Erik is a committed father who is finding the toddler years more of a chore than some other dads make it seem. Candid soul searching ensues.
Cameron’s spring cleaning uncovers unwelcome houseguests. Her research into their origins and lifestyle only serves to gross her out further.
Speaking of gross, how do you like maggots that don’t wait until you’re dead to eat you? We used to have them in the United States. Cassie tells one of the great unsung eradication stories.
Helen delights us with a zoological survey of a Washington, D.C. sidewalk between the hours of two and five a.m. Complete with illustrations.
And Abstruse Goose shows us that Dickens is as relevant as ever in his insights on life as a person.
AG’s giving Dickens a happy ending here. The cartoon’s secret mouseover says to consult paragraph 1, chapter 3, of Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. In that chapter, a banker is on his way to a mysterious meeting in which he’s to learn who was buried, how that person came back to life, and what he, the banker, must do about it. Meanwhile, he’s riding through the city, thinking lonely thoughts we’ve all had. God but I loved that book. Here’s Dickens in all his wordy glory:
A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it! Something of the awfulness, even of Death itself, is referable to this. No more can I turn the leaves of this dear book that I loved, and vainly hope in time to read it all. No more can I look into the depths of this unfathomable water, wherein, as momentary lights glanced into it, I have had glimpses of buried treasure and other things submerged. It was appointed that the book should shut with a spring, for ever and for ever, when I had read but a page. It was appointed that the water should be locked in an eternal frost, when the light was playing on its surface, and I stood in ignorance on the shore. My friend is dead, my neighbour is dead, my love, the darling of my soul, is dead; it is the inexorable consolidation and perpetuation of the secret that was always in that individuality, and which I shall carry in mine to my life’s end. In any of the burial-places of this city through which I pass, is there a sleeper more inscrutable than its busy inhabitants are, in their innermost personality, to me, or than I am to them?
My friend Kate and I use U2 concerts as an excuse to travel and see new cities. But earlier this summer the band had scheduled a couple of nights here in Washington, D.C., so we decided to spend the days before the first concert taking part in the fan-run general admission line. Fans show up and run these for every show, and it’s a way to stand in line without really standing in line: You stop by and get a number, then leave and show up at check-ins twice a day to keep your place. The line is for the floor of the arena, which is general admission, and the only reason to do it is if you really want to stand in one particular spot. Or if you like lines. We were in it mostly for the fan community experience.
We showed up as the line was starting on Friday. Someone has to represent the line at all times, and, because Kate and I have extremely overactive senses of duty, we agreed to join another fan for the 2 to 5 a.m. shift on Saturday morning. (The concert was Sunday night, so we had plenty of time to recover.)
September must be my preferred house-cleaning time, because once again, I was purging things in closets this weekend. And like last year, when I wrote this post, I found a disgusting amount of silverfish. (I feel a little better that it’s not just me: even my very organized and clean neighbor says she finds them hiding in nooks and crannies.) The silverfish love moisture, so it sounds like we can either keep our houses airtight or airlift them to the desert, where a different variety of insects await. I suppose I must make peace with my creepy friends. And also I’ll try to clean the closets more often.
I felt so successful this weekend. I cleaned out multiple closets, filled bags with clothes that I’ve been keeping since college, organized the box of “just-in-case” kid coloring books and trinkets that I save for emergencies. When I open the closet in the morning, there’s a neat row of clothes hanging in a line, there’s all this white space…ahhhh. Another doesn’t even have clothes in it any more! Doesn’t it look lovely? (And that maybe there’s room for a new shirt or two?)
But alas. There is something else that I found in these closets, something that is not as easy to get rid of as the 90s band t-shirts and the single socks. (I didn’t really get rid of the 90s band T-shirts. I put them in a pile that I’m using to make a T-shirt quilt. I’ve been working on this quilt for 10 years, but that’s another story.) I didn’t take a photo of these things, because they move too fast, and because I dislike them so much.
Oh, silverfish. There are other gross things that don’t bother me. But silverfish creep me out with a primal sort of creepiness, a deep evolutionary shiver. Ugh.
And now I know even more about them. They like places that are moist. (Even that word is problematic, and also makes me wonder why my closet is damp.) Their mating ritual lasts a half an hour, and has multiple steps. First, there is antennae touching. Then, the female chases the male. Then there’s some wiggling before the male deposits a spermatophore for the female to take. (A Friday treat: the Bug Chicks recreation of silverfish and springfish mating, complete with mustaches!)
