No Flies on Me...Oh, Wait a Minute

Okay, I know I shouldn't have sent out all those business reply cards for gardening catalogs. My new address has been sold, and sold again, I fear. Today I received a catalog from Garden Tools by Lee Valley with this:

Yes. Those are dead flies. Okay, some of them may be merely dying, squirming atop her head as they try to free themselves from the sticky trap. But they're flies. On her head. Here's the product description, straight from the Web site:

As you know, deer flies seem to land on silken feet and give you no warning before they rip out a piece of your carcass. But their motto is: "Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad". So, they fly round your head a dozen or more times before landing on the back of it.

If you have one of our deer fly patches on the back of your cap, they will immediately be trapped when they land. The patch will not stick to your fingers, but will still trap the deer flies. It's all small-scale jungle warfare.

Can everyone say "eeeeeeeewwwww."

Actually, Lee Valley does have some cool stuff, and if it wasn't $19.95, I'd be tempted to get this:


I'm a big believer in catching and releasing spiders. Good for the garden, eat other insects, blah, blah, blah. One weird summer, my cousin Jason and I caught a couple of scrawny, long-legged, web-building spiders from his dirt-floor farmhouse basement and kept them as pets upstairs, where they built tiny webs in the corner of his room near the ceiling. We do love our spiders.