I’ve read that Elvis used to get all shook up and fire his gun inside his penthouse Vegas suite. Nobody seems to know exactly why, but I have a theory: He was shooting at a fly.
I understand completely.
I hate flies. They’re disgusting disease-bearing vermin, and I know where their filthy little feet have been. Add that to the fact that they puke on their food before sucking it up and they shit everywhere, and they’re pretty much the most revolting insect ever.
Every time a fly gets in the house I say it again, loudly: I HATE FLIES!
By now, Hubby must be so sick of hearing those words that he’d like to swat me almost as much as he’d like to swat the fly. Fortunately he’s managed to restrain himself (so far).
We were sitting at the table the other night when one of the little bastards buzzed by my head. I growled and said the ubiquitous words, but I was in the middle of dinner and didn’t feel like getting up to wage war.
Instead of uttering the long-suffering “I know you hate flies” that I deserved to hear, Hubby grinned and said, “We need some anti-fly attack drones.”
In the past we’ve discussed the possibility of laser tracking and targeting systems that would zap flies out of the air, but this time Hubby stepped up with, “…and when the drone catches up to the fly, it can just suck it through the propellers: BZZZP!”
My jaw dropped with sheer awe. A brilliant and elegantly simple solution. Much easier than lasers and electronics. Except…
“But not over my dinner plate,” I objected. “I don’t want fly bits raining down on my food.”
“Right,” he agreed. “The kitchen and dining room would be a no-kill zone. The drone could chase the fly out and then disintegrate it.”
We batted the idea back and forth, making refinements to the design. (Yes, this is how dinner conversations usually go at our house.) Meanwhile, the fly buzzed around my head, taunting me.
In the end, Hubby and I decided it was unlikely that we’d be able to build a prototype drone in time to obliterate the current fly, so I got out the Dishtowel of Doom and dealt with the problem.
For those unfamiliar with the Dishtowel of Doom: When a dishtowel is snapped like a whip, it doesn’t even have to hit the fly – the concussion of a near miss knocks them right out of the sky. Which is fine with me, because the only thing more disgusting than a live fly is a freshly squished fly embedded in formerly-clean cotton.
So if you ever catch me stalking through my house with a crazed gleam in my eye, fondling a dishtowel while Elvis tunes blare in the background: Don’t worry. I haven’t lost my mind (much); I’m only fly-hunting.
At least I’m not brandishing a handgun. Or wearing a sequined jumpsuit.
Book 14 update: I’m halfway through Chapter 7 and the ideas are flowing! And I took a left turn down a rabbit hole and wrote the first pages for what might turn out to be an entirely new series… or maybe a scene from another book for Aydan & Co. Time will tell…
Author Diane Henders 
I used to have a long rubber band to despatch flies. The kind of rubber used in model airplanes. A knot in one end to hold, while the other would send the foul flapper into orbit. Worked a treat 😀
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That’s brilliant! You must have been a crack shot – that’s a pretty precise weapon. At least you could enjoy the sport at the same time. 🙂
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Love it….they drive all of us crazy…we have a good friend who takes it as his personal mission to eliminate all flies within a mile…the good news is…the flies can’t take the heat here in Arizona, so there aren’t that many…the ones that do come around face the wrath of our friend..fly swatter…bare hands…I have to credit him…he is good..he can actually catch them mid-air with his bare hands…bizarre and not someone you want to shake hands with later..
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I have to admire your friend’s manual dexterity – flies are amazingly fast and agile flyers! But one site I visited informed me that “flies defecate every 4 to 5 minutes”, which is just a little too frequent for me to be comfortable with the odds. Like you, I’ll pass on the handshake. 😉
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Did you know that Jeff Goldblum is willing to do a sequel to The Fly?
https://movieweb.com/the-fly-sequel-jeff-goldblum/
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Brrrr! I only saw parts of the original, and that was more than enough. *shudders*
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Concur. My esteem for Mr. Gooldbloom just diminished a bit.
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Dish towel of doom! Sounds like a weapon for another book or possible the new series! You have an endless imagination. Lucky readers we are.
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Thanks, Sue – if you’re entertained, I’m happy! 🙂
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Know whatcha mean. I hate the whole spray-it-with-Lysol-and-scrub-it-thoroughly routine, but it is almost worth it for the satisfying SPLAT one is rewarded with after a lengthy, but successful, stalk. 🙂
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True indeed!
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Lord have mercy woman. You make my week. I know for a fact flies know what that fly swatter is. Most likely all those eyes they have. Soon as I pick it up old buzzy just hides. I have fly strips hanging by back door and spray every day around the door but open door and there comes ole sneaky. Whatever was the Big Man thinking???.
