Society is in the gutter

most humane way to kill a fly is to swat it, as opposed to pulling off its wings and legs then dropping it on a hot griddle or anything of that nature

yeah i suppose i don't actually want to kill them.

Just escort them off the premises.

give them a bit of a beatin'

I am mates with my house spiders because they're mint and they deal with the flies

Send them away with a flea in their ear... if they've got ears.

You need to identify the alpha fly and let it know you will liquidate it's whole family if it doesn't buzz off.

I can't negotiate a sit-down with such a senior fly.

An Australian over how wondering just how bad Irish flies could be. When we turn on the reverse cycle A/C in summer the back screen door is literally thick with them.

I don't kill them either. The ones that get in the house I just catch and evict.

i imagine we are currently at the most flyless point in human history, what with our walls and buildings and sophisticated plumbing/sewage systems and AC and lack of corpses on public display.

still, flies like water, and they like organic matter, so they linger on. they may be with us until death is conquered. nowadays we can achieve distance from flies through the application of technology and willpower.

flies like sitting water, anything from our standard yard/road puddle to condensation on our iced drinks to the water mysteriously leaking from our refrigerator.

some puddles you can control, some you cannot.

god bless you who tame the savage fly.

We get flies, and ants, periodically. Reason One is probably that we have a toddler who wanders about everywhere, spilling sugary drinks and flinging his snacks about. If we got rid of the toddler we'd have a lot fewer bugs in the house. Also it's an old house, and therefore basically porous.

I don't like bug spray (cf. small children who touch everything and put random things in their mouths), but I do generally kill the flies. They're too nimble to catch and release, and generally very good at flying. So I spray them with something innocuous (water, glass cleaner, air freshener), not to kill them but to make them temporarily bad at flying. When they stop to clean off whatever it is, then I swat them. I may feel slightly bad, but I feel this is morally preferable to allowing them to breed in the house and thereby making more flies, who would lead frustratingly short indoor lives before needing to be killed in some ignominious manner.

Society in general gets a C+ in my estimation. It has a ways to go, but so do I. There is a lot of evil about - as there always has been - but decent people are getting better every day about recognizing it and calling it out.

The different types of flies behave in quite different ways. The bigger ones seem to just want to get out of the house back into the open air, and they usually find their way out pretty quickly. They actually seem quite clever in finding their way around, but if they have trouble, I'll draw curtains and direct them towards a door, where there's light, and beyond that an open window. Smaller ones seem more intent on staying inside and looking for things to feed on. They seem to be most attracted by sugary things, like the rims of glasses of wine or beer. They just keep coming back, and they fly fast, so they are difficult to capture. They seem to like resting on walls rather than horizontal surfaces, so I wait until they settle on a wall, approach slowly and catch in a glass, then release out of the window.

The worst flies are the tiny ones that congregate in huge clouds anywhere near sewage plants, or rivers and streams receiving cleansed water from sewage plants.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/14/opinion/narcissism-is-increasing-so-youre-not-so-special.html?WT.mc_id=2016-JUNE-FB-MC8-AUD_DEV-0610&WT.mc_ev=click&ad-keywords=AUDDEVGate&_r=0

My teenage son recently informed me that there is an Internet quiz to test oneself for narcissism. His friend had just taken it. “How did it turn out?” I asked. “He says he did great!” my son responded. “He got the maximum score!”

http://images.forbes.com/media/lists/53/2010/jay-leno.jpg

Donald J. Trump ‏@realDonaldTrump
Another horrific attack, this time in Nice, France. Many dead and injured. When will we learn? It is only getting worse.

you know you're not going to change the world by running over random people with a truck. there was a time when you could do that, but that window of opportunity is closed.

