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I used to think of houseflies as annoying but relatively harmless pests. Living in the country, we’d often have one or two buzzing around inside the house if we’d left a door open for any length of time (2-3 seconds was usually enough).

Then my opinion changed. I needed to research flies, specifically the genocide thereof, and I learned that they are so far from harmless that they’ve lapped past harmless from the benign side and are again halfway up the scale, double-plus vile, infectious, and all around revolting. The memory of this event makes me shudder. Even after four weeks, my mouth involuntarily pulls into a grimace of disgust at the thought.

OK, here we go. Brace yourself. Bite down on a rubber puck if you have one handy.

We had some friends in to warm up the new house. We put a spread of food on the table inside, and because everyone was sitting outside on the deck, we left the sliding glass door open to facilitate anyone’s inclinations to feed. (Friends don’t let friends drink on an empty stomach. Also, friends don’t let friends walk into screen doors with a glass of red wine in one hand and an expensive wool carpet within splash radius.) The open door was an invitation to more than our guests — the neighborhood flies crashed the party.

This became clear when I watched through the window as someone went inside to get food. As he approached the table, what appeared to be a few dozen flies lifted off and swarmed around. This was disturbing, although in retrospect perhaps not as disturbing as the fact that my friend ate the food anyway. I went inside after him to drape plastic wrap over everything still on the table.

At some point later, it occurred to me to close the sliding door. There seemed to be fewer flies than previously near the table, and for a moment I thought the rest had flown back outside. And then I looked up in horror to see all of them, and their extended families, with guests in from neighboring counties, clinging to the ceiling. There were hundreds.

I couldn’t imagine going after hundreds of flies with a flyswatter, and I definitely didn’t want to scar the ceiling with hundreds of little fly-stains. I tried to suck them up with the vacuum, but was unsuccessful; the flies saw me coming and took off long before the suction reached them. Having no solution, we went to bed that night with a couple hundred houseflies on the living room ceiling. That’s not a restful thought, I can tell you.

The next morning, we purchased and installed flypaper strips. These are an inadequate solution, because flypaper works only work passively — if a fly happens to land on it, he’ll stick, but otherwise the strips are ineffective. (But sometimes a fly will manage to brush up against the edge of the strip while in flight, and catch a wing in the goo. This must be a hard way to go, glued by one’s back and hanging in the air with legs dangling. If flies have nightmares, this must rank near the top. Be sure to add in the visual of a hex-tiled image of the gloating homeowner (armed with a vacuum hose) to complete the effect.)

I researched fly-killing techniques online. My stomach turned, reading about where flies congregate (near garbage, sewage, manure, and the eye secretions of cattle) and the number of diseases they serve as vectors for (typhoid, diarrhea, dysentery, cholera, poliomyelitis, anthrax and tuberculosis). I was particularly disturbed by this description of using “spot cards” to measure infestation level: “Spot cards are 3-inch by 5-inch white index cards attached to fly resting surface… A count of 100 or more fecal or vomit spots per card per week indicates a high level of fly activity and a need for control.” My white ceiling was one big “spot card.”

We quickly developed winning techniques for fly management. I returned to the vacuum, but I altered my technique. Rather than trying to slam the nozzle around the fly, I moved very slowly, sneaking up behind each one at a pace below its threshhold of concern. When I got within three inches, the fly would take off — up and backwards, generally — right into the slipstream. It was gratifying to hear the whack when the flies smashed into the side of the tube on their way to the bag. My new vacuum technique was about 80% effective — best on windows (perhaps the bright light outside masks the “overhead” image of the vacuum approaching), decent on the ceiling, but not so good on the floor.

My wife became a terror with a dishtowel. This approach is superior in kitchens, better even than a flyswatter, because a towel is lethal around uneven surfaces (edges and corners). We’re both about 90% effective with the towel.

The U. of Cambridge’s Insect Vision Group website offers some interesting PDFs that explain about compound eyes and fly vision: Seeing the brain through a fly’s eye.

I have time to write, but nothing to say. This is the reverse of my usual condition, at least in the sense that I have time. Truthfully, though, even my time will be up shortly, so it’s just as well I have nothing to say. Ahh, wait, I just thought of something.

We had breakfast at a different diner today. I’ve driven past this place a hundred times but was always put off by the sign on the door announcing “Ribs! Chicken! Beef!” They have almost as many types of meat as they have tables.

Breakfast is the hardest meal through which to maintain a healthy diet. Worldwide, traditional breakfast food choices are among the fattiest, most heart-stopping on the entire cultural menu: fat strips (fried), chicken ova (fried), stacks of refined-wheat “cakes” (fried, natch) served with butter and a chemical soup designed to evoke the gustatory properties of boiled tree sap. And that’s just in America. Other countries provide even more gruesome fare. Black pudding, popular in the UK, consists of pig blood and suet (a hardened animal fat that’s also used to make candles and soap). Vegemite, popular in Australia, is made from “yeast extract culled from brewery wastes.” Africans eat fried bees.

Even relatively innocuous domestic entrees are suspect: carbohydrates turn to glue, cow’s milk blah blah blah, fruit is reported by some to cause blood acidity and yeast infections. What’s left? Don’t tell me about raw vegetables; only ascetics eat salad for breakfast. Then again, I drank Klamath Lake algae this morning, so maybe I shouldn’t judge.

