was a recent conversation with my future SIL, and we were talking about places besides Boston where we’d like to live. I told her, “I’d like to go back to Darwin, Australia maybe one day.”

She looked at me, shaking her head slowly and just said one thing in a low voice…

“Clock spider… no way baby… clock spider.”

Short anecdote: When I lived in an apartment with my two best friends we really would love to play pranks on each other. It was pretty much a sure thing that if you took a vacation that when you came back, there was *something * waiting for you there.

I went to Vermont for a week and when I came back I discovered that my roomates had hidden some fake plastic spiders throughout my room. No wait, not some, five hundred fake plastic spiders.

Everyday for the next week I’d find spiders, once a week every month after that. When we were moving out a year and a half later I was cleaning out our freezer and found a box of crappy popsicles that no one liked. I reached inside for one, pulled out… well, I think you know what I found.

[Cheesesteak]

@bigbabysweets2000

And yes, I cannot imagine someone with enough stupidity to actually do what I asserted in the OP of that thread.

You definitely don’t watch enough “caught on tape” TV shows. Some people have stupidity simply oozing from their pores.

[scareyfaerie]

I must admit I posted my suggestions on your original thread because I share the irrational fear of spiders and that would be my idea of hell. Having said that, I was still able to laugh many years ago when a friend of mine told me about his trip to the cinema. He went to see “Arachnophobia” and sat in the front row of the balcony, with a bag of several hundred plastic spiders. You can guess the rest.

[Liberal]

@Frylock

“Infer” means “Draw a conclusion.” You mean “Imply.”

-FrL-

Good luck with that. I was shot down fairly recently for making the same point. And by the way, OP, it’s “gotcha ya”.

[Contrapuntal]

@Frylock

“Infer” means “Draw a conclusion.” You mean “Imply.”

-FrL-

Words only mean what people want them to mean. Ask anyone around here. It is elitist to believe otherwise.

[asterion]

@Autolycus

Umm… you know… sir… with today’s inflation and things, 1 million spiders is just not such a big deal anymore.

But do they have frickin’ laser beams attached to their heads? Because then it might become a big deal.

[Frank]

@Giraffe

Go right ahead. Do you want us to hold his arms while you hit him?

Et tu, Brute?

As to the OP, shrug, I could have moved it to MPSIMS. In fact, I think I will.

[Sapo]

@Contrapuntal

Words only mean what people want them to mean. Ask anyone around here. It is elitist to believe otherwise.

I don’t think “mean” means what you mean it to mean, meanie.

[Wile_E]

I didn’t read it until after it was closed because it was about spiders shudder. Since I read the last post first I knew it was a joke but I could see how some spider lovers (is there such a thing?shudder) would get upset about it.

I don’t know why but I clicked on the links in the thread shudder but at least I now know what that humongous spider in my bathroom was that I made my boyfriend kill. It was near the door and I had to scream for him to come in and kill it because I knew if I walked past it it would have jumped on me. My kitten had come in to investigate and I grabbed her up and held her tightly while he killed the spider because the darn thing was big enough to take on the cat. Fortunately, I did not squeeze the life out of her. Normally, I don’t like to kill spiders but if they come in the house and are bigger than a dime, they’re fair game. This one was bigger than a silver dollar. shudder