Spiders... Why did it have to be... spiders?

Well, I haven't been blogging for a couple weeks now, given how busy the tandem moves have been, job and house. I started work at the new firm on Wednesday, and so far, so good. I'm excited about the downtown environment and the types of work I'll be doing.

The big move into the house is tomorrow, and we're very excited for that as well, although my excitement was tonight suddenly tempered. Melissa and friends Alison and Lacey went to take a load of stuff over, and discovered we have a spider problem in the new house. As in, there are a lot of spiders in the house, and it's a problem. We had seen one in the kitchen the other day, but that was just one, and no biggie. But they saw a bunch tonight, and they're roughly the same pale tan color as the carpet and the walls; peachy. Also, egg sacs in the basement; gross.

Spiders are my thing, my problem. For some people, like my dad and Indiana Jones, it's snakes. For others it might be rats or ants or cockroaches or worms or some combination thereof. I knew a girl in college who was terrified of birds, especially chickens (she had never seen the Hitchcock movie, so don't go blaming the problem on that). Spiders have kept me up nights in the past with the mere suggestion that they're there, they've made me fast forward through part of one of my favorite movies, and they've stopped me from playing through awesome video games.

So this spider business is a mental setback. It means we're going to have to keep some stuff and the cats out of the basement for a time, and that hiring an exterminator is in order, ASAP.

In the meantime, I plan to do what I did when I found egg sacs in my summer storage space at Grinnell in 2000: liberally administer a dose of great power and great responsibility.

This brings me to a question. I've noticed that all the products you can buy to kill things like insects, spiders, and so on, have pictures of the creatures in question on them. The can of Spider Killer I bought tonight has a particularly nasty customer on it. Anyway, my question is this: I want to kill these things because they frighten me; why put a big scary picture of the thing on the product? The product should ideally exhibit an absence of spiders, that being the desired effect.

As in, "This magazine will give your wife or girlfriend a _____"

An open letter to whoever signed me up for a one-year subscription to "Complex":

Hi. Thanks, anyway. Listen, it's not that I don't like hip-hop. I do. It's not that I don't like general interest magazines with reviews of music, video games, movies, and the like. I'm cool with that. It's not that I have anything against the magazine's publisher, Mark Ecko. Hell, I think what he did with Barry Bonds' record home run ball is brilliant, and I even voted on the ball's fate (to send the thing into space). I don't know much about your November cover boy T.I., but that doesn't necessarily mean I don't want to know more. That I cannot say.

But here's the thing. Your magazine is double-covered. And while your main cover may simply give the impression of "I'm a style-conscious urban dude," the other cover sends a vastly different signal, especially when the magazine shows up unannounced and your wife is the one who gets the mail:

No, the other cover gives the impression of "I'm a sneaky horndog who is scared of actual nudity and for whom an annual Swimsuit Issue is too little."

So, uh, thanks, but save your postage.

Kiss kiss,
Fuffy

PS: Any chance I could switch to an annual subscription to, I dunno, The New Republic? Or Omni? Does Omni still exist? No, wait -- Wired. Wired is what I want you to give me for free without my asking for it.
PPS: Why is the model on the left wearing a big purple glove? Is she a silver-age DC Comics supervillain?

Ravenholm update

Originally posted at WayIPlay.com

I played Half-Life 2 on Friday for the first time since February. I am now in the thick of Ravenholm, and have encountered every horrible thing that the sleepy little hamlet has to offer: all three varieties of headcrab and zombie.

As I’ve blogged about here and elsewhere, I’m a great big wuss when it comes to Ravenholm. I actually wouldn’t mind the lightning-fast, shrieking, skeletal zombies leaping at me from the rooftops if giant spidery-looking things didn’t subsequently jump off of them.

The worst, of course, are the poison headcrabs. They look like giant spiders, they move like giant spiders (say what you will about the creepiness of the original headcrabs — I could usually remind myself that they looked like walking Thanksgiving turkeys), and they make rattling/hissing noises like the giant spiders in movies. These things scare the bejeezus out of me. Given the opportunity, if I know or suspect that one of these is around the corner, I will saturate the area with grenades rather than face the potential of having to watch one of these move. I should also note that I’ve been playing through Ravenholm on God mode, so none of these things can actually HURT me.

If that wasn’t enough, the poison zombies each carry four poison headcrabs, and can throw them at you from up to two stories below. Typically at that point I’m too busy spontaneously evacuating my bowels to actually kill the things.

2009 Addition: SEE! Horrifying!