Oh my god, Jammies sent me the article the other day and we've been terrorized by it ever since. RASBERRY CRAZY ANTS.
It was the best article ever. I have a crush on the writer now -- he did a spectacular job of staying deadpan while heaping on the ridiculous.
Also, Rasberry Crazy Ants is clearly the name of something you can get mixed in to your Blizzard at Dairy Queen.
The entomologist who tried to change the name is an ass. Rasberry crazy ants is a perfectly good common name for the things.
I thought we had had a brief discussion on them tangential to fire ant discussion (or something similar), but a cursory search of the archives does not find.
I need to spend more time associating with people whose instinct, when they see a swarm of insects, is to shoot it.
Come to think, actually, no. I need to keep staying way far away from them.
It turns out that the Houston suburb where a lot of the action takes place is one where I spent a good chunk of time in a previous life as a woman I dated for several years lived there. It was a dusty south Texas town in the process of being overtaken by suburbia when I was there. Drove through a couple of years back and it is now a working-class suburb of about 100,000 people. And I'm presuming the "Central Texas Style BBQ" joint they eat at is the same one as was there in the late '70s.
Tom DeLay got his start as an exterminator not too far from there (SW Houston suburbs rather than SE.)
We had a particularly ludicrous argument about whether or not we were too far north to be affected. It hinged on the fact that I commute south to I-10, and thus felt we were vulnerable, whereas Jammies commutes north to Austin, where we'd be invincible.
It turns out that the Houston suburb where a lot of the action takes place is one where I spent a good chunk of time in a previous life as a woman
Not that there's anything wrong with that.
It was pretty "Texas" in a lot of ways. We'd drive into work along a fairly desolate two-lane road (but most of it within Houston's expansive city limits) marked with very deep ditches on both sides and a number of roadhouses. It's instructive to learn the number of ways you can put a car into the ditch. The best were ones that ended up directly across from the roadhouse parking lots either nose or tail-first with no hint of evasive action attempted.
I love this bit:
The ants are called crazy ants. That's their actual name. Many people call them Rasberry crazy ants, and some people call them Tawny crazy ants and refuse to call them Rasberry crazy ants. The enmity between these people, I found, can be extraordinary.
Oh, who am I kidding. I love all the bits. This article is the best thing that ever happened.
10: Add punctuation (or not) as you see fit.
But really, "Rasberry", not "Raspberry"?
Oh, it's named after the guy. Right. Read past the first page, self.
I especially like the detail of the banana pudding, but the author should have working in the pronunciation - 'nanner puddin' - favored by locals.
I'm starting to feel like you all are reading this on a different level than I did.
Heebie, I feel like you're too focused on the entomology (shudder) when there's so much delicious anthropology.
I suspect she's focused on the fuckers making it to her house.
Right, and I'm joking that she should compartmentalize by ignoring the part about invasive ants making their way east and enjoy the colorful characters.
I just saw an article about exterminating Yellow Crazy Ants on an island. Seems Crazy Ants are the new meme.
Is the paragraph beginning "Finally, one man spoke up." misplaced?
Gonna need Chuck Heston to dynamite the dam and gain Eleanor's love forever.
I count on the fire ants to kill everything else. Fuckers are failing me.
I actually saw that movie. He made ant-proof armor out of cloth and rubber.
The NYT wants me to register to read that, so I'm just going to assume that my rule about never living anywhere without a real winter has me covered.
Anyway, enough to make me cheerful about having had to shovel the walk this morning.
25, 26: Original source material.
It practically demands a Heston movie.
Heebie, I feel like you're too focused on the entomology (shudder) when there's so much delicious anthropology.
I suspect she's focused on the fuckers making it to her house.
If she focuses on the anthropological, the crazy fuckers are a lot closer.