― the event dynamics of power asynchrony (rushomancy), Thursday, 14 July 2016 23:48 (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

tbt

trucks used to contain local goods

is this really the right thread title to talk about this under

no, it isn't, sorry

i was going to bump this yesterday with a quaint and wistful observation about how when young people used to throng the parks and streets, it was with a ball to kick, an ice-cream cone. now the only ball is on a screen, the ice-cream cone a virtual monster that isn't really there. they will never see the birds

https://www.uber.com/promo/ice-cream/

oy

see what we have wrought

FWIW I was alive in the nineteen-seventies. Plenty of things sucked mightily then too. Some of the same things, some different things. Peace out y'all.

http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/images/ic/640x360/legacy/clip/p007n14v.jpg

40-50 years ago (and less), the kinds of US police shootings we've been enraged by of late would've been buried in the newspapers if they were noted at all.

you all are not understanding this thread

no we do, we're trying to change it.

there was a time you could open a newspaper and not have to read about african-american men murdered by police

simpler times

you had a thread called "society is in the gutter" and people knew what it was for

Now youve said it, sean, now you have it

we used to appreciate threads - we didn't have many but we read them every day

the threads were threads and thats all there was to it, now days... pokeman

would be nice if people caught some values along with those pokes.

Gutter catch 'em all, I say.

http://i.imgur.com/7JeV84g.png

I was killing some time in the staff room, as you do, and started reading a Dean R Koontz thriller called Dragon Tears. This was on page 2.

http://i.imgur.com/mZg02p5.jpg?1

the use of "no doubt" is key.

tbf Koontz might have been on to something with the "bad-tempered, evil minded trolls" bit

in my day a troll was someone who would happily stay under his bridge, now it's all Twitter this, Facebook that

mankind? more like ManUNkind if you ask me

https://metallica.com/blog/news/429181/hardwired-to-self-destruct-available-november-18-2

http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-doomed-mouse-utopia-that-inspired-the-rats-of-nimh

i condensed it for those who don't want to read the full article:

In 1947, to keep a close eye on his charges, Calhoun constructed a quarter-acre "rat city" behind his house, and filled it with breeding pairs. He expected to be able to house 5,000 rats there but over the two years he observed the city, the population never exceeded 150. At that point, the rats became too stressed to reproduce. They started acting weirdly, rolling dirt into balls rather than digging normal tunnels. They hissed and fought.

[...]

Most frightening are the parallels he draws between rodent and human society. "I shall largely speak of mice," he begins, "but my thoughts are on man." Both species, he explains, are vulnerable to two types of death—that of the spirit and that of the body. Even though he had removed physical threats, doing so had forced the residents of Universe 25 into a spiritually unhealthy situation, full of crowding, overstimulation, and contact with various mouse strangers. To a society experiencing the rapid growth of cities—and reacting, in various ways, quite poorly—this story seemed familiar. Senators brought it up in meetings. It showed up in science fiction and comic books. Even Tom Wolfe, never lost for description, used Calhounian terms to describe New York City, calling all of Gotham a "behavioral sink."

Convinced that he had found a real problem, Calhoun quickly began using his mouse models to try and fix it. If mice and humans weren't afforded enough physical space, he thought, perhaps they could make up for it with conceptual space—creativity, artistry, and the type of community not built around social hierarchies. His later Universes were designed to be spiritually as well as physically utopic, with rodent interactions carefully controlled to maximize happiness (he was particularly fascinated by some early rats who had created an innovative form of tunneling, where they rolled dirt into balls). He extrapolated this, too, to human concerns, becoming an early supporter of environmental design and H.G. Wells's hypothetical "World Brain," an international information network that was a clear precursor to the internet.

[...]

But there was one person who paid attention to his more optimistic experiments, a writer named Robert C. O'Brien. In the late '60s, O'Brien allegedly visited Calhoun's lab, met the man trying to build a true and creative rat paradise, and took note of the Frisbee on the door, the scientists' own attempt "to help when things got too stressful," as Calhoun put it. Soon after, O'Brien wrote Ms. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH—a story about rats who, having escaped from a lab full of blundering humans, attempt to build their own utopia. Next time, maybe we should put the rats in charge.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CvIpdKUWgAAlJau.jpg

excellent use of the rhetorical question there, A+

"even 20 years ago an ambulance would have been called"

'would of' surely?

Lowering taxes to makes lower paid jobs more worthwhile would of helped this indolent gent get `back on his feet'

that's amazing. garda you have to get some submissions into these 'have your say' newspaper things, it's a natural forum for reports from the gutter.

struggling to accept that that isn't garda's work tbh