Topic: The Chit-Chat Thread

@ThanosReXXX not sure if i ever told you, but my job entails going into food plants and selling process equipment. It's pretty cool seeing how everything is made. Stop me if you've heard me say this, but laffy taffy is by far the coolest. Just imagine seeing a big slab of strawberry or grape Laffy taffy the size of a car in width and length( not so much height ) but it's still at least 10" thick

@NintendoByNature Yeah, that's the exact kind of thing that I used to watch being made in that "Food Factory" show. From pastries to candy to microwave meals and so on. Weirdly fascinating and sometimes even almost mesmerizing, like those meditative "most relaxing" videos on YouTube.

@ThanosReXXX I'm fine with spiders and insects, so long as they stay outside.

@NintendoByNature Here's the first two episodes of Food Factory. They're 22 minutes each, so watch them when you've got enough time to kill. Needless to say, only if it piques your interest enough to actually invest that amount of time in them...

@Heavyarms55 Well, sometimes the poor critters get confused, thanks to us destroying their natural habitats, and then they accidentally find themselves in our homes. No reason to kill them. Just putting them back outside is enough...

And spiders are useful against all those nasty insects, so that's one animal that I'll definitely never kill.

@ThanosReXXX I can respect that choice. But it's not one that I'm likely to emulate.

@Heavyarms55 How so? Are you that much against catching and releasing them? It's a win-win, basically. You're rid of them, and they get to stay alive. Mind you, I do have an electric fly light in my kitchen in the summer, seeing as the adjoining balcony of my apartment hangs over the canals, so you can probably imagine how many little flying critters might potentially come up here during those hot summer days...

But in general, bees, spiders, bugs, mice, and anything other than flies or mosquitoes will leave this building unharmed 9 out of 10 times. It occasionally happens that they don't want to cooperate, or that I simply have bad aim with the container that I'm trying to catch them with (usually a small glass jar, so I can actually see if I was successful), but that's completely by accident, so I never aim to kill them.

@ThanosReXXX I’m about the same in regards to insects, with a few exceptions; RIFA, paper wasps, and brown recluse are all insecta non grata around here. I already know two folks that have had tissue surgically removed due to the necrosis from recluse bites here. And I’ve been stung on the earlobe by a paper wasp more than once. RIFA needs now excuse. That monster doesn’t belong in this world.

@ThanosReXXX definitely interested and will watch both when i get a few moments. Watched the Campbell's soup segment which was pretty neat.

@ThanosReXXX It's not as though I have a pathological hatred of them or anything, I just don't really care enough. They're just insects and spiders, not thinking animals even on the level of a mouse. Which, if one got in, I would catch and release. I don't go out of my way to kill them, I just don't care enough to spend an extra 20 minutes trying to catch a spider when I can just crush it and toss the paper towel in the toilet.

I was just listening to a podcast, and Dave Grohl is being interviewed. He said he made his first paycheck in music when he was 21, it was $400 and he immediately bought a BB gun, a Nintendo, and some whippets. Nice little afternoon he had for himself there. That amount of money was quite a chunk of change at that time. It speaks to the meteoric rise of Nirvana.

@HobbitGamer - I’m stuck on RIFA? I’ve seen a few ROUSs, but I can’t think of what a RIFA could be. All wasps and hornets should die. It’s what they wish upon us and I reciprocate those wishes. I will fight every last one of them.

@NintendoByNature - Did you make it to the recital, or were you too wrecked? How are things looking for Sonic Movie Project 2020?

@ThanosReXXX - I’m with you on preserving all life when possible... except wasps and hornets. If you read above, it’s a blood feud for me. I grew up in an old farm house that had more than a couple yellow jacket infestations through the years, and one of their ports was in a window in a bathroom. As you know, they’re drawn to water, and I was once stung where the sun don’t shine while sitting on the toilet, innocently playing Tetris on my Game Boy and working on something important. It was the cheapest shot possible, and I’ll never forgive hornets. Or wasps for that matter. Love me some bees though.

