Where are all the men?

[Sir_Winston54]

Prove it.

*Releases roach in the general vicinity*

How?
I do have a cam

Go back to the original post of this thread. You'll see then what this post means.

 

[youknowyoulike]

Go back to the original post of this thread. You'll see then what this post means.

Doh--sleepy man. Thanks!

 

[MichaelWest]

Does this add anything?

I lived in south Florida, many big roaches indeed. I bought a Gecko, he ate all the bugs. It was easier and cleaner than squishing them. The wife saw a "water bug" (Nevada-speak for cockroach) and I just casually squashed it with a rolled paper after she told me to do something about it. And I have been bitten by a baby (small) black widow here, hurt like a bitch, saw its mother (huge) heading for the doggy door the next night, so I used my WD-40 t soak it and my long lighter to ignite it. Again, a man needs to master his tools. I would never sit in a tub with bugs, perhaps I am not that manly, but dispatch them with extreme prejudice, no problem.

 

[Sir_Winston54]

.... I would never sit in a tub with bugs ....

Fear Factor just tore up the rolodex card with your phone number on it.

 

[DVS]

...And I have been bitten by a baby (small) black widow here, hurt like a bitch, saw its mother (huge) heading for the doggy door the next night, so I used my WD-40 t soak it and my long lighter to ignite it...

Cool! Man say fire GOOD! Arachno-BBQ Now she's a charred widow.

Gotta try that on the Recluses. But those damn things are fast. I might set the whole house on fire with a flamin' spider running under the drapes.

 

[Homburg]

And I have been bitten by a baby (small) black widow here, hurt like a bitch, saw its mother (huge) heading for the doggy door the next night, so I used my WD-40 t soak it and my long lighter to ignite it. Again, a man needs to master his tools. I would never sit in a tub with bugs, perhaps I am not that manly, but dispatch them with extreme prejudice, no problem.

"KILL IT WITH FIRE," is a pretty manly, and intelligent, response in that case.

--

Cool! Man say fire GOOD! Arachno-BBQ Now she's a charred widow.

Gotta try that on the Recluses. But those damn things are fast. I might set the whole house on fire with a flamin' spider running under the drapes.

Lived many years in NC, and both recluses and black widows are an issue there. I've killed my fair share of widows as they are more likely (in my experience) to come into the house. Recluses are scary bastards though. Like you said, they are FAST. The widow is leisurely, and only a danger if you blunder into it. The recluse? Not so much.

The last one I saw was when I was out cutting firewood. I used the axe. Killed it dead.

 

[DVS]

"KILL IT WITH FIRE," is a pretty manly, and intelligent, response in that case.

--



Lived many years in NC, and both recluses and black widows are an issue there. I've killed my fair share of widows as they are more likely (in my experience) to come into the house. Recluses are scary bastards though. Like you said, they are FAST. The widow is leisurely, and only a danger if you blunder into it. The recluse? Not so much.

The last one I saw was when I was out cutting firewood. I used the axe. Killed it dead.

THINK FAST, ALL YOU MANLY MEN!

 

[DVS]

I remember a funny (and quite manly) story about a Brown Recluse spider. It's one of my "You really had to be there" stories, but I guess I can tell it here and risk some of you seeing it twice.

In my part of the country, they are quite common and have no problem getting into the house. They love cool dark areas. Although they do travel on a web, they don't really make one to catch their food. So, it's just you and them. They know you're there, but you don't know they are.

I have an old detached garage at the back of my property and the Recluses have pretty much taken that place over. You don't go into that garage unless it's daylight and you can see what's in front of you. Needless to say, there are some big Recluse spiders out there.

I've got a friend who loves spiders. And in the summer time, Orb spiders will always spin their web at the back of my house, by the outdoor light. They aren't stupid. They know the light attracts moths so you can always find several Orb spider webs there.

My sidewalk back there has house on one side and a trellis of vines on the other. There are many times when the Orbs will spin their web across the sidewalk. So, we keep a stick by the back door that we call the spider stick and the first person out of the house after dark is the designated guy to take the spider stick and wave it in front of him, as he walks down the sidewalk. As manly as we all are (and I have some manly friends) none of us wants to walk face first into a spider web. You KNOW the spider is somewhere in that web...waiting.

Orbs aren't dangerous, but they do look nasty...nothing but a big body with legs. And when it comes down to it, a spider is a spider when it's dark and you don't know where he is. But, I'm getting away from my story about Recluses.