When I first moved into my new place in June, some ants showed up (mostly in the bathroom). Never having been impressed with those hexagon-ish Raid traps, I decided to try the Terro ant baits. They feature a little swimming pool of Ant Death Juice. They really did seem to work more quickly and more effectively than the Raid traps, with the downside that more ants die where you can see 'em, and if you spill the Ant Death Juice, it's a pain to clean up (not to mention somewhat toxic to humans).
What I'm saying, heebers, is: build an Ant Death Juice moat around your house.
where I spent a good chunk of time in a previous life as a woman [I dated for several years lived there.]
Is it childish to say how disappointed I was by the bracketed part of this sentence? Yes, but still.
I can't tell if the cultural ridiculousness is just the water I swim in, or if I'm really just too frightened by the ants to appreciate the cultural depiction.
The author has a book out that sounds interesting.
Bonus knowledge: "mooallem" means "teacher" (in Arabic (and Farsi)).
Huh. Never seen that before.
Conversely, I had no idea it had been made into a movie.
The movie was a weekend afternoon staple on broadcast TV in the NYC area when I was a kid.
I should just give up writing. And trust me, it was not an LGBT-friendly place.
38: I don't see how you could read that and not think that if Charlton Heston didn't exist, the universe would bring him forth to make a movie of that.
Seems Crazy Ants are the new meme.
Now that everyone's tired of Angry Birds.
We read Leiningen in the 10th grade and somehow it stuck with me. I do think the anteater solution should be seriously considered.
We need to get the crazy ants fighting with the Mexican drug cartels so they can exterminate each other. Get the ants addicted to cocaine.
So which is better: The Naked Jungle or Them!
Are there other good ant movies I haven't heard of?
Them! was another regularly shown movie on weekend broadcast TV in the 70s. I preferred Tarantula for my giant creature features mostly because ants just aren't scary to me even if they're 40 feet long. And I'd say that The Naked Jungle is better because Charlton Heston and also giant ants are cheesy.
45.2 I think that's pretty much it it. The others are pretty bad.
What is Texas like? Very grateful for at least one good hard freeze ever year.
Used to have a lot of toads, but the toads are gone. Never see any roaches at all, just an occasional isolated waterbug. Never seen a black widow, and the scorpions are apparently gone. Did get that minor brown recluse bite. Hurt sumpin awful. Gotta watch for rattlers in the woods. Mosquitoes, flies, ticks...dogs get treated every month. Not much lyme around.
This house, like a lot of houses round here, spends $100 every spring at home depot to surround the house with termite and ant spikes. And general cheaper powder to sprinkle the foundations. Just on principle, as prevention or control, cause you're gonna get them. Same thing with high-power powder for the fire-ants and carpenter ants. Usually evertime I mow during the summer I treat a couple new mounds, and dust the edge of the house. We still don't leave cake or pie or cookies out unless in a glass container...wait we keep everything sealed in the cupboard too.
Dog's kibble, all 40 pounds of it, is kept in the fridge.
Fucking rats once ate through an aluminum bin to get to it. They'll eat thru plasterboard, they'll eat through 2 x 4s. Got them again, fuckin Norwegian roof rats, came in from the cold, good 1 pound 8+ inch fuckers, not counting tail. Just now disposed of my 10th carcass in the last month. Very embarrassing.
Cat used to catch them. Dogs are worthless.
One reason we use window ac, besides that it is much cheaper on electricity, is the the rats have tore up the attic duct work three times in 30 years. Ain't expensive, only a couple hundred, but an insane hassle to get up there.
And yes, we tried green cake, but the fuckers go insane with thirst, eat through pvc and anything else looking for water, and stink up the house for two weeks. Apiece.
So its the tomcats, extra big mean finger-eatin traps, baited with kibble.
Get your feet off me you damn dirty ants!
You Maniacs! You swarmed it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!
20 - Heebie's had years to come to terms with the fact that she's surrounded by -- that her very home is full of! -- Texans; she's only known about the crazy ants for a few hours.
