HomeARC ML 0933
THE DEVIL'S PESTS!--And What to Do about Them!--By Father David
DFO933 31 July 1980 (Maria's Birthday!)
1. EVERYTHING GOD MADE ILLUSTRATES SOMETHING IN THE SPIRITUAL, & THINGS LIKE MOSQUITOES HELP US TO UNDERSTAND EVIL. I've always said that God must have made fleas to keep the dogs from getting too lazy! (Maria: And what about mosquitoes?) Well, they're like the evil, they're like the wicked. (Maria: How?) They're "lovers of darkness because their deeds are evil." (Jn.3:20.) They're attracted by the light but they don't like it, really, they just use the light to get in & then they hide from the light, isn't that funny?--Just like the Devil's people!
2. THEY CHEW ON YOU IN THE DARK, & then in the daytime with a bellyful of your blood they go roosting in some dark corner or dark place or under the bed enjoying your blood all day, & then wait for the next night when you're nice & asleep, & out they come again! But the Lord made them at least so you could nearly always hear them, to give you a little warning, you can hear them humming & buzzing around when they get too close. (Maria: And when they stop buzzing, then you know they've lit!) Yes!
3. POOR MARIA, THE MOSQUITOES REALLY LOVE HER, I MEAN THEY REALLY DO! (Maria: I put mosquito repellent all over me tonight because last night, in spite of being all wrapped up in that blanket & everything, I got a huge bite on my leg!) Well, poor Maria really got desperate! When she gets desperate enough to put on insect repellent, she's pretty desperate!
4. I WAIT UNTIL I HEAR ONE HUM AROUND MY EAR & THEN LAND, & I know he's somewhere around my ear. You can tell that by these two bites I got here & two bites here! I wait & give her plenty of time to sink her proboscis in because if she's got that needle-nose sunk down in my skin, it's not quite so easy for her to take off too fast. But of course you've got to try to smack her before she starts squirting that fluid into you.
5. I WAIT & THEN I SLAP HER JUST AS HARD AS I CAN!--Sometimes I box my ears so hard they ring, but I often get'm that way, don't I? I just wait until I hear them humming, & usually you can just barely feel a little tickle when they land because they have to set down six feet & they have a flutter of wings & then they sink in their proboscis, that needle-nose of theirs!
6. YOU GUYS NEED TO LEARN A LITTLE BIT ABOUT MOSQUITOES BECAUSE WE HAVE THEM HERE & WE'VE HAD A BATTLE WITH'M THE LAST COUPLE OF NIGHTS. Sometimes we manage to pray'm away, but sometimes we don't seem to have enough faith or something. Last night when I finally woke up, she had been battling'm & gotten so many bites already, I guess I just gave up. I got weak in faith & quit, I figured it was too late to pray.
7. BUT ONE NIGHT I REALLY PRAYED'M AWAY! (Maria: Yes!) And another night I prayed, "Lord, don't let'm bite her, just let'm bite me!"--& that's when I got all these bites! (Maria: And I didn't get any that night.) She never got a bite! The Lord really laid it on me instead, TTL! (Maria: But I don't think you should pray that prayer, Honey, just pray the Lord doesn't let'm bite either one of us! Wouldn't that be easier?) Well, do you understand mosquitoes? Do you all know how they operate?
8. WHEN THEY STOP BUZZING, WATCH OUT!--THEY'RE STICKING THEIR PROBOSCIS INTO YOU! They're sinking their beak into you & inoculating you with that poison! They do it to dissolve the blood cells so they can suck your blood. They sink their little needle-nose down into your skin into the blood, & then they squirt this poison into the so-called "bite". It's not actually a bite, it's an inoculation.
9. SHE INJECTS YOU WITH THIS FLUID, KIND OF A PROTEIN ENZYME THAT DISSOLVES PROTEIN. Her proboscis is so small, smaller than a needle or almost anything, you can hardly even see it with the naked eye, & the tube inside is so small it is too small for the entry of red corpuscles, it's microscopic! It will not accept red corpuscles so she has to inject this fluid into the place where she has her proboscis to dissolve the red corpuscles in the blood there so she can suck the blood in--& those red corpuscles are so small you can't even see them with the naked eye, think of that! Then they suck the blood back in, which they digest--particularly the females--because they can't reproduce without blood or vegetable juice.
10. THEY'LL DO THE SAME THING TO PLANTS, BUT THE ANOPHELES MOSQUITO IS PARTICULARLY FOUND OF HUMAN BLOOD, & that is the one which carries all the various diseases like malaria, yellow fever, smallpox & so on. They spread those terms around when they go biting somebody that's had malaria & has the malaria germ, then they come bite you & you get malaria. Or the same thing with yellow fever & dengue fever, several different kinds of fevers you can get from mosquitoes, including smallpox. (Maria: That's why they say in South America you really have to be careful about getting bitten.)
11. I DON'T THINK MOSQUITOES CARRY CHOLERA, THAT COMES FROM EATING DIRTY FOOD--unclean meats & unclean seafood--& from dirty toilets & having dirty flies crawl on somebody's dung & then crawl on your food, which is quite common in places like Latin America where they're not very clean & they have a lot of bugs that carry germs. But mosquitoes & flies are the primary germ-carriers.
12. THE LORD EVEN CALLS THE DEVIL THE LORD OF THE FLIES, BAALZEBUB, & I'M CONVINCED HE IS, the way they annoy you, & mosquitoes too. So mosquitoes love darkness because their deeds are evil! Flies love dirty things like dung & sewage & garbage, dead bodies, dead things, rotten things, & then they pick up all those germs on their sticky hairy legs & they come crawling all over your food depositing their germs & eggs, & you eat the food & you don't keep it clean & you get cholera, tuberculosis, typhoid fever etc.
13. SO KILL THAT FLY & KILL THAT MOSQUITO! THOSE ARE TWO OF GOD'S LITTLE CREATIONS THAT I ENJOY KILLING because they're more like the Devil's little creatures. But God made them to illustrate how bad the Devil is. Flies & mosquitoes are like his little demons that go `round spreading his poison all the time. They do it literally & physically just like the demons do it spiritually & mentally. So I guess the Lord made them just to illustrate how bad the demons are & to watch out for them.
14. NORMALLY FLIES & MOSQUITOES ARE JUST A NUISANCE & ANNOYANCE, LIKE THE DEMONS, as far as we're concerned, because the Lord protects us & keeps us, but they can be deadly if they're carrying deadly poison. The Lord protects us from the demons, thank the Lord, & the flies & mosquitoes too, He keeps us from getting those terrible diseases. Even though we get bitten & the flies crawl on our food, the Lord protects us anyway.
15. YOU'VE REALLY GOT TO DO A LOT OF PRAYING WHEN YOU'RE IN THOSE DIRTY COUNTRIES. Some of `em are pretty dirty, others are a little cleaner. In the cities & above altitudes of 300 meters, something like that, you don't have to worry about mosquitoes quite so much, in the bigger cities--I guess they don't like the smog & pollution. But the flies, of course, it just seems like you find them everywhere!
16. YOU FIND FLIES MORE IN THE COUNTRY BECAUSE THEY BREED IN DUNG, that's one of their favourite places of breeding. They land on it & deposit their eggs on it & their little larvae hatch out in it & become these little worms called maggots, & then the maggots hatch out & turn into flies. Lots of times when you look down in those open-hole outhouses you'll see them almost boiling with maggots, so full of maggots it's just seething, all those little worms!
17. WHENEVER WE DIDN'T PUT ENOUGH LIME INTO OUR OUTHOUSES AT TSC, THAT WOULD HAPPEN. I had to keep getting after the people to throw a cup of lime in after they used the toilet, each time cover it up with that white lime which you buy by the bag. Lime is the white powder they make cement with, & it kills the larvae & drives away the flies too; they don't like it & won't land on the lime because it will kill them.
18. SO IT'S GOOD IF YOU HAVE AN OPEN-PIT TOILET TO ALWAYS KEEP SOME LIME HANDY, but keep it out of reach of your children because it can be very bad for children to get in their mouth or eyes. If you take a little bit of that lye powder & just touch a drop of water to it, it will just like boil, it really turns into a very caustic fluid that will burn you & take the skin off you, so it's very dangerous.
19. THAT'S WHAT THEY HAVE IN SOME OF THESE TOILET POWDERS & CLEANING POWDERS, & ALL THOSE THINGS SHOULD BE KEPT AWAY FROM CHILDREN. They can get it in their eyes & blind'm or in their throat & choke'm, they're really dangerous.--But they're dangerous to flies too. Some people camp 'way out somewhere where they dig their own open-pit toilet, & when we did that on the road we always had a sack of lime for the people to dip a little out after they went to the toilet & sprinkle over their BM so as to discourage the flies, & we kept things pretty clean that way.
20. IT KEEPS DOWN THE ODOUR & IT KEEPS DOWN THE FLIES! (Maria: That's good advice!) (Sue: Is lime anything like lye?) No, lime's another chemical agent which is one of the ingredients of cement, what people call that stuff they put in cement & plaster, lime. So that's about the best thing to use to discourage flies besides sprays & stuff like that. Sprays are almost as bad on you as they are on the flies!
21. (MARIA: WHAT KIND OF STORES DO YOU GET LIME FROM?) Well, I think in Texas where they have a lot of open-pit toilets they even sell it in the grocery stores! You'd at least find it probably in garden stores, & since it's also a building ingredient, in a building supply store.
22. YOU CAN USE SPRAYS FOR MOSQUITOES & YOU MIGHT CHASE ONE OR TWO AWAY, but in the meantime there's another dozen coming in if you haven't got screens. They're attracted by the light, & when they usually come in is when you have your lights on at night. They'll hide under your bed or in your dark closet or in your clothes or any dark corner & wait for the lights to go out, & then when the lights go out they go on the attack! They come buzzing around & sting you while you're sleeping.
23. IT'S STRANGE, THEY GO FOR A LIGHT AFTER DARK, but once they're inside your room or home or caravan, then they will seek darkness. But talk about wisdom, intelligence, instinct or whatever it is, the Lord has made them first of all after dark to be attracted by light. And a female anopheles mosquito will peck at a screen literally for hours, keep flying around the outside trying to get in where the light is until she finds a hole big enough to get through. This is why curtains on the windows are not all that good. But even with a screen, if they can find one little tiny hole that's big enough to skin through, they'll find it!
24. A MOSQUITO BITE IS NOT A BITE, IT'S ACTUALLY A STING, same principle as the way bees & wasps sting. They inject that little needle into your skin & then they squirt poison through it into your skin. And of course mosquito bites don't pain as much as wasp & bee stings, they just itch.--But they can be much more dangerous because they carry diseases, very serious & sometimes fatal diseases. Both smallpox, yellow fever & malaria can be fatal.
25. DENGUE FEVER IS CALLED BY SOME "BROKEN BONE FEVER". It's a real serious form of a kind of a flu, your whole body aches & your bones ache like everything! I once had it in Utah, & comes, they say, from contaminated milk. Some people say that & some people say mosquitoes carry it. Malaria, smallpox & yellow fever are the main diseases carried by mosquitoes, & they can be pretty serious.
26. YELLOW FEVER WAS THE MOST DANGEROUS, BUT THEY GOT THAT PRETTY WELL LICKED IN CENTRAL AMERICA. That was the most dangerous thing about digging the Panama Canal was the yellow fever, & at that time they didn't know how it was contracted & what caused it until a Dr. Gorgas was summoned down there. They had so many cases of yellow fever & so many of the men died digging that canal through the jungle that this Dr. Gorgas went down there & really went into it & experimented & discovered that it was the mosquitoes that were carrying it. So they immediately went on a big campaign to get rid of the mosquitoes & used mosquito netting at night in the men's dorms & put on insect repellent.
27. REPELLENT IS ANOTHER GOOD THING, BECAUSE IF YOU RUB ENOUGH OF THAT ON YOUR SKIN IT REALLY KEEPS THEM AWAY!--Of course you hate to smell it yourself & it's greasy. Put it on the parts of you body that are going to be exposed to the air during the night, like your arms, face, neck, shoulders, all the parts that are out from under the covers. I sleep a lot with my feet out of the covers & when we were in Key Largo where they had so many mosquitoes I used to have to put some on my feet! (Or use a new pellet burner.)
28. THEY DON'T LIKE IT & THEY WON'T EVEN LAND ON YOUR SKIN WHEN THEY SMELL IT! Some of the insect repellents they have now don't stink quite as bad & are not quite as greasy, but they're still effective & very good. Just don't get it in your eyes because it really burns, & the mosquitoes don't like it either.