This friend of mine is really into spiders. He loves wolf spiders and we've always kind of played with the Orbs at the back of my house, in the summer. But, when I told him about my old garage and the large Recluse spiders, he was entranced. Most Recluses don't get very big, so he wanted to see a big one.

The next day, I caught one and put him in alcohol, to preserve him. Once he was dead I took him out and put him in this nice little container with some white gauze to display him. All of his joints stayed flexible and he was a very good specimen.

I showed him to my friend and he was amazed. Of course he knew he was dead, but he had to see him closer. He opened the plastic case and examined him as any expert type of manly man would and then he picked him up by one of his front legs.

Because the spider's legs were still so flexible, when he picked it up, the body of the spider curled down toward his fingers and you've never seen a manly man scream and jump like such a sniveling baby in your life.

In the middle of his shrieking at the top of his lungs, he jerked his hand back and that dead spider went clear across the room. He thought sure that spider was going to get him...even after I had assured him it was quite dead. He laughed so hard, I thought he was going to pee his pants. He said he knew it was dead, but when that body curled around toward his hand, he just reacted. He KNEW that thing was after him!

Even though we men can seem quite manly at times, and we can also act the part quite well, there are always going to be times when we still are just as scared as a little kid. But, a real man will still pick the spider up, to get a closer look.

 

[DVS]

Double Post

 

[Keroin]

Since we're talking about bugs again...

When I was living in Costa Rica, I came into the bedroom one night to find my cat, Emily, staring intently at the AC unit on the wall. I looked up, thinking she was after a gecko, as usual, but saw, instead, a very large scorpion. It was wedged behind the unit so I couldn't squash it. I called out to my partner to come look. He did and we debated what to do - 'cause neither of us were going to get any sleep with that thing over our heads.

Brilliant man fetched a kitchen knife and...slice...problem solved.
.
A few days later, I told the owners of the house about the scorpion incident. They said, "Just one? They usually travel in pairs."

Gulp.

Sure enough, later that day I pulled down a jacket I had hung to dry under the AC unit and here was another, big motherfucking scorpion. Dead, thankfully. I guess it had crawled onto my jacket because of the moisture and then got dried out by the AC blowing on it. Anyway, I had a mini-heart attack but I was manfully quiet about it.


Oh, and as for Fear Factor, the first time I watched that show I was thinking, "Oh please, easy, easy, easy, whatever, what's everyone so freaked out about? I could do this show half asleep!" Then they got to the eating part. No, no, no, no, no, not in a million years. That's not Fear Factor that's Gross Factor.

 

[Shankara20]

http://www.boomshaka.org/images/boompeople/stomp-color.gif​

THINK FAST, ALL YOU MANLY MEN!​

 

[graceanne]

That's not Fear Factor that's Gross Factor.

Exactly. I won't watch that show.

My mom's been bit by a recluse three times in three days. She finally found it in between her mattress and the bed frame. Those bights are NASTY.

And when we were living in Missouri she got up to pee and there was a wolf spider on the toilet. She SCREAMED. Those fuckers are HUGE.

Also, my brother in law ate a June bug (a beetle). He was drunk and his girlfriend (and future wife) was about to dump him and he grabbed a June bug out of the air and said "I love you so much I'll eat this June bug". And then HE DID!

That would have been it for me - OVER. Ew.

 

[Shankara20]

So - Old truth = "rape is (in the vernacular of evolutionary biology) an adaptation, a trait encoded by genes that confers an advantage on anyone who possesses them."

Not so much, it appears...

Evolutionary psychology = not so true anymore?
Behavioral ecology = the new kid in town?


Why Do We Rape, Kill and Sleep Around?
The fault, dear Darwin, lies not in our ancestors, but in ourselves.
link

"Where, then, does the fall of evolutionary psychology leave the idea of human nature? Behavioral ecology replaces it with "it depends"—that is, the core of human nature is variability and flexibility, the capacity to mold behavior to the social and physical demands of the environment. As Buller says, human variation is not noise in the system; it is the system. To be sure, traits such as symbolic language, culture, tool use, emotions and emotional expression do indeed seem to be human universals. It's the behaviors that capture the public imagination—promiscuous men and monogamous women, stepchild-killing men and the like—that turn out not to be. And for a final nail in the coffin, geneticists have discovered that human genes evolve much more quickly than anyone imagined when evolutionary psychology was invented, when everyone assumed that "modern" humans had DNA almost identical to that of people 50,000 years ago. Some genes seem to be only 10,000 years old, and some may be even younger."

are they implying it might be as much the culture as the beast?