Jammies and I later discussed if we'd missed the colorful characters out of ant-terror, or what. I'm not trying to be deliberately obtuse but I really am not seeing the local color angle. The Hog-n-Nator detail is the only detail where I can see that, yes, if you didn't routinely hear about feral hogs, that would sound funny.
In fact, when I brought it up to Jammies, he mistakenly thought the article had been published in the Houston Chronicle and was a straight piece of writing.
Well, I think the comedy was subtle: I was a fair way into the article before I was certain the writer was doing it on purpose. But come on -- ants are crawling on you and your response is to get a rifle to shoot them with? That's nuts.
The description of Rasberry, the pest control guy who's the expert on the ants?
Rasberry began his own, amateur taxonomic investigation, spending thousands of hours out in the field or examining samples with a microscope in the back room of the Rasberry's Pest Professionals office. "It was a nightmare," he told me. He'd never had any interest or aptitude for science, didn't find bugs that fascinating and hates reading.
That's funny. So's this:
Insects, Kolnai wrote, unsettle us, existentially speaking, because they "arouse generally the impression of life caught up in a senseless, formless surging." Or as Tom Rasberry put it, summing up his dealings with the bureaucracy: "I'm to the point now where I'm like: 'Screw all you guys. I don't care.' "
or this:
Duke turned 65 the day before. He wore a yellow T-shirt, a yellow cowboy hat and gold-framed tinted glasses. His story was typical: One evening, his iron stopped working, then sparks shot from the appliance and a tide of crazy ants came rushing out.
That story is only typical in a cartoon parallel universe.
It's not so much that the people described are ridiculous, although the hog guy is, but that the whole situation is absurd.
Or Sharlene Duke walking around in her barefeet clutching the can of pesticide pointing out ants.
I practically lived in one of the towns in question for 2 years and certainly appreciated that side of the article.
You even, like Heebie, lived there as a woman.
ants are crawling on you and your response is to get a rifle to shoot them with? That's nuts.
But it's portrayed as nuts, right? He's being driven bonkers past the breaking point, and he laughs at himself when he realizes he's standing there with a gun.
Or how's this: there's nothing particularly Texan about the humor. I fully enjoyed the writing, but it could just as easily be describing anywhere non-city, aside from markers like cowboy hats. And switch out hogs for alley rats, and it could be written about a city.
Mike the Rat-a-Nator even has more of a ring to it.
46: Cynthia Freeland does a nice job of drawing connections between Them! and Alien in her book The Naked and the Undead. Bugs, flamethrowers, strong female characters.
She came to a school I taught at and gave a talk, and we watched Them together and she was able to bring out ways in which it actually is a pretty good movie. The opening sequence is really nice.
But it's portrayed as nuts, right? He's being driven bonkers past the breaking point, and he laughs at himself when he realizes he's standing there with a gun.
There's still something nutty about it when you're planning to shoot ants with a rifle and you pull out of it with a "Heh. Silly me." That that's a strategy you've got floating close enough to the surface that it pops up when you're really frustrated is funny (in a please be funny only in places at least several miles away from me kind of way).
But you're right that it's not really a Texans are ridiculous story, more a this entire factual situation, which happens to take place in Texas, is ridiculous, story.
Of course, it's still possible that Texans are ridiculous and that some other, independent evidence goes to support this claim.
58 - Thorn, when I run a D&D campaign, that's your character.
I think I can threadjack now, right? It's pertinent, because it made me think of crazy ants rather than urple, but there's an old capped pipe in the corner of our basement that's making a creepy gurgling noise (possibly when I turned off the water to the washing machine, possibly unrelated) and I think it may have previously leaked a little water I blamed on the cats. The cats seem freaked out by the noise, too, and I'm not really sure what to google to see if this is normal/fixable or we're haunted by ghost ants or what.
I know a guy who can sell you braver cats.