29. THE LITTLE SAND FLIES BITE TOO & THEY'RE SO TINY THEY COME RIGHT THROUGH THE SCREEN, but their bite isn't serious & will only raise a little tiny tiny welt so small you can hardly see it, but it itches & bothers you like everything during the night! They like to work at night too, only they also like to work in the daytime, day & night! They come through & will buzz around you & bite you. They make a little tiny tiny noise kind of like a mosquito, & smearing insect repellent on your skin will keep them all away--sand flies, mosquitoes, flies, everything!
30. BUT THIS AMERICAN DOCTOR WILLIAM CRAWFORD GORGAS DISCOVERED HOW YELLOW FEVER WAS TRANSMITTED & FOUND OUT IT WAS MOSQUITOES, particularly the anopheles mosquito. I made a notebook on it when I was a kid in High School, I don't know what it means but it sounds Greek. Anopheles mosquito, that's the rascal, the female, who carries the deadly poisons. As they say, the female is the most deadly of the species. In fact throughout nearly all insect life it is the female who is the most deadly. It is the black widow spider who eats her mate, & it is the anopheles female who must have human blood in order to breed her young. We trust our females are not deadly, but lively!
31. SO THAT'S WHAT HAPPENS, SHE CARRIES YELLOW FEVER WHICH IS THE MOST DANGEROUS & WHICH IS IN SOME OF THE JUNGLES, in fact most jungles have yellow fever & smallpox, & virtually all of them have malaria. Malaria is a debilitating disease, not usually deadly, it just makes you very sick. But it lasts almost all your life & comes off & on whenever you get run down.
32. THE THING ABOUT THIS ANOPHELES MOSQUITO IS SHE STINGS ONE PERSON THAT HAS THE DISEASE & sucks in their blood carrying the germs, then she goes & stings somebody else & injects that same fluid with those germs into their bloodstream & they get the disease, & this is how yellow fever, smallpox & malaria are transmitted, primarily by the anopheles mosquito.
33. WHENEVER WE HAD A COOKOUT LIKE THIS IN TEXAS ON THE RANCH, IT WAS REALLY RISKY & A HAZARD because you had everything from stink bugs to blister bugs, mosquitoes, horse flies & all! I mean America is absolutely cursed with more horrible poisonous critters than you can almost hardly count! I don't know whether any of you ever had any experiences with blister bugs, but they've got them in Texas & they're attracted by the light.
34. BLISTER BUGS ARE LITTLE GREEN BUGS LIKE ONE OF THESE SMALL BLACK BEETLES. Now if he lands on you & you don't get afraid & you don't get him afraid, you just either wait calmly till he takes off or you're fast enough to brush him off before he squirts out his fluid, you're OK. But if he gets scared he will squirt out this fluid on you which will almost immediately raise a great big blister about as big as your little finger! I mean the mosquitoes were nothing compared to blister bugs!--And there was something else, what was it? Horseflies, of course, which bite, but it's only temporary, & what was that other bug I was telling you about today that we had in Texas?--Stink bugs!
35. TEXAS, ARIZONA & NEW MEXICO, THE SOUTHWEST OF THE UNITED STATES, SEEMS TO BE REALLY CURSED WITH ALL KINDS OF VENOMOUS INSECTS, venomous reptiles & venomous spiders & everything! It's just horrible! That's where they've got those great huge tarantulas as big as my two hands! The full grown adults are this big around with knees this high & hairy legs as thick as your finger!--And mandibles in front just as big as these two fingers working like this, that bite!
36. THEY CLAIM THAT SOME BITES ARE FATAL, BUT I THINK REALLY THE PEOPLE ALMOST DIE OF FRIGHT! You've seen these little tiny jumping spiders that are only about as big as your thumbnail but can jump a couple of meters? Well, they have them in the States, it's a little tiny spider that looks just exactly like a tarantula. They have these legs that go up & the knees like this, & they crawl along slowly & all of a sudden they can jump a meter or two!
37. THEY CLAIM THAT THOSE TARANTULAS, IF DISTURBED OR FRIGHTENED CAN JUMP 25 TO 30 FEET, that's about 10 meters! I've heard people say that they've watched'm, seen'm do it! And if something like that jumped & suddenly this big thing with all these legs hit you like that, I mean it would practically scare you to death!--And bite you on top of it! I mean spider bites do hurt! They probably get frightened, & when they get frightened, like a reptile or a rattlesnake, they will strike at anything that moves. (Jus: What good do they do?)
38. THEY EAT FLIES & MOSQUITOES & OTHER INSECTS. Some spiders build webs to catch them, but I've never seen a jumping spider build a web, they apparently depend on their athletic agility & jumping accuracy to jump on another insect. The spiders that build webs are usually very long-legged & they have very long delicate slim black shiny or ebony-like legs, not hairy legs at all.
39. BUT THESE JUMPING SPIDERS, PARTICULARLY THOSE HUGE BIG TARANTULAS OF THE SOUTHWESTERN UNITED STATES, I mean just standing still on their legs they're as big as this dinner plate!--And the knees of the legs standing this high, almost as high as this wine glass! And they are a jumping-type spider, so I'm inclined to believe the stories that I've heard about people who have seen'm jump 25-30 feet. Normally they just crawl slowly along, just like you've seen jumping spiders crawl slowly, but then when they want to jump they go, "Pffftttt!" like that! Aw, I tell you, whenever I've seen one, I give him a nice wide berth, plenty of room!
40. MARIA WANTED TO GO DOWN TO THE REST-ROOM IN OKLAHOMA ONE NIGHT & HERE WAS THIS HUGE GREAT BIG GIANT TARANTULA walking slowly along, just like this, towards the ladies room! I thought, "Boy, if any of those ladies go in there tonight we're going to hear some screams!"
41. THE SOUTHWESTERN UNITED STATES IS A DESERT, IN FACT, NEARLY HALF THE UNITED STATES IS A DESERT, most people don't know that! And the most desert part is the Southwest, & there they have the most poisonous reptiles, insects, varmints of every description that you can think of! I mean all kinds of poisonous spiders including the usually fatal black widow.
42. THEN THEY HAVE THESE BIG LONG CENTIPEDES--a foot long, this wide, as big around as my thumb with they claim about a hundred legs! And every leg has a pincher with a stinger on it on the end, on the feet! Now if they get crawling across you & get scared they will sink all hundred of them into you like that, & they've actually been known to be fatal if they inject enough of that poison into you!
43. WHEN WORKING AROUND TSC WE USED TO GET'M QUITE OFTEN. Boy, I tell you, especially if we were digging around in the brush or anything, why, they'd come, & they could run fast, man!--They could go fast! They run across the ground as fast as a mouse or something, & to kill one you had to run after him with your shovel & bang him like mad!
44. THE SOUTHWESTERN UNITED STATES HAS A LOT OF SUNSHINE & VERY LITTLE WATER, BUT I TELL YOU, THEY'VE GOT MORE INSECTS--venomous insects & poisonous reptiles, many of them deadly--than I guess almost any place in the World! And I've often wondered whether it was because of the terrible prevalence of demonology, witchcraft & Devil-worship amongst the Indians.
45. THEY HAD TREMENDOUS HUGE CIVILISATIONS OF INDIANS IN SOUTHWESTERN U.S. AT ONE TIME, & there was a time when it was not a desert. They have found huge cities, old antiquated, very ancient pueblos, some of which could have housed as many as 100,000 people but now miles from any form of water of any kind. In other words, at one time it was well-watered, there was water there, rivers or wells or something, but all God had to go was just withhold the water & the whole thing turned into a desert & whole populations perished!--& the desert filled with varmints!
46. BECAUSE THE MAJOR RELIGION OF THE INDIANS IS ACTUALLY DEMON WORSHIP, DEMONOLOGY. In most of their religions they had these underground chambers where they went down, subterranean chambers far below the surface of the ground, & there are strata, underground strata in which certain devils & demons are literally imprisoned. So if they wanted to get in touch with those particular devils or demons they dug down to where they are imprisoned & then they could have contact with them.--The pit!
47. SO THIS WAS THE MAJOR RELIGION OF THE INDIANS, ALTHOUGH THEY RECOGNISED A GOD WHICH THEY CALLED "THE GREAT WHITE SPIRIT", the good God. They also did everything they could to pacify the bad gods & the Devil & the demons, & they worshipped all of them too. So I really feel that God probably cursed those regions because of their idolatry & demonology, & gave them over to the White man, to the Christians, who came in & drove them out & spoiled & massacred them. It was a terrible thing & it was certainly not to the credit of the White man, but God let it happen. They were definitely idolaters & demon-worshippers, & God seemed to have cursed their former habitation with all these horrible venomous critters!
48. YOU CAN READ IN THE BIBLE ABOUT THE LANDS THAT GOD CURSED & SAID THEY WOULD BE INHABITED BY ALL THESE VARIOUS HORRIBLE CREATURES & they would become barren & so on, like Babylon & Assyria & some of those. He said Nineveh would become totally desolate & would never be rebuilt & totally uninhabited, & inhabited only by all kinds of these creatures--jackals & all kinds of horrible desert creatures.--And it's happened! Even the Bedouins or the Arabs who get caught in the area by dark will not pitch their tents there. They believe the place is cursed, & they will even travel at night to get away from it before they camp, think of that!
49. WELL, WE STARTED OFF TALKING ABOUT MOSQUITOES, THAT THE LORD CREATED MOSQUITOES. I believe He even created the flies, although the Devil is called Baalzebub, the Lord of the Flies. Nevertheless, God created the Devil & the flies both, He made them & made the Devil the Lord of the Flies, & if not actually demons, they're symbolic of them. I think mosquitoes are certainly symbolic of demons & devils, if not actually devils! Think about that! They're lovers of darkness because their deeds are evil! (Jn.3:20.)
50. I GOT FASCINATED BY THE MOSQUITO WHEN I WAS YOUNG IN HIGH SCHOOL. We had so many of them in Florida where we were living, the mosquitoes were terrible in those days! Now the major cities like Miami have very few because they've got them pretty well under control. They used to have the big B-52 bombers come flying real low just above the rooftops & hotels & apartments in Miami Beach, spreading down this big yellow cloud of DDT, just completely saturating all of Miami Beach!
51. YOU WERE TOLD BY RADIO AHEAD OF TIME WHAT HOUR THEY WERE GOING TO COME. They said, "Go into your house & shut your doors & windows & stay till we finish spraying!"--& these huge big bombers just laid down this huge cloud of DDT. I was really mad about it & protested to the city that it was an infringement on my personal liberty & freedom, that they were not giving us any say-so about whether we wanted to all be poisoned with DDT or not! But as usual, it doesn't do much good to protest or file complaints with the System, they go ahead & do as they please anyhow.
52. WELL, IT DID KILL THE MOSQUITOES & THE FLIES, BUT THEY ALSO FOUND OUT IT KILLED THE LADYBUGS & A LOT OF GOOD INSECTS, which had helped the crops. But in the early days when I was a kid in Miami the mosquitoes were pretty bad, so they tried all kinds of cures. They didn't have DDT yet, but they did have a petroleum spray like kerosene, & they had airplanes that flew over & sprayed out big clouds of that!
53. MIAMI OF COURSE WAS A RESORT CENTER & THEY DEPENDED ON TOURISTS, & IF THE TOURISTS GOT TOO MANY MOSQUITOES THEY WEREN'T GOING TO COME BACK, so they did everything they could to try to control the mosquitoes. They had the Mosquito Patrol, which were inspectors, & you never knew when they were going to come by your house. But I would say on an average every month or two you had a Mosquito Control Inspector come down the street & he would go all around you house & look under your house.
54. A LOT OF THE HOUSES WERE BUILT ON BLOCKS, & IF HE FOUND ANY KIND OF A CONTAINER, like an old tin car or a washtub or anything that was accumulating water, anything that was in an upright position in which rain could fall or water could get in & breed mosquitoes, you were fined $5 right on the spot!--And that was a lot of money in the Depression days!
55. THIS IS WHY IN ONE OF THOSE CENTRAL AMERICAN COUNTRIES, I THINK IT'S GUATEMALA, IF THEY FIND YOU CARRYING EXTRA TIRES WITHOUT WHEELS, unmounted tires, they will take them away from you. Because when I was a kid, if they found unmounted tires lying around your house anywhere it was a $5 fine, because water gets in the tires & breeds mosquitoes. Mosquitoes will breed in any kind of little pools of stagnant water, they'll even breed in wet grass.
56. THE MOSQUITOES LAY THEIR EGGS ON THE SURFACE OF THE WATER & THE EGGS HATCH INTO LITTLE LARVAE which are funny little things that look a little bit like a sea-horse with a tail which keeps kicking around, I guess so it can find food, & then eventually it hatches into a mosquito. Now I don't know where in the world all these mosquitoes are coming from because it's so dry here, but if there's any kind of stagnant water it'll breed'm like everything!