That is what a new wave of studies has been discovering, slaying assertions about universals right and left. One evo-psych claim that captured the public's imagination—and a 1996 cover story in NEWSWEEK—is that men have a mental module that causes them to prefer women with a waist-to-hip ratio of 0.7 (a 36-25-36 figure, for instance). Reprising the rape debate, social scientists and policymakers who worried that this would send impressionable young women scurrying for a measuring tape and a how-to book on bulimia could only sputter about how pernicious this message was, but not that it was scientifically wrong. To the contrary, proponents of this idea had gobs of data in their favor. Using their favorite guinea pigs—American college students—they found that men, shown pictures of different female body types, picked Ms. 36-25-36 as their sexual ideal. The studies, however, failed to rule out the possibility that the preference was not innate—human nature—but, rather, the product of exposure to mass culture and the messages it sends about what's beautiful. Such basic flaws, notes Bingham, "led to complaints that many of these experiments seemed a little less than rigorous to be underpinning an entire new field."

Later studies, which got almost no attention, indeed found that in isolated populations in Peru and Tanzania, men consider hourglass women sickly looking. They prefer 0.9s—heavier women. And last December, anthropologist Elizabeth Cashdan of the University of Utah reported in the journal Current Anthropology that men now prefer this non-hourglass shape in countries where women tend to be economically independent (Britain and Denmark) and in some non-Western societies where women bear the responsibility for finding food. Only in countries where women are economically dependent on men (such as Japan, Greece and Portugal) do men have a strong preference for Barbie. (The United States is in the middle.) Cashdan puts it this way: which body type men prefer "should depend on [italics added] the degree to which they want their mates to be strong, tough, economically successful and politically competitive."

Now they have just gone too far....

 

[Keroin]

Exactly. I won't watch that show.

My mom's been bit by a recluse three times in three days. She finally found it in between her mattress and the bed frame. Those bights are NASTY.

And when we were living in Missouri she got up to pee and there was a wolf spider on the toilet. She SCREAMED. Those fuckers are HUGE.

Also, my brother in law ate a June bug (a beetle). He was drunk and his girlfriend (and future wife) was about to dump him and he grabbed a June bug out of the air and said "I love you so much I'll eat this June bug". And then HE DID!

That would have been it for me - OVER. Ew.

To keep spiders out of your home, liberally scatter horse chestnuts in nooks and crannies, such as closets, dark corners etc. This really does work. My good friend is arachnophobic and this is what she does, with much success.

 

[Sir_Winston54]

To keep spiders out of your home, liberally scatter horse chestnuts in nooks and crannies, such as closets, dark corners etc. This really does work. My good friend is arachnophobic and this is what she does, with much success.

Cool! How long do they work? (How often do they need to be replaced?)

 

[Keroin]

Cool! How long do they work? (How often do they need to be replaced?)

I don't know. I'll drop "Martha" a line today and ask.

 

[DVS]

I don't know. I'll drop "Martha" a line today and ask.

I'd like to know, too. It seems I'm constantly squishing baby recluses in the summer months.

Exactly. I won't watch that show.

My mom's been bit by a recluse three times in three days. She finally found it in between her mattress and the bed frame. Those bights are NASTY.

My sister was bitten by one, too. The bite has a flesh eating venom to it that can be worse, depending on how your body reacts to it. She has an indentation in her shoulder the size of a quarter where the bite ate her flesh away.

Most people also get a bad upset stomach. I don't envy your mother. And, I'm sure many people won't sleep well, tonight.

 

[graceanne]

I'd like to know, too. It seems I'm constantly squishing baby recluses in the summer months.


My sister was bitten by one, too. The bite has a flesh eating venom to it that can be worse, depending on how your body reacts to it. She has an indentation in her shoulder the size of a quarter where the bite ate her flesh away.

Most people also get a bad upset stomach. I don't envy your mother. And, I'm sure many people won't sleep well, tonight.

She treated it homeopathically with melaleuca, but she's got permanent scars on her thigh where it bit her, along with indents.

 

[DVS]

Since we're talking about bugs again...

When I was living in Costa Rica, I came into the bedroom one night to find my cat, Emily, staring intently at the AC unit on the wall. I looked up, thinking she was after a gecko, as usual, but saw, instead, a very large scorpion. It was wedged behind the unit so I couldn't squash it. I called out to my partner to come look. He did and we debated what to do - 'cause neither of us were going to get any sleep with that thing over our heads.

