'Tarantulas' invade Assam town, 'kill' two

Goddammit DragonLance! Go get your f#cking pet.

My meep just shriveled, poo is in my pants, and I'm shaking like a crack baby.

meep spiders. meep India.

yes

Somebody get Bill Shatner on the horn, stat!

Ugh, spiders. Never had a fear of them until living in Australia.

Drove to Florida a month ago (from NJ), had to do about 400 miles a day as I had a friend with health problems, so it took 3 days each way. On the way back, the first night, I stop at a hotel, get a room, come back to the van, open the door, and the biggest freaking spider I've ever seen is sitting on the back of my seat. It runs down to the seat, JUMPS almost all the way up to the headrest, runs up to the top of the headrest, and jumps into the back of the van, among all the suitcases, bags, boxes, my friend's oxygen bottles, and everything else we have completely packed into the van.

This was a dilemma: I could imagine doing 80mph the next day, and this giant meeping arachnid crawling across my neck. I started taking everything out, one piece at a time, and inspecting it carefully, as I HAD to know if I got the meep thing out. After an hour, and only a quarter of the stuff checked, I realized that I could go through everything, and still not find the spider, it might be hiding way up under a seat or something. So, I loaded everything back into the van, went to a convenience store, bought a can of their most poisonous bug poison that specifically said "spiders" on it, opened the doors to the van one at a time, and sprayed the whole freaking can in there. When I got to the back, something BIG jumped out, but it was only a gecko that must have snuck in the night before (glad THAT mothermeeper didn't crawl over me while I was driving). After an hour or so, I opened up all the doors, and tried to air the van out, sat outside for 4 hours guarding all our possessions. The next morning, the smell was terrible, but I found the spider, hanging dead by one leg. "meep you, mothermeeper" I yelled, then I did a little victory dance, loaded up my friend, and got the meep out of Dodge.

meeping spiders.

Oh yeah, and why does this article say "kill" in quotation marks, are they not really dead? Something either kills you, or it "kills" you.

i think it's safe to conclude that spiders are really reincarnated indians

hoya...

For all of us arachnaphobics, I thank you.

Would have done the same for you.

Hope your friend is OK.

Did you know, in Toronto (and I hear in other North American cities as well) that the North side of every office tower has a robust population of spiders that can grow quite large, both in population and the size of individuals.

I know this because years ago I worked as a high-rise window cleaner and did battle with hundreds of thousands of these little ninjas.

Lots of spiders makes a lot of silk. The weather, the wind tunnels and updrafts around tall office towers often wreck the webs which then clump together against the glass in little bio-steel spit meep that dry on to the window and then need a good scrub with a soapy, sopping wet, horse-hair brush to come off. That means really ramming the 4" bristles of the brush (which hold a ton of water) in to the corners of the windows.

The ones that live under the frame and in the gaps and channels around it come out of their spider holes when the soapy water runs in where they hide. You always work down the building starting at the top so your dirty water does not meep up clean windows. This means the spiders at the top have nowhere but down to go down to escape the wave of suds. The speed of spreading suds delays the reaction -often until after you've moved down to the floor below yourself before they decide to try and rappel to safety.

Spiders are territorial and when you displace a bunch at the top of a building by using a lot of soapy water they stampeded down and invade the homes of the ones below and when you descend a floor you get to see all the spidery chaos you caused. Then you liberally soap up the battle field and send the little meepers fleeing down further so the scene repeats itself over and over. These little meepers on spider lines rappelling down the wall en-mass all around you while you wash windows kinda sucks, but they're not poisonous and rarely bite and only wussie window cleaners complain about that... but anyway they land on you, they land on the swing stage, they blow past you leaving strings of webs stuck to your face. Sometimes they fall past -entrapped in and wrestling a ball of suds. When I got the chance I'd slash their little safety lines with my trusty squeegee and let them fall. The big ones actually splat like you and me would, when they hit the ground, we'd find them when we got to the bottom.

Sometimes the little meepers in free-fall would catch an updraft, spread their legs and fly up. Some seemed really good at that, like they were able to control it enough to reverse a fall, stop and hover in front of my face and glare at me after I'd tried to send them to meep.

Occasionally the spider population was so bad we'd be asked to do a "spider clean". That's war. We'd use leaf-blowers in reverse as our primary weapons backed up with wand application around windows of a toxic brew using pest control cylinders and respirators for a scorched earth effect.

i squished a rather large huntsman with a cricket bat not too long ago.

Feels good, eh?

yes.

Huntsman spiders don't hurt you, they should only ever be evicted from your home if they insist on clinging to the ceiling above where your head is when you are sleeping, and they should never ever ever be squished with a cricket bat, or any other implement of destruction.

Sunny, you are a cruel and heartless woman. :-)

they are huge and terrifying, i have no problem with squishing them. i love the house geckos, though. :)

hearts this.

meeproach,

I will extrude your well written account into the following Pro-Tip for Arachnaphobes:

When in a city with tall buildings, look up. If you spot a window-cleaning crew, run away from that building like a flesh eating monster is chasing you or be consumed by millions of nasty, furry, agile, acid-spewing, tissue-dissolving spiders.

That is all.

PS... My meep just ensconsced themselves in my liver.

meeping spiders.

i had my bathroom window opened and this meep walked in. or skittered. whatever the meep they do. anyway scared the meep out of me. for size comparison, that cannister is roughly the same size as a can of axe body spray

You leave your bathroom window open?

in summer, yeah.

what is "body spray"?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axe_(brand)

I bet you towel off after a nice shower in front of it too.

Can your average Swarmer fit through this window?

ninja: the bathroom window faces the back yard, and it is fenced with lots of foliage, so it's rather private and it is not an issue, so yes

bigd: two push-out windows, so i'd say yes

@sunny77

i had my bathroom window opened and this meep walked in. or skittered. whatever the meep they do. anyway scared the meep out of me. for size comparison, that cannister is roughly the same size as a can of axe body spray

Sunny, my dear old ma always described a huntsman's method of locomotion as "stomping around in its hobnailed boots".
Yes, she was a pom of the old school. (A pom is what we call someone the yanks call a limey).

this is off subject, but i still cant tell the difference between a limey, kiwi and aussie accent lol

Poms can be hard to pick because there are so many different accents.

Aussies in general are much 'flatter', sort of a cross between New England and Texas.

Kiwis pronounce 'I' as a short 'U'- six sounds like sux, so if in doubt just get them to count to ten, which will sound like 'tin'.

when i was a kid i would joke with my friends about how australians sounded like british rednecks hahaha

i went through this when i came to australia, the differences in aus and american english:


@dragonstaff

If you want to learn some good old Aussie slang, hunt up a copy of a book called 'Their a weird mob' by a bloke called Nino Cullotta. It was written as being by an Italian immigrant in the 60's by an Irishman called John O'Grady and is long out of print, but you will still find it secondhand bookshops if you look. It was also made into a movie in 1966.