The species of silverfish that are making themselves at home in my home are Lepisma saccharina. Their name gives you an idea of what they eat: sugars and starches. But they’d do fine on a paleo diet, too, because they can go for weeks without eating. (One silverfish spent 300 days in a jar without food or water.) Some species can absorb water through their rectum.
When they can eat, they like all sorts of household things. Grains, book paper, starches in clothing and wallpaper, photos, hair, their own exoskeletons.
Clean closet 2! Still likely has silverfish, somewhere.
If I needed something eaten I would call a silverfish.
There don’t seem to be holes in my clothes or books, but they still appear whenever I move another load of things out of a closet. They scuttle. Silverfish have been scuttling like this for years; their ancestors are some of the earliest insects, appearing more than 400 million years ago.
I’ve been trying to think of something redeeming about them so that I can coexist more peacefully; it’s unlikely I’ve found all of them, and we have enough nooks and crannies that new ones will appear in places I haven’t yet reached. It is true that they don’t bite and don’t carry diseases. But maybe their benefit to me to keep me prying into the dark corners to find the things that make me shiver. That’s the only way to get the light in.
**
Top photo is 41 stacked microscopic images of a silverfish’s “forehead” by Flickr user Specious Reasons/Creative Commons license
This post originally ran on April 23, 2015. But people are still developing maggot infestations. Yes, even here in the US. So it’s still relevant. Read on and be disgusted all over again.
I’m not the kind of girl who ordinarily irons her underwear. But two weeks ago I found myself hunched over a flimsy wooden board doing just that. I was visiting friends in Mozambique, and they assured me that everything must be ironed—shirts, pants, sheets, towels, and, yes, even underwear. It’s not about aesthetics. You need the heat to kill the tiny eggs that a female mango fly might have laid on your damp clothes while they dried on the line. If you don’t iron, the eggs will hatch, and the mango fly larvae will burrow into your skin, feast on your flesh, and emerge a week or so later as plump, white maggots.
So this is why I spent a sunny afternoon while on vacation ironing. You can imagine what a nuisance these insects would be if they infiltrated your underwear. Oh wait. You don’t have to imagine. Here’s a case report of an 11-year-old boy who showed up at a British emergency room with “a firm, ovoid, motile mass” on the head of his penis. Motile because the mass contained a wriggling maggot about the size of a pinto bean. The boy had recently visited Somalia. Continue reading →
I have a confession to make. I’m worried that I don’t like parenting.
Don’t get me wrong, I like being a parent. And I definitely love my kid. I like hanging with my family, grilling dinner, listening to my son babble incoherently as my wife giggles and pretends to understand. But the actual work of child-rearing, I don’t know that I like it.
There’s the potty training, sleep training, diaper changing, life changing, sick kid, then sick wife and sick me right afterwards. There is screaming and whining and spilling and peeing in the wrong places. Weekend mountaineering adventures have turned to two-hour trips to a pond that take two more hours to prepare and clean up after.
And playing with my child isn’t what I expected either. When I imagined playing with my son, I envisioned throwing a baseball, wrestling, teaching him to rock climb. But my kid can barely catch a rubber ball thrown from five feet away, let alone shag fly balls.
And the worst thing is that I know I have it so much easier than many parents. He doesn’t have any intellectual or physical disabilities, he’s mostly calm and obedient, has an amazing smile, sleeps through the night and just wants to to hug his daddy all the time. It’s like someone programmed him on “Beginner Parent, Level One.” I really should be enjoying this. So what’s the deal?
August 27 – 31, 2018, the week in which “regolith” appears not once but twice.
The People of LWON, bug-lovers every one of them, are nevertheless united in their loathing of sprickets. They share their feelings but have murder on their minds.
Rose doesn’t live in NYC any more bet when she did, she calmed herself by watching traffic camera movies. Then she wondered what cameras might be watching her back. Her GIF game is strong.
Sally writes Part 2 of her brilliant, searing, and fictional expose of the multiverse, including regoliths and the dismantlement of Roko’s Basilisk. It doesn’t end well but I blame that on the maggots.
Christie continues the high-risk literary adventure by taking spam comments and turning them into poetry, sheer poetry.
Emma shows you why letting an eco-writer loose on space science is such a splendid idea: she makes me love Bennu as much as she does.
For the past two years, I have been following the voyage of OSIRIS-REx, a spacecraft headed to an asteroid called Bennu. Bennu is important for at least four reasons:
Local space history may recorded in its rocks, which are about as old as the formation of the solar system.
It is carbon-rich and scientists think it might have molecules similar to the precursors to life on Earth.
It has goodies we might want to mine someday, like precious metals.
