#19 - Flypaper
Who on Earth invented flypaper? Whoever it was, he was half genius and half mad. The idea of smearing sticky, gooey stuff on a rolled-up strip of paper hanging from the ceiling to catch flies is silly, but it works, and rather well I'd say; at least the flypaper hanging overhead in the kitchen has done its job over the last couple of days. There are two dozen flies stuck on it.
It was rumored recently that all the people in China have been called upon to dutifully kill at least one fly a day in a collective national effort to control these household nuisances. Now if that seems an extravagant measure, just imagine the awesome spectacle of a billion flyswatters slapping, slicing and slashing at every fly unlucky enough to be there. The numbers get pretty big. But then, think what a toll one billion Chinese armed with flypaper could exact - something like thirty billion flies every day!
The beauty of flypaper is that it is very effective and yet a passive system; hang it up, catch ‘em and take it down - no wearisome flailing and near misses, no gucked up newspapers and no cussing. Just hang it up and grin like a ghoul. That part is genius, pure and simple, and cheap.
But the inventor also had a warped side to him. Clever as he was, it must also have occurred to him his very sticky, undiscriminating strips would end up dangling in the middle of uncounted bustling, household situations. A man with a most unsavory sense of humor, he must certainly have recognized the potential here, knowing full well that his stickum could just as well stick to fingers and the feathers on ladies’ hats. And he must have known too that short families would hang their flypaper low down and thus accidentally catch unsuspecting tall visitors by their hair or by their nose (or worse, if you dare to contemplate the horror of it, by the hair in their nose).
There is no doubt in my mind that this mad inventor had his scenarios planned. Being a genius of sorts, he knew the statistical likelihood that out of, say, a million Chinese, at least a few of his strips would hang precisely over someone's wonton soup. It would be only a simple matter to adjust his quality control to be sure a few of his flimsy hanging strips and the tacks holding them were just flimsy enough.
The insane humor in this, of course, is not simply in what awful things can happen with all this gooey stuff hanging about; it’s the foul burden of fly carcasses that can turn an ordinary if unpleasant experience into a wholly disgusting catastrophe.
There was an occasion a number of years ago, when we were supposed to go to dinner at a friend's house. It was a weeknight, so there was a certain amount of rushing around when we got home from work to get cleaned up and dressed, which took a little doing as we had not yet made any improvements on our old house, improvements such as running hot water; bathing took place either outdoors under a hose or in the kitchen over a bucket in the sink. Well practiced in the ritual, I was nearly ready to go.
"Hurry up or we'll be late," said my wife as I was about to put on my jacket in the kitchen. Over my head hung a strip of flypaper, well laden with a crop of mid-September flies. Up shot my arm through the sleeve of my jacket. My hand hit the flypaper strip and knocked it off its flimsy tack, and down came the entire array, draping itself across and around my head more artfully than I could have done myself. I became totally involved with the filthy mess, the goo and dead flies all through my hair. It was painful as well when I finally managed to pull it free after a prolonged battle.
"Hurry up or we'll be late," said she again with not very well suppressed laughter. There I was, all dressed to kill with a bar of soap in my hand and my head in a bucket of hot water. That unknown inventor of flypaper was almost certainly a madman.