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I’m glad you got a laugh! We always had fly strips up in our trailer. The fly strips caught some of them, but there must be a smarter batch of flies that can recognize and avoid fly strips, too. Grrr!
But now that I’ve seen Duane’s Bug-A-Salt shotgun (below), I might actually enjoy getting rid of flies… 😉
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Hi Diane, Here it is, the solution to your war on flies:
Presenting the new and improved BUG-A-SALT 2.0! Now the original salt gun has more power and uses less salt. Get… |
Keep smilin’,Duane.
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OMG, that’s hilarious! I want one! But I can see where a person could get in a lot of trouble with something like this…
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Oh yes, the “old dish towel” snap. My personal favorite. I also have the zapper racket (especially good on those bee things that like to bore holes in my barn). Also, keep the old 88 cent swatter handy.
I’ve always heard that a mind is a precious thing to waste. I will bear witness that your’s is definitely not wasted. Your books alone are a testament to your creativity and then throw in the “blog” with your endless subject matter –including the little fly. They are driving me crazy trying to enjoy being outside before a rain storm in my swing.
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Aw, thank you so much for your kind words! Now I’m smiling. 🙂
And it’s always good to have a variety of anti-fly weapons available – I hope you found one that gave you a few minutes of peaceful swinging.
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I never knew that fact about dishtowel snapping concussion . . . does it kill the fly or just stun it? Either way, it’s good 🙂
Have you ever noticed how flies will disappear if they see you with a flyswatter? I swear it’s true. It has to be in your hand, though, not just lying around.
A long time ago, I knew a girl who knew of a family whose father tried to shoot flies with a hunting rifle. Indoors. Yeesh.
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Yikes! But flies make a person crazy like that.
And you’re absolutely right about their instinct for the flyswatter. Maybe that’s why the dishtowel works – they don’t realize you’re sneaking up on them with a weapon! The concussion does actually seem to kill them, unless my aim is a whole lot better than I think. 😉
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I agree – avoid the sequined jumpsuit. Nobody needs that anymore…
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Yep, the Crazy Police might let me off with a warning for dishtowel-fondling on its own, but I’d be off to the asylum for sure if they caught me wearing a sequined jumpsuit at the same time.
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But on the plus side, they have a nice jacket with very long sleeves for you…
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There is that.
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I have a bug zapper which is shaped like a tennis racquet, it’s great but the smell of crisp fly gets a bit much after a while.
Currently on a train home, will add more later as soon to arrive at the end of the line
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I’ve seen them. Always wondered what would happen if one of those things dropped, er, accidentally, of course, into, say, a bathtub full of bubbles, comfy warm water, and a disagreeable someone of the douche bag persuasion? And would the, er, effect be, well, permanent? Inquiring minds, and all that…
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Sadly, they have a dead-man switch so that couldn’t happen. Unless one (hypothetically) taped down the button with (hypothetical) duct tape. Then something interesting might happen. Hypothetically, of course.
But I can tell you that those wires leave grill marks on one’s skin if they accidentally make contact while energized. I only made that mistake once.
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Let’s say I’ve heard corroborating evidence, er, anecdotally. 🤪
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We have a bunch of those tennis racket bug zappers, too – love them! But we mostly use them on mosquitoes – it takes major hand-eye coordination to nail flies. Those little suckers are FAST!
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We are blessed/cursed with one of those whole-house vacuum cleaner things. Our house was eight years old when we bought it from the second owner, and we could tell that the system had seen wide use. How did we know? Easy. The long coil-spring hose had worn the paint and drywall texture off the corners of every doorway in the house. Our first ‘improvement’ to the house after we moved in was to toss all the hose and attachments up into the attic and hide them under boxes of Christmas decorations. The home inspector verified that the suction unit works. We just took his word for it.
But it’d make a fun way to get some cardio, though! Leave the doors and windows open for, say, an hour before a thunderstorm blows through. That would be enough time to fill the house completely up with flies. Then turn on, say, Another One Bites The Dust, plug the hose into the wall receptacle thingy, and have at them!
And then spend another week matching the texture and repainting…
Nah, a bug zapper is looking better all the time.
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LOL! When we had our acreage in Alberta, our travel trailer was plagued by flies. There was some small aperture somewhere (we never did discover where) that was EXTREMELY attractive to flies. Walking into that trailer in the afternoon was like a horror movie.
But… you ain’t seen nothin’ funny until you’ve seen my Hubby chasing down a zillion flies armed with a hand vac! As usual, his was the elegant solution. I just went haywire with the flyswatter, and then spent the rest of the day cleaning fly guts off every surface. Sigh.
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