Shopping Tips and Guidance by Mandy Claire

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored," where we are blissfully free of the peskiest varieties of vermin! We've seen many unwelcome bug and mammal infestations here at Chateau Johnson, but just now things are pretty calm ... except for the fruit flies. And we love fruit flies! So all is well.

I'm sure you've read or heard that a certain particularly despicable vermin is making a comeback. That would be your bed bug. Or, not your bed bug, I hope. Someone else's bed bug. May the bored gods protect all my readers from bed bug infestations!

There was an article on Yahoo about the mounting bed bug problems, especially in the big cities. The article was factual and gave a few tepid tips on how to rid yourself of the little nocturnal bloodsuckers. I did a quick perusal of the subject matter, noting that people have been carting bed bugs home from movie theaters and department store dressing rooms. Well, that sounds reasonable enough to me. If you can cart a cockroach home in a bag of groceries, and a tick home on the back of Fifi or Fluffy, you could just as easily wind up with a bed bug on your jeans, if you draped them over a fitting room chair.

Bed bugs are making a comeback.

You know the expression. "Good night, sleep tight. Don't let the bed bugs bite." Ever wonder about it? The "sleep tight" part stems from an era when mattresses were suspended by ropes. If the ropes were tight, you slept better, because the mattress didn't sag.

Have you ever seen a rope bed in use? Me neither. Sometimes you see them at antique stores. No one buys them. Hence, the "sleep tight" is probably an old, old saying. And the bed bug part too. They've been around, these bed bugs, for a long time.

I don't have any free advice on how to rid yourself of a bed bug infestation. I know I cleared my house of a bad mouse problem by adopting Alpha, a cat who had lived in a dumpster for an unspecified period of time. But there's no peppy pet you can adopt to send the bed bugs packing. If we got them here at Chateau Johnson, I would probably just wring my hands helplessly and get bitten.

If you scare up Yahoo and look for the bed bug article http://shine.yahoo.com/channel/health/4-places-bedbugs-hide-and-how-to-avoid-them-2371120/which I've tried to link here, probably with scanty success, let me tell you something. The comments are better than the article. To date there are more than 450, most of them displaying thoughts and beliefs that do not encourage faith in humankind. Random samples:

* If you go to Wildwood, NJ, don't stay at the *** ***** Hotel. Those things will pick you up and carry you to the toilet in the middle of the night.

*The worst bed bug is in the white house and he is sucking out our blood.

*These come from illegal immigrants. Everyone knows Mexico is filthy. Those people are bringing in the bugs, and we're letting them.

*It's no wonder bed bugs are in hotels. That's where the foreigners stay, and everyone knows foreigners aren't as clean as Americans, especially people from the Middle East.

And on and on and on like this! I only read about the first 50, and all four of the above were there. Of course some reasonable comments followed, in which sensible writers pointed out correctly that bed bugs are equal opportunity vermin, completely disconnected from the sanitary conditions around them. These voices of reason get shouted down in that comment thread by morons who insist that bed bugs are riding around on the bodies of illegal immigrants and Middle Easterners, and anyone who suggests otherwise is a no-good liberal who ought to have swarms of bed bugs leeching every last drop of blood from his blue body!


You can learn a lot about people by how they source an infestation of insects in their homes.

Here at Chateau J, we've had a bad infestation of fleas in the past. I blamed the handyman who was fixing our kitchen. It couldn't have been my cats Alpha and Beta running around the yard! No way. They'd never gotten fleas that bad before. Trust me, you've got to keep these white, Christian, Vietnam veterans out of your home.

When I lived in Baltimore, in several different apartments, I was surrounded and confounded by cockroaches everywhere. Not a single living space I could find was free of them. Well, we all know that extremely intelligent people don't practice good hygiene. And after all, I was a student at Johns Hopkins. Know where those roaches came from? The briefcases of some of the finest minds in this country, that's where! Keep your kids away from the Ivy League, and if you can't, don't let them bring their luggage home with them. Make them strip in the front yard, do a cavity search, and only then let them inside for the parental hug. Smart people are buggy people! Word.

Which brings me to my final example of how despicable insects invade your home through human hosts.

There must be a whopper of a hornet nest in my attic. Can't see it, because that same handyman (uh oh) built a room on the third floor for The Heir. For about five years I've seen big-ass wasps fluttering in and out under the roof eaves. This, I tell you, is directly related to Halliburton. Some of the tar in those roofing shingles was probably fondled by Dick Cheney. Need I say more? The dude is a human wasp, isn't he? How else could I have gotten wasps in my roofing?

The moral of this sermon is that you have to watch out what kind of people you deal with. You could get bugs, and of course it would never just be by chance or bad luck.

Pinky swear, if I get bed bugs in this house, I'm going to haul Glenn Beck to court for extermination fees! He's got 'em, you can tell. Don't let the suits and hair fool you. At home he's a slob. With foreign friends, illegal household help, and sheets he stole from a hotel in Wildwood, NJ.