57. BUT THE FEMALE CANNOT DEVELOP HER EGGS & LAY THEM UNTIL SHE HAS MAMMAL BLOOD, so she will search for hours & hours, she will untiringly fly all night long & poke at a screen trying to find a way in to get a bite of blood. (Sue: Does she smell you?) It's smell or something, but she can sense the presence of humans inside of a caravan or a house or whatever it is.
58. IN THE EARLY DAYS OF MIAMI THEY WERE VERY THICK, & THEN LATER IN THE 60'S WHEN WE WENT TO KEY LARGO, during the three Summer months they were in swarms! I mean you'd get out of your car & they would descend on you in a cloud, & they could almost drive you crazy! We used to drive up alongside our trailers & honk at somebody in the trailer to get ready to throw open the screen door. Then we'd scream at them through the closed window, "Are you ready?" And they'd say, "We're ready!" And we'd say, "OK! One, two, three, go!"--And we'd throw the car door open & they'd throw the screen door open & we'd literally leap from the car into the trailer & slam the screen door!
59. EITHER THAT OR THEY WOULD JUST DESCEND ON YOU IN A CLOUD!--And I believe that people could go absolutely crazy! I remember a young fellow named Sands who was crossing the Everglades one night coming from Tampa to Miami & he had a flat. Crossing the Everglades they had a beautiful highway, but if you got stalled there somehow, the best thing you could do was roll up your windows tight & sit tight in your car, otherwise the mosquitoes just descended on you by the thousands!--And that many mosquito bites can almost kill you! I mean it was horrible! Talk about a nightmare or a sci-fi, it exists some places!
60. SO I WAS RAISED WITH MOSQUITOES & I KNOW SOMETHING ABOUT'M! (Dora: But do mosquitoes go after certain people more than others?) Well, this was a great subject of discussion when I was young in Miami. Some people they seem to avoid & they don't like to bite, & some doctors contended that it was according to their diet. For example, the Seminole Indians seemed to be totally impervious to mosquito bites & they live right out in the swamps, right out in the Everglades, but the mosquitoes seem to avoid them like the plague, never touched'm, never had malaria, nothing!
61. THEY WOULD CATCH GERMAN MEASLES FROM THE WHITES & IT WOULD BE ALMOST FATAL, frequently fatal, but they seemed to be totally impervious to mosquito bites. And some doctors claimed--amongst them Dr. Koger--that it had something to do with their diet.--Either that, or that they had built up a resistance of some kind against the mosquito bites.
62. (DORA: IN GERMANY THEY SAY THAT MOSQUITOES GO AFTER THOSE WHO HAVE SWEET BLOOD.) (Maria: Maybe that means they eat too many sweets!) Well, they used to talk about it in Florida when I was a kid, that some people they didn't go for because they had bitter blood, they didn't like it. But it was true, there were certain kinds of people that they didn't seem to touch. Oddly enough, I was one of them, they hardly ever bothered me at all, but they would really go after other people & they nearly drove my mother crazy!
63. BUT IT'S IMPORTANT TO KNOW ABOUT THEM BECAUSE THEY CARRY THREE VERY IMPORTANT DISEASES, ALL OF WHICH CAN BE FATAL, the most serious of which is yellow fever. The next most serious is smallpox, & the least serious but can be serious & sometimes fatal is malaria, & that's the most common. I guess that's why the Lord made me give this talk today, because all our people going to those tropical countries like Latin America are going to have that problem.
64. I MADE A NOTEBOOK & WROTE A PAPER ON IT WHEN I WAS IN HIGH SCHOOL. You've seen that notebook, haven't you? I made a drawing of this great big mosquito on the front of my notebook & had all about the anopheles mosquito. That is the most dangerous; it's a fairly big mosquito & it is the female who carries all these various diseases.--Any one of them, or even all three of'm!
65. IN ALL THESE COUNTRIES IN SOUTH AMERICA THAT THE KIDS ARE GOING TO GO TO, MOSQUITOES ARE VERY PREVALENT. All tropical countries such as South & Central America, the Caribbean, Africa, Asia, the South Sea Islands & all the rest, have mosquitoes, & most of the altitudes below 300 meters have lots of mosquitoes & many of them carry malaria.
66. SO YOU'RE ALMOST SURE TO GET MALARIA IF YOU GO TO THOSE AREAS WHERE THEY HAVE THOSE MOSQUITOES & you stay in any place that's lower than a thousand feet, 300 meters, where the mosquitoes are. They just have'm, that's all. And worse yet, they might even carry smallpox & yellow fever.
67. BUT YOU'LL FIND THAT THEIR BIGGEST CITIES ARE FAR ABOVE THAT ALTITUDE & AWAY FROM MOSQUITOES. Nearly all the big cities of Latin America are up on high plateaus or high mountains above the jungle level, above the mosquito line. In fact when you first go to Mexico City you wonder why you're so tired till you find out you're at 7000 feet, that's over 2000 meters high! And San Jose, the capital of Costa Rica, is I think at about 3000 meters, very high up on a high plateau.
68. AND ONLY THE PORT CITIES USUALLY ARE AT SEA LEVEL, & USUALLY THEY'RE NOT THAT NEAR THE JUNGLE. They're kind of away from the jungle & they get a strong sea breeze which blows the mosquitoes away. That was a big advantage of Miami, it always had a strong sea breeze, about a 20-25 knot breeze that kept the mosquitoes back in the interior in the Everglades. We always dreaded the time when we had a rare West Wind, an Everglades wind which would blow all the mosquitoes into town, & it was horrible!
69. WELL FINALLY, WHEN I WAS A KID, THEY HAD THE MOSQUITO PATROL, & that helped keep down the breeding places & they even sprayed from balloons, those blimps & small dirigibles. They tried spraying & everything, but the thing that finally licked the mosquito problem in Miami & what they found to be the most effective method of fighting mosquitoes was a natural enemy called the mosquito hawk or dragon fly.
70. THEY LIVE ON MOSQUITOES, IT'S THEIR FAVOURITE FOOD, & THEY WILL HOUND'M & POUNCE ON'M & FOLLOW'M & DEVOUR'M! So they finally brought literally millions of these dragon flies--I don't know how, they bred them someplace--they brought'm by the millions, & they had the blimp fly around over Miami releasing them, & for awhile they were thick! But they almost completely cured the mosquito problem, they just devoured the mosquitoes!
71. THEY NOT ONLY DEVOURED THE LIVE GROWN MOSQUITOES BUT THEY WOULD LAND ON THE WATER & DEVOUR THE EGGS & THE LARVAE, their favourite food! So God has a remedy for everything & a natural enemy for everything. That was when they really began to conquer the mosquitoes in Miami, when they got the dragon flies, or as when I was a kid they called'm mosquito hawks, & they really did the trick, TTL! A hawk is a predatory bird that lives on small mammals like mice & rats & chickens & things like that, so they call'm mosquito hawks because they lived on mosquitoes.
72. BUT WATCH YOUR DOORS & WINDOWS, TRY TO KEEP THEM WELL CURTAINED OR SCREENED & KEEP THE MOSQUITOES OUT! The main thing to do is not leave a light on at night. If you have a light on inside, be sure all your doors & windows are closed, screened or at least well curtained, because they are attracted by light, the tiniest kind of light, particularly the light on the interior of dwelling places.
73. NOW GOD MADE'M, SO HE MUST HAVE GIVEN THEM THAT INSTINCT OR INTELLIGENCE TO MAKE FOR A PLACE WHERE HUMANS DWELL & to be attracted by the light, even a candle flame. And they will flutter around & poke around your screen for hours trying to find a way to get in. It was almost like a nightmare sometimes in Key Largo. You could hear not one little tiny hum but a steady big drone of literally hundreds of mosquitoes outside of every screen trying to get in!
74. IT WAS THE MOSQUITOES THAT DROVE US OUT OF KEY LARGO. I finally told Aura Jones I couldn't take it any more! There were three months to the Summer, that's all; it began in June & went through August, & then the mosquitoes went away or died in the cold or whatever. The rest of the time was delightful, a beautiful tropical paradise, but nobody in his right mind stayed in the Florida Keys or the Everglades or swamps during the Summer--the mosquitoes could almost drive you crazy!
75. SO WE JUST FINALLY SOLD OUT OUR INTEREST IN SHARON COLONY TO AURA JONES. You've heard about Sharon Colony, you saw it in the Old Goldies I think. Aura Jones was the one that partnered with us on that & we went down there & bought these lots for $10 down & $10 a month, it was quite a bargain.
76. WE HACKED THIS WHOLE TRAILER PARK OUT OF THE JUNGLE, acres of it! We got about four acres, room enough for around 50 trailers. We dynamited our cesspools out of the coral rock & laid out our lots & got people investing in it & it was great! I mean it was beautiful, except when Summer came, & then it was a nightmare with those mosquitoes!
77. BUT THE FUNNY THING ABOUT MOSQUITOES & WHY YOU GET SO MANY BITES IN THE NIGHT FROM ONE MOSQUITO, is because involuntarily in your sleep you try to shoo it away & get rid of it, or maybe you're even awake, & you don't let the mosquito take a good bite! It literally amounts to a good suck, it does not bite, he inoculates you--I'm sorry, it's not a he, it's a she, a female!
78. SHE HAS TO HAVE THAT BLOOD & SHE LANDS ON YOU & SHE SINKS HER PROBOSCIS INTO YOU. Now sometimes she will move of her own free will because she's not getting enough blood, she didn't sink it in the right place. You know how they do sometimes when they draw blood at the blood donors or blood samplers with a big needle, if they don't get it in the right place they poke another place until they can really get a lot of blood.
79. BUT IF SHE SITS ON A GOOD PLACE WHERE SHE GETS A GOOD STREAM OF BLOOD to where she gets so gorged with blood she can hardly take off & fly, then she'll go to the nearest dark place & sit down & digest it for the rest of the night & sleep all day & be all ready for her next foray the next night!
80. WELL WHEN I WAS A KID WE BOYS USED TO LOVE TO SHOW THE TOURISTS IN FLORIDA, THESE NEW PEOPLE FROM THE NORTH, "HERE'S WHAT YOU DO ABOUT MOSQUITOES, we can show you how to let a mosquito bite you without getting a mosquito bite!"--& we would let a mosquito land on our arm & hold very still, you can't even hardly breathe or blow a breeze or anything or you'll frighten her away.
81. SHE'D SINK HER PROBOSCIS INTO OUR ARM & SIT THERE FOR ABOUT FIVE TO TEN MINUTES. (Maria: That long?) Yes! (Family: Ugh!) Let her sit there & inject the fluid. It's the fluid that causes the very strong itching, it's a poison to you, & if after having injected the fluid she gets frightened away, you're stuck, literally stuck with the fluid which causes this allergic reaction of the so-called mosquito bite.
82. IT'S THE POISON SHE INJECTS WHICH CAUSES THE SO-CALLED BITE, WHICH IS LITERALLY AN INOCULATION. You've had other inoculations like smallpox that causes a reaction, a bump or a blister or something? Well, that's what she does. She injects that fluid & if you frighten her away before she is able to suck it all back out again, you've got a bad mosquito bite that itches & swells as she's had to leave her fluid there. She apparently has quite a bit of fluid because she can do that quite a few times & give you several bites, so-called, & leave some fluid in each one of'm.
83. SO WE USED TO DO THIS TRICK, WE SAID NOW WATCH! YOU DON'T HAVE TO WORRY ABOUT MOSQUITO BITES, LOOK! Let the mosquito land, sit there five or ten minutes, she injects the fluid, it dissolves the corpuscles, she sucks the blood, just let her sit there until she gets actually fat! You can see her get visibly fat with blood to where she's about a 16th of an inch thick, that's more than a millimeter, thick with blood! Just fat fat fat with blood!
84. BUT IN SO DOING SHE SUCKS VIRTUALLY ALL THAT FLUID OUT AGAIN WITH THE BLOOD, & then when she's through she voluntarily takes off. Or when we saw that she was really through, really fat with blood, gorged with blood, we'd shoo her away & she'd take off leaving virtually no bite at all!--Hardly the slightest bump or irritation or sting or anything, no itching, nothing, because she has sucked all the fluid out again with the blood.
85. NOW PERHAPS THAT'S WHAT THE LORD INTENDED, THAT SHE WOULD DO THAT & YOU WOULD NOT SHOO HER AWAY. (Sue: Because if they're malaria or disease-ridden mosquitoes it wouldn't matter if she bit you all the way or not, as soon as she sticks her thing in you, you can contract the disease, right?) I don't know, maybe if you give her time to suck it all out maybe you wouldn't get it! But that's why you contract these diseases, because she injects this fluid into your blood & along with it these germs that she has contracted from somebody else she's been sucking on who has either malaria, yellow fever or smallpox germs. If she has bitten one of those before she bit you, then you get it. (Jus: Isn't smallpox almost extinct?)
