The Video Game Critic

Boric acid powder was always the home remedy for getting rid of roaches.  But there are good ones for getting rid of ants and spiders too.

For ants, take those large cheap table salt round containers, several of them, and sprinkle them over all of your floors and carpets.  Sprinkle it to cover everywhere generously.  Then take baking soda and sprinkle it on top of that lightly.  Leave it for two to three hours, or for best results, you can leave it on there for 24 hours.  Then vacuum it all up.  Ants and other creepy crawlies will flee in a hurry, because they can't stand the salt.  If there are any colonies, they will basically abandon them and move to areas outside of your home.

For spiders (and I for one despise spiders), it's even easier.  Just buy citronella oil, mix it with water and shake it up, then spray it on your walls and windows and wipe it off.  Spiders taste with their legs, and they HATE the stuff and won't stick around.  It chases off more than just spiders, but spiders are definitely the ones most repelled.  It won't kill them, but they will simply go away.

Houston is an area full of insects.  But I've used these formulas to keep ants, roaches, and spiders out of my apartment quite well.  They work like a charm.

It's amazing how FAST these subjects can change. We WERE reveiwing the ROACHMILL game, right?

First mOzart, I am glad to see you using biological warfare, but you are right Geckos are more likely to spread disease then roaches. Roaches have been on this earth over 300 million years, almost unchanged (except their ancestors were the size of dinner plates!)... and they are pretty much the CLEANEST insect alive. Yes, they will eat garbage but NOT Feces like flies do, and they are constantly cleaning themselves. If a roach touches a filthy human it will run off and spend an hour cleaning itself in disgust! (mammals are filthy, disease carrying things!)

But really, I wouldn't live with them either. When I first moved to this tenament building, I turned on the light in the bathroom and saw the first large American Cockroach I'd ever seen (most roaches in Maine are German imports) ... one day they ordered everyone and every pet out of the building for 24 hours while they sprayed it. That did it. They came from a small resteraunt, the BROWN BAG, just below us, that got in some infested flour.

The best natural control for insects like flies, if you don't mind them, are spiders. I try to keep a few around to catch insects. ALL spiders are poisonous-thats how they kill prey- but the only 2 in North America poisonous to man are the Black Widow, mainly a country dweller (be careful of outhouses), and the imported Brown Recluse, rare but spreading in our southern states (be careful in basements down there! These things are
SERIOUSLY dangerous...they look kinda like a big, tan, really thin "tarantuala"..by the way pet Tarantualas are safe...)

Thanks for reading the Nature Thread! Now back to "Our freind the pathological death virus"....

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No one EVER thinks movies based off books are "good enough". Seems to be the popular thing to say.

 
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Perhaps I didn't express myself clearly.  My problem with the movie was not simply that it didn't seem as good as what I'd imagined, it was that the director took the story in an entirely different direction.  Some important themes, notably the theme of fatherhood, were omitted.  The difference in the importance of the individual in each of the opposing forces--namely, that for the humans the individual is important, meaningful and empowered, whereas the enemy regarded the individual as subserviant to their communal structure (to their eventual detriment)--was completely eviscerated; indeed, it was countermanded by Verhoeven's retelling of the story.  Anyone see powered Buzz Lightyear type battle exoskeletons?  No?  Me, either.  But it was one of the ways that Heinlein reinforced the importance of the individual.  That's why it was dispensed with by Verhoeven, to equate the Nazi-esque (in Verhoeven's retelling) human forces with the bugs. 

One thing I did like, immediately, was the way Verhoeven and Ed Neumeier (the scriptwriter--the pair worked together on Robocop, too, and you can see similarities) made the humans the bad guys, but presented them as the good guys through clever and glitzy in-film advertising propaganda.

The bugs in the novel, by the way, were stand-ins for Communists (book was written in 1959).  The novel had a large impact on the way James Cameron directed Aliens, even using some of the same language ("the drop," "bug-hunt," etc.).

As I said, I later came to understand what Verhoeven was doing. 

So you see, it's not simply me saying "Eh, wasn't as good as the book."  It was completely different from the book.  The movie has its own agenda, its own strengths and its own weaknesses.

I have got to swap some hard drives around and get that paper and associated powerpoint presentation online.

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