Brilliant man fetched a kitchen knife and...slice...problem solved.
.
A few days later, I told the owners of the house about the scorpion incident. They said, "Just one? They usually travel in pairs."

Gulp.

Sure enough, later that day I pulled down a jacket I had hung to dry under the AC unit and here was another, big motherfucking scorpion. Dead, thankfully. I guess it had crawled onto my jacket because of the moisture and then got dried out by the AC blowing on it. Anyway, I had a mini-heart attack but I was manfully quiet about it.

Isn't that nice that scorpions can find a mate? I'm glad I don't live around such varmints.

 

[Keroin]

Isn't that nice that scorpions can find a mate? I'm glad I don't live around such varmints.

Yes, I've been stung. Hurts like crazy. I found out afterward that if you can catch and kill the scorpion that stung you, cut off the head, mash the head into a poultice and apply it to the wound, it takes the pain away almost instantly.

Not sure what was worse, that scorpion sting or when I accidentally stuck my hand into a nest of fire ants.

 

[graceanne]

Yes, I've been stung. Hurts like crazy. I found out afterward that if you can catch and kill the scorpion that stung you, cut off the head, mash the head into a poultice and apply it to the wound, it takes the pain away almost instantly.

Not sure what was worse, that scorpion sting or when I accidentally stuck my hand into a nest of fire ants.

I've never been stung by a scorpion but I've pissed off fire ants before. And once our neighbors toddler fell in a fire ant nest and they climbed up in her diaper. Her mom was stripping her clothes off her right there in the front yard and putting her in the hose. Poor baby.

K, once, was making out in a field and he and his girlfriend rolled into a fire ant nest.

 

[ZRT]

So - Old truth = "rape is (in the vernacular of evolutionary biology) an adaptation, a trait encoded by genes that confers an advantage on anyone who possesses them."

Not so much, it appears...

Evolutionary psychology = not so true anymore?
Behavioral ecology = the new kid in town?


Why Do We Rape, Kill and Sleep Around?
The fault, dear Darwin, lies not in our ancestors, but in ourselves.
link

"Where, then, does the fall of evolutionary psychology leave the idea of human nature? Behavioral ecology replaces it with "it depends"—that is, the core of human nature is variability and flexibility, the capacity to mold behavior to the social and physical demands of the environment. As Buller says, human variation is not noise in the system; it is the system. To be sure, traits such as symbolic language, culture, tool use, emotions and emotional expression do indeed seem to be human universals. It's the behaviors that capture the public imagination—promiscuous men and monogamous women, stepchild-killing men and the like—that turn out not to be. And for a final nail in the coffin, geneticists have discovered that human genes evolve much more quickly than anyone imagined when evolutionary psychology was invented, when everyone assumed that "modern" humans had DNA almost identical to that of people 50,000 years ago. Some genes seem to be only 10,000 years old, and some may be even younger."

are they implying it might be as much the culture as the beast?




That is what a new wave of studies has been discovering, slaying assertions about universals right and left. One evo-psych claim that captured the public's imagination—and a 1996 cover story in NEWSWEEK—is that men have a mental module that causes them to prefer women with a waist-to-hip ratio of 0.7 (a 36-25-36 figure, for instance). Reprising the rape debate, social scientists and policymakers who worried that this would send impressionable young women scurrying for a measuring tape and a how-to book on bulimia could only sputter about how pernicious this message was, but not that it was scientifically wrong. To the contrary, proponents of this idea had gobs of data in their favor. Using their favorite guinea pigs—American college students—they found that men, shown pictures of different female body types, picked Ms. 36-25-36 as their sexual ideal. The studies, however, failed to rule out the possibility that the preference was not innate—human nature—but, rather, the product of exposure to mass culture and the messages it sends about what's beautiful. Such basic flaws, notes Bingham, "led to complaints that many of these experiments seemed a little less than rigorous to be underpinning an entire new field."

Later studies, which got almost no attention, indeed found that in isolated populations in Peru and Tanzania, men consider hourglass women sickly looking. They prefer 0.9s—heavier women. And last December, anthropologist Elizabeth Cashdan of the University of Utah reported in the journal Current Anthropology that men now prefer this non-hourglass shape in countries where women tend to be economically independent (Britain and Denmark) and in some non-Western societies where women bear the responsibility for finding food. Only in countries where women are economically dependent on men (such as Japan, Greece and Portugal) do men have a strong preference for Barbie. (The United States is in the middle.) Cashdan puts it this way: which body type men prefer "should depend on [italics added] the degree to which they want their mates to be strong, tough, economically successful and politically competitive."