86. SMALLPOX IN THE UNITED STATES & EUROPE HAS ALMOST TOTALLY DISAPPEARED! The WHO, World Health Organisation, even had a reward out for the reporting of smallpox cases, & it has almost disappeared. The last report I heard, about the time we left the States, they had only six cases, all from being inoculated! They had more cases from inoculation, which sometimes backfires, than they had from mosquitoes! (Dora: I don't know what smallpox is.)
87. SMALLPOX IS VERY SIMILAR TO CHICKENPOX, ONLY MUCH MORE SEVERE. You break out with these little sores like pimples which have scabs on them, & the reason they call it small pox is they leave these little holes all over your face called pox. Everywhere there was one of these little volcanoes erupting with a little scab on it, when you finally recover, it leaves a bunch of holes.--That is if you do recover, which you don't always, because smallpox can be fatal. I've seen guys in the past when I was young whose faces were just covered with these holes, horrible, but you don't seem to see'm anymore.
88. NOW YOU CAN GET A FEW OF THOSE EVEN FROM CHICKENPOX. I've still got one or two on my face, I don't remember right now where, but maybe you remember seeing'm, even from chickenpox, if you have a few severe ones. But chickenpox is like a very very mild case of smallpox & I don't think it's ever fatal, whereas smallpox is frequently fatal.
89. YELLOW FEVER IS OFTEN FATAL! You get bitten by the mosquito & you develop a high fever & you turn yellow, a little like hepatitis, only hepatitis is caused by drinking bad water & eating unclean food which plugs up your liver somehow & gives you liver disease. Your liver purifies your blood, so when it fails to function properly & fails to purify your blood sufficiently, you'll turn yellow.
90. WHEN I WAS A KID THEY CALLED HEP YELLOW JAUNDICE. My mother used to point out someone on the street & say, "Look, he has yellow jaundice!" People turn quite yellow with it & look very sick & pale & emaciated & weak. (Maria: Some babies have it when they're born, don't they?) They say it occurs mostly in babies of cigarette-smoking parents & causes a liver failure or breakdown of some kind. I think something like 64% of babies born to habitually cigarette-smoking mothers are usually born with some kind of liver, heart or lung trouble. (Hep comes from dirty blood transfusions too!)
91. WELL, I THINK ONE REASON THAT MARIA HAS BEEN PLAGUED BY MOSQUITOES & I HAVEN'T HAD SO MUCH TROUBLE is because I was sleeping so soundly that the mosquito would bite me & suck all the blood she wanted including withdraw the fluid again, & therefore it didn't bother me. (Maria: Last night I was slapping & pounding on myself & you didn't even stir!) See, I was snoring away, I was really sleeping soundly & it didn't bother me.
92. THE SOUNDER YOU'RE SLEEPING WHEN A MOSQUITO BITES YOU, THE BETTER OFF YOUR ARE. If you don't disturb her, but just let her get her fill that she needs for breeding & fly away, she will suck most of that fluid back out with your blood. After all, it's only about one drop of blood, you can spare it, & you can sure do without that fluid! She will then fly away & leave almost no mark or bite at all.
93. BUT WHAT USUALLY HAPPENS IS THAT IF YOU'RE NOT SLEEPING REALLY SOUNDLY OR DEEPLY, you feel a little tickle of the mosquito landing. Maybe you even feel it if she happens to strike a nerve, you may feel the proboscis, so you stir & you move & she's frightened away. She's just injected a nice dose of inoculation fluid & leaves a little bit of fluid each place causing what's called a mosquito bite, until she has enough.
94. PROBABLY THE LAST PLACE WHERE SHE REALLY SETTLED DOWN & GOT HER FILL YOU NEVER GOT A BITE AT ALL!--It's just all those places that you shooed her away from. So actually the sounder your sleep the better, & they seem to be most active in the very middle of the night when it's the darkest & you're the soundest asleep, which is probably for your benefit. If you don't stir, she'll probably get it all back out again with the blood & leave almost no bite at all. But the sad part about it is, if that first tickle or few little probes or humming sound wakes you up, then you start fighting & she keeps landing here, there & yon, biting here, biting there, & you wind up with a whole bunch of bites! Poor Mrs. Mosquito never had a chance to get her fill!
95. ALL THAT TO SAY THIS, IF YOU LET HER JUST GET ONE REAL GOOD BITE & stay there & drink her fill of your blood & suck the stuff out again, why you'll hardly even feel it! It's true! So anyway, that's about mosquitoes, & they are very dangerous because they do carry those three major diseases.
96. MALARIA IS THE MOST COMMON, BUT THE LEAST DANGEROUS & they say now that they've got some kind of a new medicine you can take if you're going to a malaria area. You take this medicine ahead of time & it almost completely negates the affect of malaria. It not only protects you from malaria, but even if you get malaria mosquito bites it prevents you from getting the disease & you'll not carry it home with you & continue to suffer from it. (Maria: But then after you get home you have to continue to take it for awhile to nullify it, it's a pill.)
97. UP UNTIL NOW THE MAIN PROTECTION AGAINST MALARIA WAS QUININE, a fluid taken from the bark of a tree. You drink it orally, steadily, before you go to the malaria-infected area, & you drink it constantly while you are there & even after you've left, & it seems to prevent the effects of the disease. And this new medicine does the same thing.
98. BUT IT'S VERY COMMON & YOU CAN JUST BE ALMOST VIRTUALLY SURE THAT THE MOSQUITOES IN THOSE LOWER JUNGLE AREAS & LEVELS, the lower altitudes below a thousand feet or 300 meters, have malaria, & you can get it! Virtually all the Caribbean Islands, Central America, South America, Africa, Asia, the Pacific Islands & anywhere where you're near sea level or you're below a thousand feet, the mosquitoes are there & they usually have malaria.
99. AS FAR AS I KNOW, ANTS DON'T CARRY ANY PARTICULAR DISEASES OR ANYTHING, EXCEPT DIRT ON THEIR FEET. They're just kind of a nuisance because they get into your food & into your house & crawl on you in the night & they do bite. Even the little tiniest ones bite, particularly the red ones, they really bite, & the big red ones, oh, they are terrific, they really sting! The black ones are not as stingy, & the smaller they are the less powerful they seem to be.
100. BUT THEY'RE JUST KIND OF A NUISANCE CRAWLING IN YOUR HOUSE & GETTING INTO YOUR FOOD, PARTICULARLY SWEETS & GREASES. In Florida we used to always have to keep the honey in a bowl of water. I don't know how they can smell it, but they can smell it for it seems like miles, or yards anyway, & they will find food in your house no matter where it is, even if it's in cans or jars or bottles or whatever, once it's been open. If it's sealed & never been opened they can't smell it, but once it's been opened, they'll find it!--And they love honey & sugar & sweets! Then there's another kind of ant that loves any kind of greasy foods.
101. THEY LIVE IN COLONIES, SO IT'S PRETTY EASY TO KILL THEM & GET RID OF THEM BECAUSE YOU CAN SPRAY THE COLONY. When I was a kid they didn't have so many of these insecticides & things, we just used to pour kerosene on an ant colony to kill them, pour it down the hole & light it with a match. If you don't have anything else, just take some kerosene or gasoline & pour it down the hole. That was the old Florida way of doing it, & really got rid of them because the fire would go right down in the hole.
102. I KIND OF HATE TO DO THAT TO THE POOR LITTLE ANTS, but when they get to be such a nuisance they're crawling in your house or crawling on you in the night & biting you & stinging you & getting into all your food, why then you get pretty mad at them, mad enough to kill them! If they stay outside & don't bother us, I'd leave them alone, because they're part of God's creation & His balance of nature, & as a group are beneficial to humans, aerating the soil & destroying crop-damaging insects. But when they start coming in, watch out!
103. DON'T UNDERESTIMATE THE POWER OF ONE LITTLE ANT YOU HAPPEN TO SEE IN YOUR HOUSE! HE IS PROBABLY A SCOUT for the whole colony looking for the next place to land, & he will go back & tell them & pretty soon you'll have a whole stream coming in! They send out little scouts, that's what all these little ants are that we've had in here lately, probably every one is a scout, because they're not in streams, they're not going together.
104. THE REAL WORKERS ALL WORK TOGETHER & GO IN BIG LONG STREAMS & CARRY THINGS. Sometimes if it gets too wet outside they'll come running out of their holes, every little worker carrying a little egg, all their babies, & they'll stream into your house through some hole, someplace where it's dry, carrying all their little children, their little eggs inside, to get them out of the wet. And they can do it in a hurry! I mean they can come in, land, & build a nest in your house overnight if they've got a way in!
105. THEY COME THROUGH SOME LITTLE HOLE SOMEWHERE, crawl in a drain or something. They don't seem to like dirt like flies though, they seem to be fairly clean. I've never heard about ants carrying any kind of germs unless they just accidentally get some kind of germs on their feet & get them on your food, because you don't find them in dirty places like roaches. (Maria: Excuse me, but there's three right down there!)
106. THEY'RE SCOUTS, THEY MAY BE GETTING TOGETHER, YOU BETTER STOP'M, KILL'M, SQUASH'M, QUICK! If you don't get those few little scouts that come in, pretty soon you'll have the whole colony moving in, you'll have a whole stream of them! So you've gotta get the pioneer scouts, the lone one or two or three you see wandering around. Don't underestimate their power, because they're looking for good places to eat & feed & colonise & land & set up a new colony, frequently inside your walls!
107. WE HAD A NEST OF ANTS ONCE IN ONE TRAILER THAT HAD GOTTEN SETTLED INSIDE THE WALL OF THE TRAILER, & we almost never got rid of them! I mean they never had to go outside at all, they were already in & they just bred right there inside the trailer wall! (Sue: How'd you get rid of them?) Fumigating. We had to use a lot of ant sprays & spray it into the cracks they were coming out of to try to get it into the walls.
108. JUST DON'T EVER SPRAY WITH ANY OF THESE INSECTICIDES WHEN YOUR WINDOWS ARE CLOSED! Always if you're going to spray inside your house or trailer, be sure you open up all the windows & vents. Take a deep breath, spray as long as you can hold your breath, & then run out into the fresh air & stay out there long enough to get your breath again & breathe deeply & get fresh air & wait till the spray that is just floating in the air has blown away.
109. BECAUSE THE POINT OF THE SPRAY IS NOT TO LEAVE IT IN THE AIR, BUT IT'S FOR IT TO SETTLE ON THE SURFACES SO THAT IT WILL DISCOURAGE THE BUGS. They don't like to crawl in it or over it & it's quite fatal. Some of these sprays, especially pyrethrins, I think they call them, are illegal in the United States, because they're so deadly that if you breathe much of it it'll make you sick. But I notice they sell them in Europe, & they're very effective.
110. IF YOU JUST SPRAY A NEST OR COLUMN OF ANTS THAT'S GOING IN & OUT OF YOUR HOUSE WITH JUST ONE LITTLE PUFF OF THAT STUFF, they all fall down immediately, no stragglers, no squirming or nothing!--Whereas a lot of the sprays that were popular when I was a kid were just made out of petroleum & weren't very much more than just kerosene in a spray can, you had a kind of a pump can. They used to have a very popular ad which said, "Quick, Henry, the Flit!"
111. FLIT WAS THE SPRAY, BUT IT WAS NOTHING BUT A PETROLEUM PRODUCT LIKE KEROSENE & therefore it was dangerous. If you ever sprayed around a fire, you'd have an explosion! But it wasn't quite as lethal as these pyrethrin sprays like Shelltox, which was banned in the States but is very popular in other parts of the World because it's really deadly & really kills the bugs with the slightest contact. But it's also deadly for you if you breathe too much of it! (Or get in food!)
112. I'VE GOTTEN SICK JUST SPRAYING SHELLTOX IN THE HOUSE WITH THE WINDOWS OPEN! I'd take a deep breath & run in & spray & run out. But at night we had to kind of close up, & the odour or gas was still lingering in the house from such a thorough spraying, so that by morning I was sick from just sleeping in the same room where I'd sprayed. It makes you sick at your stomach & sort of nauseated, & if you aren't careful how you spray, why you'll really have trouble! (Keep off dishes etc.!)
