I like how, in this comic, the arachnophobe Hannelore is spontaneously acquiring a deeper appreciation of the connectedness of all life, and realizing that spiders are only a small part of a matrix of creeping, squirming, writhing organisms.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
I just hope no-one tells Hanners that kittens are covered in cat spit.
I love Hanners so much.
Spiders evolved… to be tickled! They are perfect and wonderful and deserving of respect (might be good in roasted coffee though.. hmmm).
@2 themadtapper
My name is Turi, and I support this message
Don’t ever tell this lady about microbiota or she might end up killing herself accidentally, trying to cleanse her body…
… or about the inhabitants in her gut….
I’m pretty sure those have been addressed at one point or another.
…. or how many bacteria cover your average Sexy Fireman.
@Azkyroth 7
No, not in Hanners’ hearing, not that I can recall, anyway.
It’s been many years since I read that comic, but IIRC Hanners is diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder and one of her compulsions is hand-washing. She may well have caused harm to herself in various ways by trying to avoid/get rid of “contamination” of some kind in the past. Intellectually, someone with OCD can recognize that a fear is irrational (kitten spit, bacteria on skin, yes the oven probably is turned off, it’s very unlikely someone is going to burst into your house in the night and murder your children because you forgot to lock the door), but that doesn’t mean the obsessive thoughts or compulsions just go away.
That’s about where I am with spiders. I can’t stand them, but I avoid killing them when we encounter each other, usually just trapping them under a glass and chucking them outside. Not perfect, but I think that’s as close to living with them that I can get.
Spiders are necessary, but if I could just make sure every one automatically teleported somewhere else when it got within 10m of me, I would like that.
Yet another reason I despise physicality itself sometimes. Stupid physical universe keeps getting in the way.
@NelC, I know the feeling. I had a significant phobia with spiders, I think it was started when a white spider crawled up mom’s nose when we were moving out of our house in Philly, in favor of the suburbs, many decades ago.
Now, they’re an annoying critter to either move outside or otherwise relocate (I just had a hatching, due to a local cool snap, of course, the critters found a warm place – our house).
I’d tolerate them more if I could train them to go after fire ants! While those ants have left me alone, they did sting the crap out of my wife.
I suspect those ants are brighter than the wasps that attacked me when I first opened our new garage, likely due to the example I made of the wasps. I simply went out, got a few fogger cans, rolled them in the slightly opened garage door, came back the next day to a cleared garage.
Yeah, that fire and nest is right in front of the garage door. They were obviously spying upon me.
While the above is all true, the interpretation is merely an expression on precisely *why* my eyes are brown. ;)
Although, I have been reading up a lot on fire ants, due to my wife’s being repeatedly attacked.
Damned invasive species! How’d they like it if my species invaded their…. Oh, crap.
as a kid I liked to catch spiders. I had some orb spiders both silver striped ones and black and yellow ones even had some black widows, I did not know all of their names but I could distinguish all of the species I found from each other.
I do not catch them any more but I still have a fond place for them all and enjoy seeing them almost every time I see one. The exception is when a black widow sets her trap nest up in a place I am subject to need to get into often then she has to move there has been a succession of them out by my back fence for close to like always, rarely they are across the alley. They are all such wondrous creatures.
I took her breathing into the bag as a reaction to all of the waste that all of those creatures deposit everywhere and there is creatures eating it and someone eating them around and around and around.
I had to go and listen to Joni Mitchel’s “circle game” seemed to be the right feeling
uncle frogy
@unclefrogy, . I just recently recovered from what I suspect was a hobo spider bite.
Had a red, occasionally itching, frequently sloughing wound the size of a quarter on my inner calf that lasted for three months.
Had it advanced to eschar, I’d then have considered brown recluse bite.
that’s the thing with spiders there are few that are more dangerous and it is easy to get your self ensnared in their traps or end up with one trapped on your person so they feel threatened and then they bite.
I had a paper wasp get trapped up my pant leg once and it made itself known by stinging me a bunch of times in a small coin sized area the skin kind of died, scabbed over and peeled off but it took some time. I know what it was because I managed to free it before I stepped on it I was a little mad so was the wasp!
we were demolishing something that they had made a nest in and in the confusion……
uncle frogy
Yeah, as I woke up with it, I’m guessing that a hobo spider climbed up on the bed and got trapped between the sheet near my lower leg.
As I never found a dead spider in the bed, it obviously made a clean getaway, after expending some rather physiologically expensive venom.
I grew up in Minnesota and had to carry a bat to ward off the smaller mosquitoes. Anything that eats them is A-OK in my book.
I’m not a fan of spiders — like, massive squick and ALL the NOPE — but I fell in love with the cellar spiders. These guys eat bugs and other spiders.
I haven’t seen any since we bug-bombed the place a few months back, though a few other spiders (of various types) have made their way in and been summarily executed.