i like using a spray on lots of bugs ..either electrical freeze spray or sometimes a little more insane ..carb cleaner .....->toluene . maybe a bit excessive for a spider
i had wood boring bees which were pretty darn slow ..so the tennis racket worked like a charm .
spiders in the bathroom almost always get treated to the toilet brush .
i tried to set the side of the house on fire one day while cooking wasps with starting fluid and a lighter .
As a kid ants used to get the magnifying glass ... flies seem to like the vacuum cleaner .
I used to turn one of those cans of compressed air upside down and press it super gently…. out dribbles supercooled droplets that are great fun to drip on unsuspecting insects.
Try oven cleaner on those big nasty centipedes you find in the basement…their legs just pop off…hate those things. Carb cleaner is pretty good too! I like to swat wasps this time of year with one of those metal spatulas that have a long blade on them, it makes the nicest ‘TING’ sound when you hit one just right.
In college, we were spraying cockroaches with Right Guard deodorant and setting them on fire. One guy sprayed a roach and part of his bedspread at the same time. He lit the roach and it ran right to the sprayed part of the bed and set it on fire. BTW, the little buggers burn with a green flame.
My favorite roach killer was to put the little buggers in the payload section of a high powered model rocket. Above the little monsters was a cylinder filled with lead shot. The rocket motor supplied over 100 G’s of acceleration. Cylinder came down with extreme mushitude.
BTW, you can use roaches as make shift vacuum gauges. At 10E-3 they flip over on their back, at 10E-4 their wings spread out, at 10E-5 the wings come back in. As you release the vacuum, they repeat the cycle in reverse. You can pump down the critters several times before they break. Actual vacuum numbers may vary…
We were looking at a new apartment comlpex and were sitting in a freshly painted rental office in Houston Texas talking to a nice women who was telling us that the resrictions regarding renting ...included having to be a permanent resident for over a year and that there was no way we could get an apt...sorry ...
A cockroach ran across her desk and without missing a syllable she snapped it in half and tossed it in the ashtray in front of her and proceeded to torture the last vestage of life from him by burning him with her lighter ... as she rambled on and on about how nice the entire complex was going to be when completed .
It was 4th grade, and my first school year not going to day care in the morning. I was waiting in the living room, watching tv, waiting for the bus to arrive. Also, I had just moved to the residence, so I was deathly afraid of someone breaking in. (For the first couple months in the previous spring, I would hide in the bathroom until the bus came, and I would sprint out of the bathroom to outside.) Well, downstairs I had seen some soft bodied centipede bugs, bout an inch long, tan colored. And while I was watching tv, the very same bug fell, from the celing, in between the tv and I. So I took a shoe to squish it, reeled back and smacked down. I was sure I hit it…until I looked at the bottom of the shoe. Of where I couldn’t find any evidence of any bug.
That was something that made me even MORE paranoid in this new place!
When I was about 10 I used to use petrol to burn ants nests. One day I screwed up and the petrol container caught fire and I dropped it and was surrounded by a wall of flames. Didn't get burnt much but but I can't recommend trying it.
When I was younger I sprayed aerosol deodorant onto a moth, and it instantly stopped moving. Afraid that I may have frozen it I lit a match and held it close to it to warm it up. Little did I know at the time that the aerosol was flammable, and instead of bringing the moth back to life I accidentally set it on fire. I was mesmerized by the slowly burning moth and watched it’s final seconds. I still think I’m kind of a psychopath for doing that.
As kids we used to saturate the spiders in the letterbox with aerosol flyspray.
The twist was to light up the wisps of aerosol flowing out of the slot, then whump, the door would fly off, flames would shoot out, and singed spiders would groggily stagger out.
Tough buggers.
Or the time a bee flew inside my leathers while riding my motorbike.
You’ve never seen a faster emergency stop, strip and dance.