113. THERE ARE SOME OTHER SPRAYS THAT CONTAIN NICOTINE, WHICH IS QUITE DEADLY FOR BUGS. It kills bugs, & they use that mostly to spray crops. I remember staying on a farm where young boys had been out all day spraying with nicotine, & they'd come home so sick & throwing up, it was pitiful! But they just expected it, they knew they had to go out & spray & from breathing that stuff they'd get just almost deathly sick at their stomachs. Nicotine is very poisonous! (Wash your fruits & vegetables!)
114. THAT'S THE SAME STUFF YOU GET IN YOUR BLOOD WHEN YOU SMOKE, only you get it in such minute quantities that habitual smokers don't notice it & it doesn't make them sick because they're so used to it. They build up a kind of resistance or tolerance of it, but at the same time it's actually making them sick & they don't know it, sicker & sicker all the time, year by year, until finally it'll kill them! Nicotine is quite deadly.
115. THEY USED TO USE AN ILLUSTRATION WHERE THEY'D PUT A LEECH ON A HEAVY SMOKER, one of those little worms that sticks to your skin & sucks your blood, a blood-sucker. They'd put a leech on a smoker's skin just for a few minutes, & pretty soon the leech would just curl up & die from sucking nicotine blood! It would kill them within a few minutes! So that's how deadly nicotine is, & the nicotine sprays are used mostly on crops.
116. YOU'VE GOT TO WATCH OUT HOW YOU SPRAY & BE SURE YOUR WINDOWS ARE ALL OPENED WITH PLENTY OF FRESH AIR & PREFERABLY A BREEZE BLOWING THROUGH. Be sure you open up everything, including the doors, & before you start spraying take a deep breath, try to hold your breath while you're spraying, & then run outside & start breathing again until you've recovered your oxygen sufficiently to take another deep breath & run in & spray again.
117. ANTS ARE VERY INTELLIGENT, IT'S AMAZING HOW THEY CAN FIGURE THINGS OUT! They explore to find food & shelter, & warmth in cold weather, & when they find it, then they explore to find the best routes from the colony to the food, & start leading all the workers back & forth to the food. They don't just stay there & eat it, they carry little morsels back to the colony to feed the whole colony!
118. ANTS ARE REAL PROVISIONERS! They establish routes just like we used to establish provisioning routes. They go out & find donors, like you, who leave your food out & uncovered & crumbs & little bits of garbage on your floor or sink, & if you don't keep a good clean house, why, you're going to have both ants & roaches, especially in warm countries.
119. BUT ROACHES ARE THE WORST! THEY ARE DIRTY, ICK! I mean they are like flies, they will live in sewage, they will live in your toilet drains, they love filth! They used to run out of the toilet drain in that apartment we had in Tenerife. I finally found where they were coming out by getting clear down on all fours & sticking my head behind the toilet. I found one little hole about the size of a dime at the back of the toilet bowl where it was attached to the floor where they could get in & out of the drain.
120. WE KEPT FINDING THESE ROACHES IN THE BATHROOM & WE COULDN'T FIGURE OUT WHERE THEY CAME FROM. Everything else was closed up, but they were crawling in & out of the toilet drain, the sewer, where they crawl all over your shit & dung & sewage! Then they run out of their dark evil hiding place & run into your kitchen & all over your food & all over your sink & drain board & work table where you prepare your food, & dishes & silver etc.!
121. IF YOU DON'T KEEP IT GOOD & CLEAN & SCOUR IT GOOD WITH POWDERS & WHATNOT, THEY'LL JUST INFEST YOUR HOUSE OR YOUR TRAILER! They'll build nests in the walls, & once they have settled in your house & built nests in there, either you're going to have to fumigate or forget it!--You're either going to have to fumigate or move out & let them have it, because it's impossible to get rid of them no matter how many sprays or pastes or powders you use! You cannot get it back inside the walls where they have their nests.
122. AND SOMETIMES YOU'LL SEE SOME OF THESE ROACHES DRAGGING THEIR TAILS, THESE EGG SACKS ON THEIR REAR ENDS. The females drag a quadruple egg sack on their tail when they're pregnant, not just one egg but four eggs. But that's not the end of the sad story: Each one of these egg sacks contain about 350 eggs, or a total of 1400 baby roaches from one female! So you will never catch up with them! I mean it doesn't matter how fast you kill the roaches, they'll breed faster than you can possibly kill them if you don't actually fumigate!
123. NOW FUMIGATION IS WHEN YOU HAVE TO MOVE OUT OF YOUR HOUSE OR TRAILER OR CAMPER COMPLETELY & take all your stuff with you. Be sure you shake it all out & don't carry any roaches out with you; & move into a hotel or apartment or somebody else's trailer temporarily. You've got to take it all out, clothing, food, absolutely everything, & this is what we had to do once with the Cruiser.--The Ark!
124. THEN THEY DO WHAT THEY CALL "FOG IT" & IT'S THE ONLY WAY TO EVER GET RID OF THEM; boy, it got rid of them & we never had any more at all! (Maria: And it costs money too!) Yes, it costs money, but God bless this dear old Texan, he was a little low on work & because we were missionaries he said he'd come out & do it for $20, otherwise even for a trailer it can cost you $50, & for a whole house it might cost you several hundred dollars!
125. FOR A WHOLE HOUSE, THEY DO IT BOTH FOR ROACHES & TERMITES, THEY PUT A TENT OVER THE ENTIRE HOUSE. Have you ever seen that? We saw it a lot in Florida because there they were so bad that they would eat your house to pieces till it collapsed! I've seen big huge tents over two & three-story houses, the old wooden houses of course. And then they get this machine that blows this fog, this deadly mist into the house that completely saturates the entire house, soaks into the walls, the cracks & crannies & all the places where the roaches or termites breed, & you have to leave it there for three days.
126. IF YOU HAVE TO HAVE YOUR TRAILER FUMIGATED, WHAT THEY DID WITH OURS, WE HAD TO MOVE EVERYTHING OUT--clothes, food, drawers, everything that could be removed out of the Cruiser, & we moved into one of the cabins at TSC. Then we had to seal every possible opening including the stove pipes on the roof, tape up all the windows, every crack & cranny. We had to stuff rags or wads into the sewer pipe & water pipe openings, seal everything completely so the roaches couldn't get out & neither could the fog or the mist, this deadly fog that they blow in.
127. AND ONCE WE WERE COMPLETELY OUT & WE HAD THE WHOLE THING SEALED, he came then & inspected to see if we had everything sealed, & he found we hadn't sealed the vent pipes. He said, "You've got to get up there on the roof with a ladder & tape up the vent pipes." And then he set his little machine just inside the door of the trailer & closed the door so that there was just a crack where the wire went in, & he turned it on.
128. THROUGH THE TRAILER WINDOWS YOU COULD SEE IT WAS ALL DENSE FOG OR SMOKE INSIDE, & then there was a little pouring out the crack of the door where he had his machine, & he stayed clear of it. He just left it there & he left it on for I think only about a half an hour, then he pulled it out quick & slammed the door! He had told us before hand that we'd have to find a place to stay for three days.
129. HE SAID, "JUST LEAVE IT CLOSED UP TIGHT, LOCK THE DOOR & DON'T LET ANYBODY GO IN FOR ANYTHING AT ALL! Leave it three days, then at the end of three days you can open the door. First open the door & leave it open a while until it airs out for an hour or two, then go in & open the windows all wide.--Just rush in & open the windows as fast as you can, hold your breath & open as many windows as you can & then run out & get your breath again until you finally have all your windows open."--Because that fog was really deadly stuff & could kill you!
130. I THINK HE SAID TO LET IT AIR FOR A DAY--THREE DAYS OUT OF THE TRAILER & THEN YOU HAVE TO LET IT AIR A DAY BEFORE YOU CAN GO BACK IN. And even though we aired it out, we could still smell the odour of that stuff for a long time! (Maria: It probably wasn't very good for you, it's so deadly!) Yes, & especially when we'd turn on our gas heather. Somehow or another that stuff reacted with the heat & we'd smell it stronger when we had the gas heater on than almost any other way. And of course when you had the heater on you had the windows all shut too.
131. BUT BOY, IT DID THE TRICK! WE'D TRIED EVERYTHING! WE EVEN TRIED FUMIGATING CANDLES, & I'll tell you what happened on that. That did the trick too but we didn't know how to do it. We didn't do this total removal & total sealing up. They told you to leave four or five of these fumigating candles burning in safe secure dishes so if they got knocked over they wouldn't catch anything on fire, for several hours until they burned up completely.
132. BUT YOU KNOW WHAT? WE SAW THE ROACHES POURING OUT OF THE VENTS TO GET AWAY FROM THAT STUFF because we hadn't sealed everything up like we did when he did it. The roaches were pouring out of the vents & crawling all over the outside of the trailer. We'd smoked them out temporarily but not thoroughly. And so of course as soon as we got the thing aired out they just all crawled back in again. And it didn't reach everything, it didn't kill all the females in the nests & the eggs.
133. IF YOU DON'T KILL EVERYTHING, THE FEMALES, THE NESTS, THE EGGS & EVERYTHING, THEY COME RIGHT BACK AGAIN. It doesn't matter what kind of spray you use, hand spray or pastes or powders or whatever, all you do is kill a few roaches that come out to eat at night. They usually come out to feed in the dark, they don't like the light.
134. LIKE I TOLD YOU, ONE WAY TO AT LEAST KEEP THEM OUT OF SIGHT IS TO KEEP A LIGHT ON IN THE KITCHEN ALL NIGHT & then they won't come out. There's only a very rare hearty brave roach who will come out in the daylight & run around! They're like mosquitoes, they don't like the light because their deeds are evil!
135. ONCE YOUR HOUSE OR YOUR TRAILER GETS REALLY INFESTED WITH ROACHES THERE'S NO WAY TO GET RID OF THEM UNLESS YOU REALLY FOG, & the trouble is, if you're living in an apartment house you may get your apartment completely fogged, but then they'll come running in from somebody else's dirty apartment. But the thing about that stuff he used though was that it was residual, & that's one of the things he liked about it. That means it sticks to surfaces throughout the trailer, inside the walls & everywhere, & it would still kill bugs & roaches if they crawled on it. So it had a very lasting effect for a long time--not only got rid of them all, but kept others from coming in. So that's good stuff if all else fails.
136. IF YOU JUST HAVE A FEW, YOU MIGHT BE ABLE TO DISCOURAGE THEM WITH A LITTLE SPRAY, & if you're going to spray inside a house you've got to remove all your food, dishes, silver, everything that would get this residual spray on it. You take out all the drawers with the dishes & the linens & the utensils & everything.
137. YOU SCATTER THEM OUT ON THE GROUND & TAKE ALL THE UTENSILS, SILVER & ANYTHING THAT YOU WOULDN'T WANT TO PUT IN YOUR MOUTH WITH SPRAY ON IT, you take that stuff & put it someplace else in a safe place, wrap it up or store it temporarily somewhere, & then you take the drawers & all & you spray them inside & out--all these drawers that contained your dishes & utensils & even clothes, because we'd find them sometimes in our clothing drawers too.
138. THEY PARTICULARLY LOVE DIRTY CLOTHES, & TO GET THE FOOD OUT OF THE STAINS, DIRT SPOTS, THEY WILL EAT A HOLE RIGHT THROUGH THE CLOTH! In Florida we used to wake up in the morning & find these huge big cockroaches had eaten a nice big hole about the size of a quarter to get the food out of a dirt spot or food spot on a shirt or pair or pants, ate the cloth too!
139. SO ABOUT THE ONLY WAY TO GET RID OF ALL THE BUGS IN YOUR HOUSE IS BY FUMIGATING WITH A MACHINE FOG, & you have to hire a special fumigator to do it. It's a technical, scientific job with special equipment & special deadly chemicals & you cannot do it yourself, but it's the only way to really do it, & we never had any more roaches in the trailer after that, thank the Lord, & I really camped on Eve's trail to make her keep a clean house & a clean kitchen, because that's what attracts both ants & roaches & mice, a dirty house!
140. (MARIA: CAN YOU GET MICE IN A TRAILER TOO?) Well, I never remember having any mice in our trailers, no, but I presume it's possible. Mice can just climb almost anywhere; I've seen them run up a string! They had some mice there in Tenerife, mice & rats, & it was unbelievable! You know those nice little singing canaries that guy gave us? First we fastened them to the wall & we found the mice kept coming up & getting in the cage to eat the canary food.
141. AND SO THEN I GOT THE BRIGHT IDEA TO JUST HANG THE CAGE OUT ON THE PATIO JUST ON A WIRE. And you can believe it or not, we'd sit out there at dusk sometimes enjoying the sunset, & that's when all these evil little rascals come out, in the dark!--The mice come under the category of the "thieves that break through & steal" too! (Mat. 6:19.) I watched a mouse run up & down that wire to get to the cage & to get the food; they can seem to smell food for I don't know how far!
