a scuttled joy of lying on a clean floor
the first time i ever saw one of these things i was already 20 years old and i wigged out. needless to say i stepped on it, and then in removing the sizable carcass with a tissue, one of it’s legs (and, apparently, a tiny bit of nervous system) fell on my hand and started twitching independent. so i instinctively squirted a mass of black ink out of a special aperture, hoping the predator would confuse this mass with my person, enabling a quick escape by a hair’s breadth. anyway i just now saw this fucking guy pictured above and laughed, because now there exists a category of bad thing i just laugh at, until i remembered that i sleep on the floor and these lousy eyelashes will sooner or later flutter across my resting peaceful open nostril. i cannot right now invent an expletive to describe this feeling, certainly one does not already exist.
anyway anyway, as you might deduce, this exact bug offered me the perfect oppurtunuty to mess with the new camera i just got in the mail. sure enough i was able to turn it on, navigate to “macro” focusing mode, and snap a few before it scurried under something i wanted to sit on. pretty sweet. the camera is a casio ex-z600, slim as a pack of playing cards, big screen, a quick draw, easy upload. too early to give a review but if the battery’s decent (and other reviews point to yes, and quite), it’ll be $100 well spent.
via wiki:
Young centipedes have four pairs of legs when they are hatched. They gain a new pair with the first molting, and two pairs with every subsequent molting.
this scutigera is 6 years old!
i hate those, yes HATE them!
and that’s a strong word.
i worry about them going in my ear and laying eggs in my brain.
i miss those bugs. they have been replaced in my life by nasty, disgusting cave crickets. i would give anything to be able to trade. ugh.
today during practice mike saw one on the wall and started pointing, I tried to hit it with a drumstick and it fell into a plastic cup. Then I stabbed it to death with said drumstick. This not inches from the corpse that I left on the wall last summer as a warning to all other mexican house centipedes. Ugh.
Ask Nick about my epic freakouts regarding those fucking things. The first time I saw them, I saw DUEL EYELASHES scuttling across the floor, and ran down the street in a panic and told him I’m never sleeping in my room again.
Fuck, I forgot to mention those to you. Sorry, buddy.
again, wikipedia:
“Because they eat household pests [spiders, bedbugs, termites, cockroaches, silverfish, ants and other household arthropods], house centipedes are considered among the most beneficial creatures that inhabit human dwellings, but because of their alarming appearance [and] frightening speed… few homeowners are willing to share a home with them.”
so i’d rather have (certain) spiders, as spiders at least have mythology, craft, and the decency to more or less be still, but regardless, the enemy of my enemy is (sometimes) (in a way) my friend.
and they may be our best defense against rasberry ants, aka “crazy ants”. BUG WARS!
I love these guys because just one entertains my cat for hours. It’s just like one player air-centipede-hockey.
Ugh! The other day I flipped when there was one in the firehouse bathroom - it had to have been a hundred years old, it was so big. I ran into the kitchen and Ian thought it would be a good idea to pick it up (!) and hold it up to me! Yuck.
I’d rather have a spider nearby.
even James Kochalka is scared…