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Monthly Archives: May 2011

Bugs and stuff

Disclaimer: if you’re squeemish about bugs and spiders, this post only gets worse as you continue.

This.  I would like one of these as a pet.  It is a Japanese beetle and it is considered a bit of a pest here in the US.  But when my mother was growing up in Taiwan, they weren’t as there are natural predators there.  She used to catch them as a girl and tie a string around their legs and watch them fly about.  They’re pretty clumsy fliers.  I can’t imagine what they’d be like trying to fly with a string attached to its leg.

Oh, so I’d really also like a rhinocerous beetle.

See?  Even their larvae are cute!  Too bad they aren’t native to the US.  Or at least, there aren’t too many species native to the US.

Anyway, we have some grapevines in the backyard but I’ve never really seen any Japanese beetles hanging around the plants.  I suppose that’s good for us, since we still get to eat grapes, but I really want a beetle.  Grampaw, one of my colleagues at work, says that he has hordes of them hanging around his grape plants in his backyard.  HORDES!  I’ve petitioned, unsuccessfully, for the last couple of years for him to catch one for me.  He keeps refusing.  I think he’s secretly afraid of them.  Or maybe just disgusted by them.  It’s still unfair though.  He gets a huge supply of Japanese beetles and he just lets them go to waste!

So then, you may be thinking that it’s really weird for me to be asking my coworkers to catch bugs for me.  You may think that they are just so weirded out by me asking them such questions.  Not really.  I’ve kind of desensitized them to my weirdness.  At least regarding bugs.  I’ve caught and jarred several bugs during my tenure at the office.  I’ve caught:

  • a species darkling beetle (I don’t remember which one, I ended up giving it someone for a school project)
  • a moth (because it was available)
  • a fly (actually FSB caught this for me, and by caught I mean that he found the fly dead in a vial and then he gave it to me)
  • lots of fruitflies (because they’re so annoying)
  • a pincher bug (I think they look cute and I ended up letting this one go because I found out that they can live for a pretty long time and I didn’t want it to be bored to death)
  • I think I have an ant in a vial somewhere

Besides these, I also had a brown widow spider.

I didn’t actually catch this one, she caught herself.  We had left some empty, open vials out on the table one night and she crawled into one.  She was a pretty stupid spider because the vial was barely big enough to fit her.  Grampaw found her the next morning and stoppered the vial to give to me later in the day.  That was nice of him.  I ended up giving her to SMW, another one of my coworkers, because once he caught a black widow spider with his own hands and put it in a jar.

After that, he caught flies for her.  I think he ended up setting her free.  I don’t remember.  Anyhoo, he liked the brown widow spider a lot because they have geometrical patterns on their abdomens.  We would take turns looking at it under a magnifying lens.

And just to leave you with something interesting, here is an article about how tarantulas really do leave silk footprints around because they actually can spin silk from their feet and not just from their spinnerets at their butt.

Also, I think I might also like a Mexican flame-knee tarantula as a pet.  Yaris would be so displeased with me though.

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The Irritation Quota

Anger has been a bit of a problem for me recently.  A lot of it is tied into how some people or things irritate me a lot.  Now that I think about it, a lot of my anger has its roots in some form of irritation and then more irritation piles on top of it and then they morph and congeal and become this huge mass of irritation which becomes a ball of anger.  Think about it, wouldn’t it make you angry if there was a huge ball of irritating anger in you and you had to carry it everywhere?  Where would you even put such a thing?  It’s not like there’s a lot of room for you to store big balls of anger inside of you.  You have all these innards in the way.  It must make you feel bloated.  That would be another source of irritation, which would make you even angrier.  It’s a vicious cycle.  Sugh.

Anyway, to deal with this, I have come up with a new anger management system.  Granted, I don’t know much about real anger management systems that they teach to you in…anger management classes.  All I know is stuff that I’ve seen on TV and in movies.  And I’m sure it’s totally true.  Hollywood would never lie to you.  Hollywood portrays life in a completely accurate manner.  Seeing the anger management classes that people conduct in the media…well, they irritate me and that feeds the anger ball, and that needs to be avoided.  So, new anger management system!

Now, I have tracked down that the root of a lot of the anger comes from irritation.  This should probably be limited that in some way.  It seems that people are capable of producing limitless amounts of irritation.  You would think that would violate some laws of physics, but apparently not, because I am can generate just infinite amounts of irritation.  This is no good for anger management.  Thus, I propose a quota system.  You will only allow yourself a limited amount of irritation a day.  Preferably some amount that will keep the bits of irritation from reaching critical mass and then interacting with each other and congealing into a big irritation mass that then becomes an anger ball that will make you bloated and thus more angry and more bloated and more angry and more bloated and more angry until you explode with bloatation, anger, and irritation.  That would be a sad way to die.  Bloated to death!  Bloatality!  Yeah…no good.

So, if you limit the amount of irritation you are willing to hand out at every irritant, it should greatly help reduce the size of the anger ball.  Oh, you’re smacking your gum incessantly?  Two units of irritation for you.  You come in every two minutes asking me the same question but in different ways because you didn’t like the answer I gave you the first time, an answer that was truthful and reasonably well thought out?  Five units of irritation for you.  You are entirely incapable of working out a schedule that is realistic to the resources we have and insist that I work overtime for the rest of my life and also work 23434 hours in a day?  Ten units of irritation for you.  Actually, this is a lot irritation already.  I should be careful.  Maybe I should lower the quota a bit.

But anyway, say now someone comes in and wants me to answer a question for them, a question they could have easily answered themselves just by doing the smallest amount of research.  Well, this might coincide with three units of irritation, but I am out of irritation for the day.  Therefore, that person will just have to come back tomorrow while I refill my irritation quota.  That person can even be the first person in the line for fresh irritation.  Thus, I can deal with the person and his stupid question with the appropriate amount of irritation that they and it deserve.

Limit the irritation, limit the anger.  Ta-da!  Anger management system!

(Hahaha, you thought I was going to talk about limiting the sources of irritation from reading the title, didn’t you?  Well you thought wrong!  HAHAHAHAH!!)