Angels And Pinheads

I took some philosophy courses in college. They were fun. There you are, just you and your noodle, batting stuff around. I doubt I'd do as well in philosophy now. My ability to concentrate took off for the corner store years ago and hasn't come back. Ask me how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, and I'll start batting away, but my racket's come unstrung.

It's likely that wasn't meant to be a serious question anyway. These days it's used to make fun of people wasting time on ridiculously trivial points when there are more important things to think about. Like debating who is the ickiest Democrat of them all when the Republicans are busy burning up the entire planet. But in medieval times some people really did wonder about that angel thing. It was a way of considering the nature of angels, and whether they occupied any space at all. There is some consensus that they do not have a physical nature even though there are all those paintings suggesting otherwise. And that they're mostly men and chubby babies. What they are instead, it is said, are pure intelligences, and as such any number of them might be able to share a pinhead.

Which is a little silly. Let's face it: intelligences are not all equal. Some are stronger than others. Why, some intelligences could knock other intelligences right off the pin and take their lunch money. So I would posit that not all the available angels are going to dance on the same pin.

Moreover, I don't think any of them do. If there were angels on my pins, my sewing would go smoother. This, of course, assumes that any given angel would have some interest in how my quilts turn out, and it's entirely likely that they aren't giving it any thought at all. In general, I don't look to angels for comfort or advice. I can see how somebody might, but I'm too much of an introvert. You can wish for heavenly guidance all day long, but at some point you're going to have to do the dishes yourself.

So I haven't spent too much time on the angel density issue. I'm more interested in how many maggots can dance on the eyeball of a deceased rodent. This is of immediate importance to me, because we had a monster hatch of flies here last week. One day, no flies; next day, bazillion flies. Right now there are flies every the hell where around here. There's some evidence they came up from the basement. We didn't smell anything, but there might be a dead mouse behind the walls where we can't see it, and it got some flies all sexed up. With any luck, all the resulting maggots started life at the same time and will also drop dead around the same time. We've been hurrying up that process, but we're getting Swatter's Elbow. So that's why I'd like to know how many critters we're dealing with. Because I'm assuming this is all one litter.

The adult fly, it says here, lives for about 28 days, or as long as a standard uterine lining. We should see a significant decline in a month, then, assuming they don't get busy again. I can handle a month.

The angels don't creep me out as much, even though, according to the literature, they demonstrate some serious stalkerish qualities. They can get up on that pinhead and dance all they want, and I won't object no matter how many of them there are. I figure one good Flying Spaghetti Monster could cream the whole crew.

It's A Fly Ball

We have flies. Not a ton of them, really, just your standard set, and they're almost all in the outdoor stairwell going down into the basement. It's always a bit startling to open the basement door and see all those flies out there. They're mingling and talking over each other like they're at a church social. I don't know why they've picked that spot.

Because ever since those awkward early years at this house, we've kept the piles of cow poop in the stairwell to a minimum. We're likewise short on corpses. It is a bit untidy, and that might be attractive to flies, but it's hard to understand the draw. Being flies, they're marginally annoying even though they don't bite or anything. Probably we should install a frog.

I looked up "flies in the stairwell" to see if there was some reason they hung out there. To my chagrin, Google instantly supplied a billion articles about killing the hell out of flies, which was not what I was going for. I'm cool one-on-one with a swatter, but I always assume if you start spraying small beasts with poison, you'll eventually drop a tiger. Anyway I don't need to get rid of them. I just want to know what they're talking about.

My research proved to be a dead end. However, there was a lot of interesting advice about natural fly control, including the old "put some poop somewhere else" gambit. There is a lot of anecdotal evidence that flies like poop, but I already fling the neighbor's cat's poop back over the fence, and my stairwell flies are still here. One woman on a forum was eager to underscore the poop-fly connection. "I have a pet rabbit whom's poop attracts the big fat juicy ones," she contended, and I'm not surprised. I think it's in them's nature.

But check this out. Have you heard of this? You put a penny in a plastic bag half filled with water and hang it near the flies, and they'll go away. People swear by it. I can't help but wonder if a couple of nickels would work even better.

It's not foolproof. One woman complained that although she tried the water-bag trick using fifteen pennies, flies were still hanging around her dog kennels. There's just no explaining something like that, you'd think, but someone did helpfully suggest she'd used too many pennies.

Snopes.com is ambivalent about the efficacy of water bags. They wouldn't say one way or another, although they took a skeptical tone. It's relatively easy to construct an experiment with proper controls and an array of bags and pennies, and you can accurately measure fly concentration by tallying up the poop spots they leave behind, if that's the way you like to spend your time. The mechanism is thought to have something to do with the refraction of sunlight in the water bag amplified by the shininess of the pennies. The flies' compound eyes are completely taken unawares by it and they have to move away to unfrazzle themselves.

Could be so. I'm tempted to try it out, except for two things. My basement stairwell is a perfectly fine place to store flies, and I can think of worse places. Also, there is no direct sunlight in the stairwell. That's right: I am infested with flies where the sun don't shine.