142. BUT YOU CAN DEFINITELY PRETTY WELL GET RID OF ANTS & DISCOURAGE THEM BECAUSE THEY USUALLY NEST OUTSIDE in the ground or in trees & various places, & then they just come in to make their forays, their invasions to get food & so on.--Unless you have a house that has a pretty good place to make a nest down inside the walls or in a basement or somewhere, why they won't usually nest inside the house.
143. (MARIA: AND YOU CAN KEEP YOUR HONEY IN A LITTLE BOWL OF WATER?) Yes, we used to get up in the morning in Florida & find scores of ants drowned in the water in the bowl that the honey was sitting in, they could smell the honey & they were trying to swim across to get into it. A few would make it across the water if we'd use too small a bowl & there would be maybe a handful of ants on the honey. But there'd be scores of them drowned in the water trying to get to it.
144. BUT CLOSING UP YOUR TRAILER COMPLETELY & SPRAYING IS THE BEST CURE FOR ANTS & ROACHES, if they're not too bad. Particularly try to spray in all the cracks & crevices & crannies & all around inside your cupboards & in what they call the runs, which are usually along the baseboards & where the walls & cupboards meet the floor, & all around your windows, inside & out, that's where they come in, drains & any kind of holes that lead outdoors. (Maria: And where the top meets the ceiling too?) Around the vents & just about everywhere you can possibly think of they might be running or hiding. Don't just spray out in the air, that won't do much good, but put a thick coat of that spray right on all those places.
145. ALMOST ANY KIND OF SPRAY WILL MAKE YOU SICK, ESPECIALLY IF IT'S ONE OF THOSE DEADLY PYRETHRINS LIKE SHELLTOX. (Maria: If you breathe enough of that stuff it'll kill you too!) They only have to have something like 1/10 of 1% of that stuff in the spray & it kills everything, including you! It's illegal in the U.S. because it's so deadly, but they still use them throughout the rest of the World. I don't know if they use them in every country in Europe, but I know they do in France & Spain. (Maria: Then when you sleep during the night it's bad for you. I guess you could take some Vitamin C to counteract the poisonous effects.) Honey, for you Vitamin C is the cure-all of everything! (Maria: No, it doesn't cure everything, but it really is supposed to help the toxic effects of some things.)
146. SO YOU SEAL UP YOUR TRAILER FIRST & THEN YOU RUN IN & SPRAY WHILE YOU'RE HOLDING YOUR BREATH, & then run out & recover your breath again, run in & spray some more till you've got everything sprayed. You better have one of your strongest husky boys or somebody like that do it, because it's not exactly a woman's job & it's dangerous! The best way to do it is to set a time when the whole Family's going to be gone except for two people to spray. In case somebody should get sick from the spray, it's better to have two people there. We always believe in operating two-by-two.
147. HAVE THE WHOLE FAMILY VACATE THE PLACE & PLAN TO BE GONE ALL DAY OR AT LEAST HALF A DAY. Go to the park or take a ride or do something, & leave these two people behind to do the spraying. They'll open up the trailer completely, doors, vents, windows, everything, & they'll run in & out & spray till everything is sprayed thoroughly.
148. THEN THEY CLOSE & LOCK THE DOOR & THE TWO SPRAYERS TAKE OFF FOR THE REST OF THE DAY & nobody comes back or goes into the house or apartment or trailer or whatever it is for the rest of the day. (Maria: But they don't take off till they've sprayed around the outside, do they?) Yes, of course, whether a trailer or a house or an apartment, spray outside as well, even if you don't know where they're coming from.
149. IF IT'S ANTS IT'S PRETTY EASY TO FIND WHERE THEY'RE COMING FROM BECAUSE THEY USUALLY LEAVE A TRAIL, then you follow the trail & you spray the whole trail of ants right to their nest & then heavily spray the nest. If you live in a trailer & you can't find the trail or a nest, you spray every part of the trailer that touches the ground, such as all around the tires & completely around each wheel.
150. UNDER THE TRAILER AS WELL AS ALONG SIDE THE TRAILER, all around the wheels & all around the stabilizers & all around the drains & hoses & awnings that touch the ground. (Maria: Even the whole way up the drain maybe?) Yes, all along. (Maria: Because otherwise the water just comes out through it & would wash the spray away.) Well, ants don't seem to like dirt or garbage or sewage, so you don't normally find them inside your drain, but they will get on the outside of the drain & follow the drain up.
151. THEY'LL GET ON THE DRAIN BECAUSE IT USUALLY TOUCHES THE GROUND SOME PLACES, then they'll follow the drain up to the bottom of the trailer. Usually where the drain comes out of the bottom of the trailer, most trailers aren't sealed up too well like they ought to be, they've got holes underneath that you don't see when you're buying the trailer & therefore you don't notice.
152. THERE ARE ALL KINDS OF HOLES AT THE BOTTOM OF YOUR TRAILER THROUGH WHICH BUGS CAN GET IN, like the drain holes which pipes or wires or various things come out of the bottom of the trailer floor. There's usually a fresh air intake hole, often three or four inches in diameter that they have to have underneath a gas heater because the heater has to have oxygen to burn, so if your gas heater is properly constructed it will have some kind of an air intake in the floor underneath it, & so will your gas refrigerator.
153. THERE WILL BE AN AIR INTAKE FOR THE GAS REFRIGERATOR SOMEWHERE ON THE OUTSIDE WALL OF THE TRAILER, LOW DOWN, & then higher up there will be an air outlet vent for the fumes, same with your gas heater. A gas heater, of course, has so much hot air that usually there's a smoke stack or a vent pipe that goes straight up out through the roof of the trailer & you can see it sticking up out there--with which I've had a few sad experiences going under over-hanging wires that were too low & things like that that took off the top of my vents!
154. I ONCE HAD TO MAKE A VENT COVER WITH A COOKIE TIN because I had taken off the top of the vent with a low-hanging wire I ran under. But you've got to be careful you don't close up the vent; you've got to have an air space between the cover & pipe. You have to have a cover on it so the rain won't come in, but you have to have it up two or three inches from the top of the pipe so the fumes can get out, that's important!
155. IF YOU CLOSE UP THOSE VENT PIPES, LIKE FROM YOUR GAS STOVE OR FRIDGE & THINGS LIKE THAT, YOU CAN PUT YOURSELF TO SLEEP SOME NIGHT FOREVER when it's cold & the windows are all shut & the gas heater or the fridge is still going & there's no vent for that deadly carbon monoxide poisonous gas! It's odourless, but it's there, & you can kill yourself!
156. SO WHEN YOU'RE SPRAYING, SEND THE FAMILY OUT & TWO PEOPLE STAY BEHIND TO DO THE SPRAYING; & a good way to do it when you've got two people is to take turns. While one's outside getting their breath & breathing deeply of the good fresh air, the other one holds their breath & runs inside & sprays. Then the sprayer runs out as soon as he can't hold his breath any longer & hands the spray can to the other guy & he goes in & sprays while the other guy's getting fresh air.
157. THAT'S WHY IT'S GOOD TO HAVE TWO PEOPLE DOING IT, SO YOU WATCH EACH OTHER that somebody doesn't get so woozy they faint, `cause it's pretty deadly stuff. Then when it's all sprayed thoroughly, shut up windows & everything--lock the door & take the rest of the day off, go someplace else & don't come back till evening.
158. BUT DON'T DO LIKE THEY DID TO ME ONCE IN MADRID! We moved into an apartment that had all those roaches, so we sprayed & I told them to stay out a couple hours & then come back & open all the windows & doors & get it good & aired out first. What you do is you go in the apartment & you hold your breath as much as possible while you're opening all the windows & doors as fast as you can, & then you run out again & stay outside for about half-an-hour till it all airs out before you go back in again, & even then you'll still smell it.
159. I SAID, "COME BACK IN A COUPLE OF HOURS & AIR IT OUT & THEN WE'LL ALL COME HOME AFTER THAT." Well, God bless the dear sprayers, they did a bang-up job of spraying it, they really sprayed the apartment & I could sure tell it, because it turned out that Maria & I were the first ones that got home! In their couple of hours out they took the kids to the park & the zoo & they forgot the passing of time & they were gone about 4 hours!
160. WE CAME BACK IN ABOUT THREE HOURS & NOBODY HAD COME HOME YET AT ALL & THE PLACE WAS STILL CLOSED TIGHT AS A CLAM! We walked in the front door & we got one whiff & I said, "Ugh! They haven't come home to air it out!" But we were tired, we'd been out a couple of hours & we wanted to come in, so I said, "Well, I guess it's up to us!" So Maria & I kept running in & out of the apartment opening the windows & doors & shutters, & then we'd run out to get our breath. But it literally made me sick just to breathe in that horrible air & I nearly had a heart attack!--You've got to be young & strong & healthy to take it, & even then it can make you sick!
161. BUT THAT'S THE WAY TO DO IT! EMPTY THE WHOLE APARTMENT of clothes, food, dishes, silver, everything. If you can't store them any place else, stick them in your car or the trunk of your car or somewhere, & then have a couple of sprayers take turns spraying inside. Open up the apartment, house, trailer, whatever, as wide as you can & have them run in & out.--Run in & spray, run out & get their breath, & hold their breath while spraying. I used to be able to hold my breath for four minutes underwater, but most people can only hold their breath about one or two minutes & then they've got to have air.
162. SO COME IN & SPRAY AS LONG AS YOU FEEL LIKE YOU CAN HOLD YOUR BREATH, & THEN RUN OUT IN THE FRESH AIR & TAKE A DEEP BREATH AGAIN. Even this is apt to make you dizzy, not only from the spray but just from all that holding your breath & then running out & taking deep breaths. You can make yourself dizzy just from taking continuous deep breaths even out in the fresh air, did you know that? So that's the way to do your spraying.
163. AND THEN OF COURSE WITH A TRAILER, OR A HOUSE TOO, SPRAY ALL AROUND THE OUTSIDE, EVERYTHING THAT TOUCHES THE GROUND, where the ground meets the house or the apartment or the trailer. Spray all around your stabilizer, your wheels, your drains, your wires, your dolly wheel, don't forget that one, everything!--Or if you've got these little curtains that hang down from the bottom of the trailer to shut off the cold air from your cabana or your awning, be sure you spray them too. So that's the way to do-it-yourself with spray, & preferably a residual spray which will stay for weeks or months & kill anything that crosses it or crawls on it.
164. I DON'T HAVE ANY CONFIDENCE IN THE POWDERS OR PASTES, I THINK THEY'RE DANGEROUS FOR ONE THING. They get all over things & children stick their fingers in them & then stick their fingers in their mouths. When I was a kid they used to have ant pastes & ant powders & roach pastes & roach powders & you'd put it along the places where the roaches & ants were running or coming in. But usually the pastes were sweet & kids would be tempted to stick their finger in & lick their finger.
165. THE NEXT MOST SEVERE WAY IS TO FIRST CLOSE IT ALL UP TIGHT & SEAL EVERYTHING & FUMIGATE. You can do it with the fumigating candles, & try to let the candles burn as long as possible. Usually they're set to burn about two or three or four hours depending on the size, & you just plan to stay away & out until they're finished, & let your trailer, apartment or house just set sealed up like that as long as you possibly can. It's a good idea to do that fumigating in the morning.
166. OF COURSE IF YOU'RE BURNING CANDLES, ALWAYS BE SURE SOMEONE'S STAYING THERE WATCHING THEM THROUGH THE WINDOW to make sure that they're okay & they're not falling over & setting your house on fire! But allow them to burn till they burn out completely, while somebody's watching, & then the best thing to do is just go away & stay away the rest of the day. Come back in the evening & have somebody run in & out opening up, & then let it air out completely for at least an hour or two if you can before you move back in again.
167. AND THEN THE MOST CERTAIN & SURE EVEN COMPLETELY GUARANTEED WAY IS TO FUMIGATE BY FOGGING. This man who did our fogging even guaranteed it. He said, "If you ever have another roach I'll come back & fog it again for free!"--he was so sure he knew it did it. And we never had another roach in the Cruiser ever again for the next ten years, so that was pretty sure!
168. FOR THE FIRST FIVE YEARS IN THAT CRUISER WE WERE JUST PLAGUED WITH BUGS & ROACHES, but after that fogging at TSC when we lived there as our little family, before the big Family came, back in the middle 60's, after that fogging, why, we never had any more roaches. But you have to pay a professional to do that who has the machinery & the chemicals & knows how.
169. IT ACTUALLY TAKES ABOUT FIVE DAYS. You spend the first day moving out, & then you're gone the next three nights & three days & another night, no doubt, so that really makes the fifth day. Day one moving out, three days sealed up, fumigate it, & then the fifth day come back & open it up & air it out all day before you move back in that night. And of course if you can air it out longer than that why it's even better, because we could still smell it & it kind of made you feel a little sick or nauseous.
