Question #6

"What’s the most cost effective way to handle household pests?"

- Samuel


Malathion. A few drops of that stuff could kill a full grown person. And it’s easy to use.

Unfortunately, if you want to live in your house then you may have to look for some alternatives. The easiest one is to just clean up after yourself. If pests are around, it’s because you have something they want.

When I… errr, when one of my friends first started college he didn’t take out the trash very often. Who could blame him? He had to walk five flights of stairs and half a block down the street to get to the dumpster. When he could no longer throw trash away without jeopardizing the structural integrity of the towering trash heap, he figured out instead of putting pizza boxes in the trash you could put trash in the pizza boxes. Plus they stack conveniently. Well 10-15 pizza boxes later he noticed a few little fruit flies had made their home in his dorm. Since they weren’t big and didn’t take up too much space, he wouldn’t bother them if they wouldn’t bother him. But then they laid eggs in the trash heap and when he got back late one night there were hundreds of fruit flies swarming around the room.

This seemed like a clear violation of the mutual contract so he got out the vacuum cleaner and started sucking up all the fruit flies, one by one. At first it was easy, but when it got down to the last few dozen it was only the smarter ones left that flew away from the loud sucking noise of death. By that time it was easier just to take the trash out and leave the window open for a few days.

So that’s how I proved natural selection. That was the question, right?



John sucking flies. (Reenactment. Name has been changed to protect confidentiality.)