So solly about my wacist friends. They wacist long time.

Wait, wait, wait. Am I missing something here? Why would a guy that is too cheap to buy a prescription for Niagra go all the way to Brazil, insert his bald-headed mouse inside a banana bunch to get bitten, stand on his back legs for four hours to vote in an election then drop dead. All very confusing.

Desperate times call for desperate measures. ;)

:lol2:

As a lifelong arachnophobe, I gotta say...

WHY have we failed to even attempt to convince the Asiatic folk medicine market that because its face DOES look like a nutsack AND it causes dangerous levels of engorgement in males it MUST be good for libido and virility? Outgoing fruit & vegetable shipments would get checked WAY more closely if each spider was worth $20! They're not endangered...but they could be... ;)

Oh, and racism aside, it turns out not every Asiatic folk medicine is bunk. There's a fungus that grows in grubs found in grass thatch/roots in the Himalayas that actually does act like a HUGE shot of caffeine without the side effects or withdrawal symptoms. Can't remember the word for it offhand, but in the language of the herders who started collecting it because they noticed eating it made their yaks all energetic and playful, its name means 'winter worm, summer grass'. The fungus hides out in the grubs all winter, then pokes a little grass-blade-lookin' spore-bearing structure up among the short grass blades when the pastures green up.

I knew a girl like that...

...right before I passed out.

A crazy spider jumped on my arm while I was eating lunch yesterday. It was about the size of a nickel out to its toesies. I swear it could see me looking at it! Which ever way I turned my arm to see it as soon as I could lay eyes on it it retreated back out of sight. Drove me nuts trying to get it off me onto the worthless tangelo tree on the porch (outside) because of the continued hidy-seek it was doing.

Thanks, hon ;)

Spuck, you are way braver than I am! The only kind of spider that doesn't turn me into a whirling dervish of Kermit flails is the little zebra-striped jumping spiders. By 'little' I mean the biggest one I've seen was less than 1/2 inch (15 mm for the parts of the world that measure sensibly) and they totally crack me up. They 100% can see motion at a surprising distance. I can slowly wave a hand six or seven inches above one and it will clearly, obviously turn side to side, watching. If I get any closer, they're GONE. They're the only ones that will survive being caught indoors, too--I catch them and put them in the potted plants to keep the gnat populations down. We have these crazy stupid annoying late-summer and early-spring gnats that are small enough to climb through a screen on a window and decide to spend the rest of their lives bashing their heads in on my computer monitor. I don't approve of distractions while I'm computer-ing, and because of the several decades I've spent as a bird watcher training my eyes to be attracted to motion, those gnats are the WORST.

As for other spiders we have here at the edge of the Rockies (the Great Plains basin starts like 2 hours east of us and goes all the way to the Mississippi River if my memory serves), it's horrible. Hobo spiders, a ground-runner that likes to nest in the rock beds around here that everyone lets their toddlers play in. Hobo spiders of the sort we get aren't fatally venomous, but they are irritable, aggressive, and do deliver a highly painful bite.

And we have black widows. At the last place I lived, like 15 miles north of where I am now, one day the neighbor kids came to get me all freaked out about this giant spider that had webbed up one of their little sandbox buckets. I went to take a look and holy crap it was the biggest widow I've ever seen! The kids were about to totally flip until I told them I could show them a super-cool anti-spider trick if their mom had any hairspray. They loved it, but the spider did not--the hairspray plates their breathing apparatus, which is a set of tiny pores along the butt end, and that enormous beast of a spider was done for in about 17 seconds.

And NEVER believe anyone who says there are no brown recluses in Montana! All the pest controllers around here seem to think we don't, but every autumn I end up going 2 rounds bare-knuckle with one trying to sneak into my downstairs neighbor's apartment. Management always orders in the repellent sprayers (they use a citrus-based spray rather than poison, and it does work) when I tell them I've seen one. My neighbor is highly vulnerable to fiddleback venom, having nearly died after taking 2 bites in 1 night down in Arizona some years back, so we operate with extreme prejudice on brown recluses!

And then there's the "barn spider". Don't know the proper name, don't wanna. I was asleep on the couch in the old mobile home I used to live in some years back, waking up every time the wood stove started running out of fuel (it was inadequate but also our only source of heat). I woke up one time and the stove was fine...but out from under the edge of the hearth LUMBERED this spider about the size of a freakin' mouse! Headed right toward me, and it took 4 dead-on hits from my sweetie's size 10 hiking boot to kill. Just the memory makes me wanna Kermit flail.

:D