170. OF COURSE THAT DOESN'T KEEP OUT THE FLIES & MOSQUITOES, THE FLYING INSECTS, as soon as the air clears they're prone to fly right back in again. The best thing for them of course is good screens. That's why the Americans really go for screens, `cause they have so many bugs. Europe doesn't have as many bugs, so they just use curtains to keep out the bugs. But there are so many bugs in both North & South America that they have to have screens, good screens.
171. OF COURSE A LOT OF THOSE BIG CITIES IN SOUTH AMERICA ARE INFESTED WITH RATS! MOST BIG CITIES ARE, even Washington, D.C., & New York & all, they're infested with these rats that are almost as big as cats! Rats, that's another problem! If you're living in a ratty neighbourhood I'd suggest the best way to cure that problem is to move out, because that's something that's virtually impossible to get rid of if the whole neighbourhood is infested & overrun with rats.
172. I'VE SEEN RATS AS BIG AS CATS & THEY OPEN GARBAGE CANS & RUN IN THE SEWERS. Someone has said if they ever heard there was any animal of any kind that was apt to be man's greatest enemy & eventually take over the World & take it away from man, the most likely candidate would be the rat! Some of you may have seen one of those movies about how this rat got so intelligent that he was able to organise the rats into an army & overrun this city & other cities & was taking over America. But it's pretty close to the truth, from what I've heard about New York & Washington, D.C., & some of those places, they're becoming overrun with rats!
173. ONCE THEY GET THAT STRONG A HOLD WHERE THEY'RE JUST EVERYWHERE LIVING IN THE SEWERS & EATING OUT OF THE GARBAGE CANS & infesting the houses, it's virtually impossible to get rid of them. Because even if you kill a few by putting a little poison around--poison pellets which are of course dangerous to have around when you have pets & children & so on--it may kill a few rats, but there are so many more that God will have to burn up the whole World before He'll be able to get rid of all the rats!--But I don't think you ought to try to burn down your house just to get rid of your rats!
174. I REMEMBER IN EMANUELE'S HOUSE IN ITALY THAT THEY USED TO BE PEEKING DOWN AT ME THROUGH THE HOLES IN THE CEILING with their beady eyes at night, or in the daytime hiding up in the dark attic, & you could hear them scurrying around & running through the attic & the walls. It seems like once a house gets infested with them it's pretty hard to get rid of them because usually it means the whole neighbourhood's infested.
175. SO THERE'S NOT MUCH USE IN GETTING RID OF THE RATS JUST IN YOUR HOUSE, THEY'LL JUST COME IN FROM THE NEIGHBOURS' THEN. When they find out you got rid of your rats, then they don't have any competition, so they come over & enjoy your hospitality. So the best way to get rid of rats is just plain move out of the ratty neighbourhood & forget it, because it's virtually an impossible situation!
176. RATS DESTROY LITERALLY BILLIONS OF DOLLARS WORTH OF GOODS & FOODS & GRAIN EVERY YEAR besides all the other troubles they cause. They also carry bubonic plague, what was called back a century or two ago the Black Plague, the one which nearly wiped out London & Europe during the 17th century & was really apparently a scourge from God for their wickedness. See, that was after the Reformation so they really had gotten the Truth & the Gospel, & God apparently sent them a strong plague which killed, as I recall, about half of London, then the other half burned down.
177. THEY SAY THAT THE GREAT LONDON FIRE THAT SWEPT LONDON & VIRTUALLY BURNED NEARLY ALL OF IT DOWN WAS ONE OF THE GREATEST BLESSINGS after the bubonic plague, because it also killed all the rats--the rats & the plagues went with it. I think there was a record of considerable prayer & so on to try to get rid of the plague, & the Lord apparently sent the fire to wipe out all those dirty rat-infested wooden buildings.
178. THE ENCYCLOPEDIA SAYS THAT IN 1665 THE GREAT PLAGUE TOOK SOME 75,000 LIVES IN LONDON ALONE, think of that! They used to have what they call the charnel wagon that used to go up & down the streets every morning & gather up the dead. Every house that had the plague they marked with a huge white X on the door to warn people to stay away, that they had the plague there, & some of the people just died of the plague or starved to death in their houses because they couldn't get out--they wouldn't let them come out & wouldn't let anybody go in.
179. AND EVERY MORNING THE CHARNEL WAGON WOULD COME BY WITH THIS GUY DRIVING THE WAGON & these ghouls had to pick up the bodies. They were supposed to shove the dead bodies outside their front door & then shut the door & not come out, or dump them out the window or something, & the charnel wagon would come along & pick them up. I think they tried to burn them to destroy the plague.
180. THE LONDON FIRE THEN CAME IN SEPTEMBER OF 1666, LASTED FIVE DAYS & VIRTUALLY DESTROYED THE WHOLE CITY & ALL THE RATS, thank God! So the rats are pretty bad & they're pretty dangerous, & bubonic plague is pretty fatal. I was reading where a little girl in Mexico City recently had been discovered to have the Black Plague, bubonic plague, although it's been pretty well wiped out now, mostly by the Lord I imagine, & somewhat by man being a little cleaner, keeping cleaner cities & houses & getting rid of the rats. But rats are getting so bad again, even in the U.S. in the big cities, that the plague could crop up easily again.
181. STREPTOMYCIN HAS BEEN USED VERY SUCCESSFULLY WITH BUBONIC PLAGUE reducing the death rate from 90% to only 5%. So bubonic plague as a widespread plague in the World today has been pretty well reduced to only occasional rare outbreaks here & there, mostly in Asia. But there has been a little in Africa & a little in South America that I have read about.
182. THE PNEUMONIC TYPE IS THE MOST DEADLY, & THAT'S THE TYPE THAT LITTLE GIRL IN MEXICO CITY HAD. You get it from being bitten by the fleas which rats have, which bite the rats & get the germ from the rat's blood, & then the flea bites you & plants the germ in your blood, or you can get it from actual bites of the rats themselves!
183. RATS HAVE BEEN KNOWN TO BITE PEOPLE, EITHER IN SELF-DEFENCE OR IN HUNGER. I remember there was a big fat woman who lived in Florida, one of our dear church members who were kind of cotton pickers, pretty low class of Whites who lived in a rather ratty house & dirty conditions & so on, & a rat bit her toe one night while she was sleeping! So they will bite people on occasion.
184. SO AS I WAS SAYING, IF YOU GET REALLY BADLY RAT-INFESTED WITH THESE HUGE RATS AS BIG AS CATS, I THINK YOU'D BETTER JUST MOVE & FORGET IT because they're almost impossible to conquer; they're conquering man slowly. In Tenerife we had a medium-sized field rat which was about half the size of a cat, a few of them were that big, weren't they? Remember the one that Monty killed with a shovel in the driveway that was staggering along from the poison?
185. AND IF IT GETS VERY DRY OR THERE'S A BAD DROUGHT & THEY CAN'T FIND ENOUGH FOOD IN THE FIELD, THEN THEY WILL START COMING INTO YOUR HOUSE trying to find something to eat. We found that the grain we put in the bird cage for the birds was quite an attraction to the rats or the mice. The mice could crawl right through, but the rats tried to gnaw their way in. I know mice can run up & down walls, they can almost crawl across the ceiling & get in almost anywhere, but I never would have dreamed that one of those big rats could fly up a wall like he did, virtually a smooth wall!
186. I WATCHED ONE ONE NIGHT WHILE I WAS SITTING OUT IN THE TWILIGHT. He ran across the yard & right up one of the posts of the patio there, which is almost smooth, just sort of a little stucco rough paint on it. He ran right up that & onto the awning, across the awning, then jumped right on top of the roof where we had a lot of vines up there where apparently he was nesting or something, or maybe in the attic, I don't know.
187. SO WE GOT RID OF THOSE VINES & WE ALSO PUT POISON AROUND EVERYWHERE WE COULD. We had little David then, so we had to be very careful not to put any where he could get at it, but we'd hide it in crannies & crevices & holes where David couldn't get to it or reach it but where the rats could, particularly in the underground places. They like to nest in holes in the ground, & we found some of them were nesting in the pumphouse & the furnace room & a few places like that.
188. SO WE PUT THESE LITTLE RAT PELLETS AROUND WHICH ARE POISON THAT'S MIXED WITH GRAIN, a grain pellet that they like to eat, but then the poison makes their throat so hot that they get very thirsty & they run for water somewhere & drink the water, & this facilitates their death, they die.
189. THE ADVANTAGE OF THIS KIND OF POISON IS THAT THEY DON'T DIE INSIDE YOUR WALLS, & if you've ever known a rat to die inside of a wall you know how that can make a house stink! I mean it just seems like you'd never get rid of the stink if you're in an old house where the rats have died inside the walls, it's horrible! It just really stinks like a dead cat or a dead dog or something! Or they die inside the ceiling somewhere where you can't even get at them to get the body out, & it just stinks away until it rots to pieces!
190. SO THE ADVANTAGE OF THAT HOT THROAT POISON IS THAT THE RAT RUNS OUT OF THE HOUSE SOMEWHERE TO FIND WATER, just hope he doesn't find it inside your walls or in your basement or something! But he usually runs out of the house somewhere to a puddle or a stream or a gutter to drink the water, & it kills them & they die in that outdoor place instead of inside of your house. They don't mind sewers either, they're very dirty. They live in sewers & they eat dung if they can't find anything else to eat!
191. SO IF YOU HAVE JUST A FEW & THE NEIGHBOURHOOD ISN'T TOO BAD, THERE ARE POISONS TO HELP KIND OF CONTROL THEM & keep them down at a tolerable level. We lived in a very nice neighbourhood there, & there were a few field rats around, a few little tiny mice, & one real bad drought we had, very dry season, they did start trying to get in. And then you'd better have very good screens, not just little plastic mesh or not even just little wire screens.
192. BECAUSE OF THE PROBLEM WITH RATS IN SPAIN WHERE WE WERE LIVING, BOTH IN MADRID & TENERIFE, NEARLY ALL BASEMENT WINDOWS ARE SCREENED with both fine wire screen & this very heavy wire screen with the larger holes about a centimeter wide to keep out the rats--it won't keep out any bugs, but it will keep out the rats--so heavy & so thick that they can't chew through it. They could chew right through the little wire screens.
193. IN ARIZONA WE KNEW OF RATS THAT WOULD GNAW RIGHT THROUGH LEAD PIPE TO GET WATER! One hot dry Summer in California Fred came in to find his whole kitchen floor flooded & wondered why, & the water seemed to be coming from the dish washer. He thought maybe it had sprung a leak or something, so he looked the whole washer over to find the leak & found out the water was pouring out of this very heavy heavy plastic hose at the rear of the machine where a rat had gnawed right completely through to get a drink of water!
194. THE RAT APPARENTLY COULDN'T FIND ANY WATER OUTSIDE SO HE CAME IN THE HOUSE & GNAWED THROUGH THE HOSE TO GET WATER. As I say, they've been known to gnaw right through lead pipe to get water when they're thirsty. In Fred's big mansion there in that swank suburban neighbourhood, those rich people kept a lot of horses in their barns, & Fred had some horses & some big dogs. And where you have horses, you have grain & feed & rats' nests & they love it!
195. AND SO THIS SWANKY NEIGHBOURHOOD WAS JUST OVERRUN WITH RATS, & the few visits that I had there I'd see them running right through the house, great big huge rats as big as a cat! I saw one running through the living room one time while I was sitting there, & once when I was in the kitchen one ran right through the kitchen. It just amazed me, because you know the Californians, they love those big open glass doors where they can wheel back the doors & open the house completely & live outdoors. He'd slide open those huge big picture window doors on the front of the house where it completely opened the house to the outdoors & the rats could just walk right in!
196. SO TO KEEP RATS OUT YOU NEED STRONG VERY HEAVY WIRE MESH. You need to put it all over your lower basement windows etc. So we did have that in Tenerife & Madrid both, all the lower windows were wired that way because the rats tend to stick close to the ground & don't always jump on the roof like I saw that one do that night. And if you don't have too many you can get rid of what few you have by scattering the pellets around in different places where they run.
197. SO WE SOON GOT RID OF THEM & THEN IT RAINED & THEY WENT BACK TO THE FIELDS. They don't really necessarily prefer to live around human beings, at least not the field rats we had there; they live out in the fields & eat fruits & vegetables & things in the fields if there's enough rain & water & so on. I guess they were coming into our pool pumproom in order to get water.