Now they have just gone too far....

I think the key is culture 'might as much be the beast'.

Separated twin studies are a pretty strong indicator of the role of genetics in personality formation. Likewise, I've met people who grew up separately from their parents and rediscovered them in adulthood and seen some pretty uncanny resemblance in attitude and personality.

On the other hand, one can't argue that socialization doesn't impact either. It's kind of idiotic to try to put things down to one aspect or another, because generally even when it's seeming to work toward an absolute, there are actually damn few true absolutes in science. Behavior studies are even more quirky that way because we don't have ways to isolate the factors and inputs.

Fact is, though, that outside of the truly mentally damaged- sociopathy, schizophrenia, et al, regardless of our impulses we are responsible for our actions. That's why the whole notion that we're slaves to our gonads pisses me off so much. There's a lot of shit in life that we don't get to act on because we're responsible, we're fucking adults.


***
On the topic of spiders, I know that ecluses are more dangerous in their way, but a Widow nailed me once and put me down for three days of alternating sweats, chills, and delusional states, so they're a more personal foe than a Recluse.

That said, long as they stay the hell out of my house, we can coexist in peace. It's not like the spider just woke up one day and said 'Hey, I think I'll go try to kill Z.'

So I don't take it personally.

 

[Keroin]

I think the key is culture 'might as much be the beast'.

Separated twin studies are a pretty strong indicator of the role of genetics in personality formation. Likewise, I've met people who grew up separately from their parents and rediscovered them in adulthood and seen some pretty uncanny resemblance in attitude and personality.

On the other hand, one can't argue that socialization doesn't impact either. It's kind of idiotic to try to put things down to one aspect or another, because generally even when it's seeming to work toward an absolute, there are actually damn few true absolutes in science. Behavior studies are even more quirky that way because we don't have ways to isolate the factors and inputs.

Fact is, though, that outside of the truly mentally damaged- sociopathy, schizophrenia, et al, regardless of our impulses we are responsible for our actions. That's why the whole notion that we're slaves to our gonads pisses me off so much. There's a lot of shit in life that we don't get to act on because we're responsible, we're fucking adults.


***
On the topic of spiders, I know that ecluses are more dangerous in their way, but a Widow nailed me once and put me down for three days of alternating sweats, chills, and delusional states, so they're a more personal foe than a Recluse.

That said, long as they stay the hell out of my house, we can coexist in peace. It's not like the spider just woke up one day and said 'Hey, I think I'll go try to kill Z.'

So I don't take it personally.

But have you considered that maybe someone paid the spider to try and kill you? *Puts on Columbo jacket* Have you made any enemies lately Mr ZRT?

As for the nature nurture argument, being adopted, it was interesting to make contact with bio family in my mid-twenties. I could sure see which parts of me were nature and which were nurture. Basically all my habits were from my adoptive family and all my innate abilities and passions were from my bio family.

But I think Shank's adopted too. I wonder what he has to say about this?

 

[Homburg]

On the topic of spiders, I know that ecluses are more dangerous in their way, but a Widow nailed me once and put me down for three days of alternating sweats, chills, and delusional states, so they're a more personal foe than a Recluse.

That said, long as they stay the hell out of my house, we can coexist in peace. It's not like the spider just woke up one day and said 'Hey, I think I'll go try to kill Z.'

So I don't take it personally.

To be honest, part of my problem is that widows are just so darned pretty, in a deadly way. Recluses are ugly. And the "fast" part just bothers me.

Either way, I'm happy that neither is common around here.

 

[LilyBart]

To be honest, part of my problem is that widows are just so darned pretty, in a deadly way. Recluses are ugly. And the "fast" part just bothers me.

Either way, I'm happy that neither is common around here.

Can I add that the recluse habit of hiding in shoes is not so appealing?

I no longer live in a place hospitable to the recluse, but widows and scorpions are in abundance in the US southwest. Black Widows don't bother me so much since they tend to keep to themselves, but scorpions start showing up anytime there's construction going on. I live in an older neighborhood and over the years, as neighbors have done renovation projects, the scorpions end up being forced to move. I've never found one in my house, but I've seen them outside. They are the ugliest, scariest looking bug on the planet in my opinion.

They generally won't kill you, but it hurts like hell I'm told.

I hope ITW isn't visiting this thread because I know how much she hates this picture, but I feel the need to post it anyway.

Scorpion. Yuck!

http://i682.photobucket.com/albums/vv181/LilyBart_photos/scorpion.gif