Maybe if they're doing some kind of Lassie service I won't be in so much trouble for not having found them a new home yet.
More usefully, maybe, how big is the pipe and what is it made of?
Metal, old metal so steel? It's maybe two inches in diameter, capped at about five inches off the ground, with a big flange at the base. It's all the way over in the corner by the exit door, which was originally where coal came in. There's one of those basement showers, but it's on the other side of the stationary tubs, so I don't know what it would have gone up to. On the other hand, I just realized the weird patch at the edge of the ceiling that the previous owners just stuffed plastic bags into instead of fixing the plaster(/? or whatever the hell is on those walls) is right above it. Ugh, now I probably have to stick my hand in that and figure out where it goes. Or just go to bed.
I took pictures I could put in the flickr pool because I wanted to compare it to stuff I'm googling, but nothing made it sound urgent enough that I couldnmt try to figure it out at work tomorrow.
Sounds like a pipe for steam heat. Did you used to have a boiler in the house?
We actually have water radiators, not steam. It's my understanding that water is older and so steam would never have been used, but that's just from trying to figure out radiator noise problems last year or the year before. They're lovely now! But there may have been a pipe for steam for something else.
(This is my most pitiful not-wanting-to-go-to-bed ever, because Lee has been smoking a lot to prepare to quit smoking on her birthday at the end of the week and the smell of it has given me a headache, but I am trying to downplay that so I don't get blamed as the buzzkill who's sucked all the fun from her life and a loser whose body is broken, both popular themes. If I stay around smokers often enough, I can acclimate, but spending time away really makes it clear how sick it makes me. And yes, I realize that means I live in the wrong state.)
It could just be a radiator was moved and that is the old pipe to where it used to be.
74 is quite likely. I'm sure nothing dire is going on there and I'll scope things out before figuring out what kind of professional if any to call in.
Okay, so back to the OP:
Just now in class, it came up that a student is from Pearland. So I said to her,"Pearland was in an article I just read! Have you ever heard of Rasberry Crazy Ants?"
She hadn't, but then said "Pearland has had a lot of problems with the media."
"Oh yeah? What happened?" sez I.
"I don't really know. They kept saying bad things about Pearland, and then Pearland would get mad, and that kept making it worse. So finally the mayor handled it."
"Oh yeah? What'd they do?"
"I don't really know. Just that now the media isn't allowed in Pearland."
Sometimes my students are so incredibly maddening. I'm so curious as to what happened. I suppose I'll go look up Pearland now.
I'm so curious as to what happened. I suppose I'll go look up Pearland now.
You can look but you won't find anything because I HANDLED IT BWAHAHAHA
It's maybe two inches in diameter, capped at about five inches off the ground, with a big flange at the base.
Sounds like a good time.
Although I'm sure Pearland scrubbed any quick and easy way to determine the controversy.
All I found with a quick search was fight over whether to allow an HEB store to be built at particular intersection.
You takin' notes Rob Ford? Because I'm showing how it's done. FUCK YEAH!
Let's do a search of the literature.
Is it pronounced Pearl-land or Pear-land? I've actually been there but still don't really know.
77 sounds like the start of a Stephen King novel. Innocent liberal college professor drives out into the boondocks to satisfy her curiosity about the vanished town of Pearland, last heard of being overrun by ants...
Known for their pears, historically, I believe.
I did a witness interview in an office building there once, but forgot to ask people at my firm's local office how to say the name, and strenuously avoided having the pronunciation come up in the interview.
I'm trying to recall, but I'm not good at remembering or rendering pronunciations. It was definitely "pear," but I believe said rather quickly and somewhat slurred together* with "land" so if it were "pearl" it would be similar. I'm sure however I pronounced it was mocked.
*Will spend a lot of time this week with folks who live in Maryville, but who pronounce it Murval.
57: Indeed, there's nothing distinctively Texan about the story at all, other than the casual use of cowboy hats, guns, and feral hogs.