198. WE TRIED TRAPS WITH THE RATS IN MADRID, Dave set out quite a few of these huge big rat traps there, giant things almost as big as a paperback book, & he caught quite a few. He also set out a bowlful of pellets in a place where it was hidden & where pets & children couldn't get at it, I think it was on a windowsill of the basement, or maybe it was in the toolshed or the doghouse--we didn't have a dog.
199. BUT HE FINALLY DECIDED THAT THE RATS WERE ACTUALLY GETTING INURED TO THE POISON. And this we have read about, that rats are becoming poison-resistant to the major poisons that are used for rats, to where they can practically feed off the poison without it killing them. This is what Dave found with the poison he was giving them, so he changed poisons & I think it helped, but they build up a resistance to it somehow. They say that some roaches are getting poison- resistant too to the usual poisons used on them.
200. GOD PROMISED THAT YOU WEREN'T TO LAY UP TREASURES WHERE MOTH & RUST CORRUPT & THIEVES BREAK THROUGH & STEAL, & He keeps His little thieves going! Even if you try to poison them, if you keep laying up too much treasure like stocks of survival food, things like that would be a perfect target for rats. So you'd better keep them in sealed metal cans.
201. MICE WERE SO COMMON & PLENTIFUL IN HOUSES WHEN I WAS A KID, YOU ALWAYS KEPT YOUR FOOD IN TIN CANS WITH TIGHT LIDS, & every kitchen had a bread drawer, remember that?--A metal-lined bread drawer with a metal cover to keep the mice out of the bread, because that's one of their favourite foods. They love grain & bread & cheese & nearly everything human beings eat & like.
202. SO KEEPING YOUR STAPLES IN TIGHTLY CLOSED METAL CANS IS ABOUT THE ONLY WAY TO PROTECT THEM FROM RATS, & they have been known even to gnaw through metal. And of course a normal hemp sack, just a sackcloth sack of grain or beans or other dried foods is a perfect target for rats & they have no problem at all gnawing through the sack to get at the grain.
203. BUT THERE ARE POISONS AT LEAST TO HELP CONTROL THEM & KEEP THEM DOWN AT A TOLERABLE LEVEL if your neighbourhood's not too infested. But if the neighbouring neighbourhood & houses are all very heavily infested, there's no way to ever get rid of them except just to move out & let them take over!
204. WELL, THAT'S ABOUT RATS! WE'VE COVERED ANTS & ROACHES & HOW TO GET RID OF THEM BY SPRAYING & FUMIGATING, & we talked about flies & mosquitoes & all the disease they carry & how dangerous they are.--That you get three major diseases from mosquitoes: Yellow fever & smallpox the two most deadly, & malaria which is usually not quite as deadly but is long-lasting & recurrent.
205. MY BROTHER GOT MALARIA WHILE HE WAS IN THE SOUTH PACIFIC & he frequently had recurrences, usually in the Summer. His fever would return & he'd get sick & it's very weakening. I think you get the runs with it too, I'm not sure. I wonder if that could have had something to do with what I had the other week, because that was right shortly after we first started getting bitten by the mosquitoes. Remember, I was feverish with chills & so on. Well, a lot of diseases have fever & chills, but whatever it was, it was kind of similar to light malaria.
206. BUT ONCE YOU'VE HAD MALARIA & BUILT UP A RESISTANCE TO IT & RECOVERED, YOU SEEM TO BE MORE RESISTANT TO IT AFTER THAT. When I was a kid in Florida the mosquitoes were thick & there was probably plenty of malaria, but the Tourist Bureau didn't want to admit it! I think probably some of those fevers I had then--fevers which did not turn into colds at all, but just high fever & chills that lasted off & on over two or three days or nights & sick at my stomach--I have an idea probably I may have had a touch of malaria in those days!
207. BUT YELLOW FEVER WAS PRETTY DEADLY, I DON'T KNOW HOW HIGH THE MORTALITY RATE RAN but most people that got yellow fever died, literally hundreds of the men who went down the Panama Canal Zone, particularly the army! Dr. Gorgas was an army doctor, & they sent army units down there to control the land that they bought or almost stole from Colombia & Panama. First of all they helped Panama in a revolution to break loose from Colombia & declare itself independent, & then they bought the Panama Canal zone for I think it was only $10,000,000 in order to build the canal.
208. AND THE WORST PLAGUE THEY HAD DOWN THERE WAS YELLOW FEVER! They called it yellow fever because you'd get this fever & turn yellow, kind of similar to hepatitis which the doctors used to call yellow jaundice when I was a kid. It's a liver problem usually from unclean food or unclean water, so be sure you boil your water & use purifiers in those countries.--And don't eat unclean foods! No.609.
209. THE BRITISH WERE PRETTY SMART! WHEN THEY WERE CONQUERING & PIONEERING A LOT OF THOSE TROPICAL COUNTRIES, ALL THEY DRANK WAS TEA, & of course they boiled their water thoroughly to make the tea. So between the boiling & the tea, which is a germ deterrent--it contains caffeine which is a kind of poison like nicotine--they solved the problem of pure water.
210. AND THEY SAY THAT BOTTLED DRINKS ARE FAIRLY SAFE IN THOSE COUNTRIES, even like Coca Cola & soft drinks as well as beer & wine. These are, of course, cooked drinks that have been boiled, so they're pretty safe to drink if you can't get pure water. If you're out on the road or maybe you're in a restaurant & you don't know how pure their water is, you can be fairly safe if it's boiled coffee, boiled tea or bottled drinks.
211. WHEN FAITHY & I WERE TRAVELLING BY BUS ALL THROUGH THE JUNGLES OF THE YUCATAN, SOUTHERN MEXICO, SHE DRANK COKES ALL THE WAY; she liked Pepsi Cola, I think it was, mainly. We never touched the water. We'd stop at these little wayside inns where the people get out & buy sandwiches & drinks, & the toilets were something horrible, some of them virtually filthy holes in the ground filled with flies! Sometimes somebody would be standing outside selling little squares of newspaper to wipe yourself with for a centavo each, because even paper was so scarce!
212. SO SHE DRANK SOFT DRINKS & I DRANK WINE ALL THE WAY UNTIL WE GOT TO THE BIG CITY OF MERIDA, the capital of Yucatan near the tip of the Peninsula where there were civilised hotels & so on, & where it was a little safer to drink the water. Even there, several times in Mexico I got sick at the stomach & got the runs; it's pretty hard to stay away from it. Even in the U.S. just changing water from one city or location to another, sometimes you're changing to a whole new set of germs, & this means you have to get used to the new water.--Mexicans get it in the U.S.!
213. BUT AS FAR AS CONTROLLING MOSQUITOES & FLIES, YOU MUST HAVE GOOD SCREENS OR TIGHT CURTAINS OR SOMETHING ON YOUR WINDOWS IN THOSE PLACES.--To keep out flies from which you get cholera & several other things, & which are filthy dirty & can fly right in your windows; & the mosquitoes the same, except mosquitoes aren't as dirty but they have more deadly diseases, those three main diseases.
214. IN THE OLD DAYS OF THE PIONEERS THEY NOT ONLY SCREENED THEIR HOUSES BUT THEY SLEPT UNDER MOSQUITO NETTING WHICH WAS DRAPED OVER YOUR BED. I can remember sleeping at night under mosquito netting when I was a kid in Southern California & Texas & those places. They had a bar that ran from the head of the bed to the foot of the bed, & in those days the head stood up about a meter or more from the mattress over your head, & the foot of the bed stood up about half a meter.
215. SO ALL YOU DID WAS PUT A ROD OR A POLE FROM THE TOP OF THE HEAD OF THE BED TO THE TOP OF THE FOOT OF THE BED & you threw a mosquito netting over the whole thing, the entire bed, until it came clear down right to the floor to keep them from even getting under the bed & thereby getting in somehow. You had to make sure you shooed them out from under the bed, because that's one of their favourite hang-outs!
216. ONE NICE THING WE LIKED ABOUT ARIZONA WAS IT SEEMED LIKE THEY LIKED TO WAIT UNTIL LATER IN THE NIGHT when it began to cool off & they felt a little more energetic to fly around & bite you. So in the early part of the night when it first got dark they would all go to roost on the ceiling, & there might be a dozen mosquitoes on the ceiling of every room. So Eve used to laugh at me,
217. I'D USUALLY GO IN MY LITTLE SHORTS WALKING ALONG ON THE TOP OF THE BEDS & THE BUREAUS & THE TABLES WITH A FLY SWATTER so I could reach the ceiling, walking along on top of everything, on chairs & whatnot so I could bang, bang, bang kill all the mosquitoes in the house before I went to bed!
218. THAT MOTH JUST LOVES YOU, DORA! He just lit on your choker! For some reason he really likes you. (Dora: Do moths do something to you?) No, no, moths don't harm humans, they're perfectly harmless. They just flutter around & kind of annoy you sometimes by brushing against you or your hair or your eyes or something. They mostly go for lights, they will fly right into a light or a candle flame & die! It seems that light is irresistible to them.
219. YOU'VE HEARD THE STORY ABOUT THE SCIENTIST THAT DISCOVERED THAT MOTHS COULD TALK? And you know how they found out?--They discovered two moths chewing the rag! "Chewing the rag" is an American expression meaning just sort of talking with each other. "Oh, we were just chewing the rag" means you were just visiting & talking about anything. And you know moths are supposed to eat cloth, so they came upon two moths chewing the rag! Ha!
220. ACTUALLY THE MOTHS THEMSELVES DON'T EAT CLOTH, IT'S THEIR LARVAE. They lay eggs in your garments. The Lord has made something to corrupt everything that you don't use & you lay away! He says, "Lay not up for yourselves treasures on Earth where moth & rust doth corrupt & where thieves break through & steal." (Mt.6:19.) Well, the moths, they corrupt the clothing, & the rust corrupts the metals, & the roaches, ants, flies & mosquitoes come under the classification of both thieves & corruption!
221. SO THAT'S WHY YOU PUT MOTH BALLS IN TRUNKS WHERE YOU ARE GOING TO STORE AWAY CLOTHES & THINGS. The moths lay eggs in stored clothing or bedding, & the eggs hatch out into a little worm, a larva, which later becomes a moth, & the larvae live on the cloth. They eat the cloth to survive until they break out of their chrysalis into a moth, like butterflies. Moths do that, you know; they lay eggs & the egg hatches out into a little worm that eventually splits open & out flies a moth!
222. NOW THAT TO ME IS A MARVELLOUS THING, & I BELIEVE THE LORD WAS REALLY TRYING TO ILLUSTRATE RESURRECTION, how in this life compared to what we're going to be in the next, we're almost like little worms! And then they wrap themselves all up in this cocoon called a chrysalis. They spin this kind of a thread all up into a little tight case almost like a coffin really, & it seems like they die, they're virtually dead.
223. BUT THEN SPRING COMES, OR WHATEVER IT IS, & ALL OF A SUDDEN THE COFFIN BEGINS TO WIGGLE & WRIGGLE & SPLITS OPEN & OUT COMES THIS BEAUTIFUL BUTTERFLY OR MOTH! Once it was just a little crawling worm, the most despised of all creatures, & all of a sudden it breaks out into a beautiful butterfly that flies in the heavens!--One of the prettiest!
224. BUT WHY THE LORD MADE MOSQUITOES, I DON'T KNOW, except probably they are a type of illustration of what demons & devils are like, the Lord of the Flies. Mosquitoes, flies, roaches, termites & moths fly too, so I guess the Devil's their Lord too! Demons love darkness & they love to attack you when you're spiritually asleep, when you're least spiritually aware, & they like to inject you with their poison! Mosquitoes do the same thing, in a way; they poison your physical body & cause bites & troubles, whereas the devils & demons poison your mind & your spirit if you're not protected by the Lord.--But we are, TTL!
225. THANK GOD, IF YOU HAVE JESUS OF COURSE THEY CAN'T HURT YOU! You are inoculated by God's Spirit, you are protected, you have a resistance against them. I guess they don't like a taste of your spirit, it's the wrong kind for them! Well, I guess we've been here long enough! Honey, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to have a birthday party of mosquitoes! (Maria: It was perfect, Honey!--I learned so much!) Well, praise the Lord, I just wanted to warn you about the mosquitoes!--And all the Devil's pests! GBY!
226. YOU HAVE TO ADMIRE A MOSQUITO. It's so smart & clever & a challenging opponent & it's not dirty. But flies & cockroaches are so filthy. You kind of admire mosquitoes & ants because they're so industrious & work so hard & are so clever & are clean insects. But flies & cockroaches, they are horrible, filthy, & dwell on filth & live in filth! And let me tell you, the people that put up with them are filthy themselves & it's their filth that encourages them!--Are you one?
Copyright (c) 1998 by The Family