@Tyranexx - I do enjoy Lion King. Especially Rafiki. What a BA. She has a couple other digital downloads that she won’t watch right now. She doesn’t like that Beast is sometimes mean and can’t forgive him for it, and she doesn’t like that Ariel chooses legs and Prince Eric over mermaid tail and her dad. She’s still at an age where I’m a superhero, and I’m just soaking it up. I know some day I’ll be embarrassing, so I’ll enjoy superhero status while I can.

@bimmy-lee I always enjoy little reminders like that, that celebrities enjoy the same kinds of things us "normal" people do, too.

@bimmy-lee That’s an interesting factoid. That must’ve been a really weird turnaround for him and the band.

I didn’t realize for a long time that Grohl wasn’t the drummer on Bleach. He didn’t join until 1990. The drummer from the Melvins was in the studio for that album.

@bimmy-lee Red Imported Fire Ants, aka Satan’s festering dandruff, aka hellspawn fleas, aka little tiny death monsters.

@HobbitGamer
Dandruff is like snowflake from the head. 😆

@Anti-Matter Yeah, but Satan's dandruff is like hot wispy embers wafting from a volcano eruption.

Oh, God. When will the hurting stop? Pfffff....

@NintendoByNature all videos are from the official Food Factory Channel, so if you go to the actual YouTube page of that second video, you'll probably see the next episode listed in the top right, and otherwise you can check out their play list.

@HobbitGamer Yeah, I can imagine, I'm of the same mind concerning wasps and hornets. If it's a single ordinary wasp, I'll still try to just get it go outside, but if it keeps annoying me or flying back in, then the gloves are off. As for fire ants: heard about them, and I've seen documentaries about what a nuisance they can be, but fortunately, we don't have them over here. We've only got regular ants, which can be taken care of with a little lure box with poison, but even these regular ants are hardly present in the city. They're more likely to be found in the areas outside of the city, or in parks and/or areas with lots of greens and sand and so on.

@bimmy-lee Thanks for asking about RIFA, I was racking my brain about it as well. And as mentioned above, we agree on certain bugs.

@Heavyarms55 20 minutes? What the heck are you doing that you'd need so much time?
All kidding aside, I'd almost say that this must be some sight to see. Normally, spiders don't move that fast, so if I see one, I get a jar and a piece of cardboard to use as a lid, spider goes in the jar within 2 minutes, cardboard on top to prevent its escape, then off to the balcony, and itsy bitsy spider goes over the edge, down in the garden of the neighbor below...

EDIT:
But fair enough, and perhaps I should also take into account that the size of the spiders that we normally encounter over here, is rather small, so I can also imagine that bigger spiders come with more hazards and are probably faster as well.

@ThanosReXXX Yeah, I remember you saying before that you don't have RIFA. They can definitely be nasty buggers. Their venom is an alkaloid instead of an acid like most ants, and the way they attack is certainly worse. Where a typical ant will bite and then spray acid on the wound, fire ants grab the offender with the pincers on their head, then swivel their body around to repeatedly sting with their abdomen.

They also really like electrical fields. I've got a colleague that's had to replace a water well pump twice because fire ants get into the housing and start chewing the wire's insulation.

@ThanosReXXX
"Normally, spiders don't move that fast"

Except funnel web spider. 😖

@Anti-Matter Read the edit I made to my previous comment: I said spiders OVER HERE. We don't have exotic kinds. Just your regular home and garden spider.

@HobbitGamer Why hide that picture? I'm not squeamish about insects or bugs at all.
But yeah, that all sounds really "nice", and from what I've seen in documentaries and so on, I'm REALLY glad that we don't have them over here.

On a side note: have you ever watched the TV series Zoo? In case you haven't: in it, animals are taking over the world, due to some experiments gone wrong, and the very thing you mentioned about fire ants liking electrical fields is also used in that series, so it's fantasy mixed with science.

@bimmy-lee Forgot to ask: you solved the RIFA riddle for me, but then you yourself came up with ROUSs. So.... what are those?