I think I’ve just committed a weblogging foul — writing about one’s breakfast is tantamount to admitting one has nothing of import to contribute. There’s some interesting commentary on this phenomenon in A List Apart’s forum, spawned by a thoughtful piece on web writing. (Search the forum page for “breakfast”.)

This is old news for some of you, but I’ll risk boring you for the sake of anyone who hasn’t heard the story, which is an important one — certainly more important than most of the tripe I publish.

Microsoft is a successful company. They have huge amounts of cash, and access to the best and brightest minds on the planet. This makes their failures especially poignant, because they have fewer excuses than most anybody else.

The basic story is that Microsoft published a web page about a former Mac user who switched to Windows 2000. This was an apparent response to Apple’s “Switchers” campaign, which offers the reverse — stories of ex-Windows users who found happiness in the MacOS.

The frightening-but-funny reality is that Microsoft’s “switcher” story is a complete fabrication. For example, the image of the alleged switcher is a stock photo. And the unnamed switcher, when she came out of hiding, turns out to be an employee of the PR firm that Microsoft had hired to create the testimonial.

Daring Fireball’s John Gruber posted an insightful analysis of the story and ensuing cover-up and denials. Part 1: Microsoft’s Answer to Ellen Feiss; part 2: Microsoft Make-Up

(Ellen Feiss, BTW, is one of Apple’s “Switchers.”)

Best quote, from Dave Winer as quoted by Gruber: “You’d think Microsoft could at least find one real person to say they made the switch from Mac to Windows and were happy about it.”

I didn’t make it to the mailbox yesterday, so today there was a double load of catalog crap squeezed from the ass of retail America: over 4 lbs total. That is not a typo — I had four pounds of catalogs in my mailbox. Lands End Kids, MacConnection, Art Institute of Chicago, Sundance (faux-rugged clothing for SUV drivers), Macy’s, Duncraft “Living with Nature” (gourmet birdseed?!), J. Jill (leisure clothing for old people), The Sharper Image (what kind of pocket translator defines you as a person?), Smith and Noble, Smith & Hawken, you’d like me to list Smith & Wesson but it’s probably not legal to advertise guns via direct mail — be very glad — Brookstone Hard-to-Find Tools (really, how hard can it be anymore? Brookstone has been selling the same stuff for 10 years.), Hold Everything, Chamber(pot)s by Williams Sonoma, L.L.Bean Winter Clothing, Dance Distributors. What a waste. Someday soon we’ll be mining landfills for fuel, and the enormous piles of discarded advertising will strike shame into our souls. How did this world go so wrong?

On that topic, I had a visitor to the house today. I was poring over Artisan Baking, scaling a bread recipe for party this weekend, with music cranked up in the background. Well, foreground. Maybe even surround-ground. The walls were shaking, and it wasn’t just because I was mirroring the double-bass line on the kitchen floor.

The doorbell rang. This is unusual. I’m too far out to get any solicitors, and most of the folks I want to find me can’t, like the time Airborne Express took three days to deliver an “overnight” package. There was a coincidental lull in the music, one of those sensitive vocals-and-keyboards passages that metal bands put in to maximize the aural contrast at the next 200 mph chorus, with multiple layers of fingerboard guitar solos and four-limbed drum fills playing in unison at inhuman speeds. (This is Elegy’s Forbidden Fruit album, the closest thing to speed-metal that I own.)

Anyway, I opened the door to see a heavyset but kind-looking woman clutching a stack of propaganda. “Religious pilgrim” was my immediate conclusion. I couldn’t see the Watchtower magazine, but I sensed it. Or maybe I caught a whiff of incense and desperation on the breeze. She leapt right into her pitch, with a line like “How did this world go so wrong?” For a second I thought I’d made a bad call, maybe she was here from the post office or the DMA, but junkmail is my irrational obsession, not hers.

I smiled, tuning out the spiel while I waited for a pause so I could deliver my “get the heck off my porch” message, tarted up to match her gingham of course. While I waited, I realized that the quiet part of the Elegy song was about to end. Remember, the stereo was still cranked up just behind me in the living room.

The “intro to damnation” speech was winding its way down, too. I listened to the speech, and the music, and the speech, and the music, back and forth in slow motion as they converged. The woman had closed with a question, and it was a total Dale Carnegie question I had to answer “yes” to, assuming I really was reading a cookbook and not, I don’t know, rinsing sacrificial calf blood off my Sawzall when she rang the doorbell, and in that pause when I was juggling a reply around in my head, Elegy’s rhythm section (i.e. the entire band) kicked in at full throttle, and a wall of high-volume heavy metal annihilation blasted across the room and smacked the woman in the face, which took on a sort of resigned “I’m in the wrong place, aren’t I” look, and my smile got a little bit bigger and a lot more genuine, as if to say, Yes, I’m the person your pastor warned you about.

After she left, I queued up I Am Woman: The Essential Helen Reddy Collection, just to spite her.

Fascinating reading: Great Moments in Science

The author, Karl Kruszelnicki, has a number of advanced degrees in science and a knack for writing up interesting bits of scientific history.