Miss O's friend Miss A came over after school today, and the two of them were loitering around in the front yard, trying to come up with something to do. Miss O finally asked...
MISS O: Dad, where's my magnifying glass?
ME: Uh, I think it's in your room... why?
MISS O: Oh, nothing. [under breath] We're just gonna burn some ants...
ME: What?! No. You can't burn ants with your magnifying glass.
MISS A: My brother and I do it.
ME: Okay... but I don't think you two should do it here. It's not nice to the ants.
MISS O: They're just carpenter ants!
ME: Oh sure, today it's carpenter ants... then tomorrow it's small dogs and then, before you know it, you'll be burning manatees.
MISS O & MISS A: [silence + looking at me like I'm a huge ass-head]
MISS O: Hey! We'd never burn dogs!
Ah! Notice how she didn't say anything about the manatees? I may have just saved those fucking sea cows from an early extinction.
By the way, I burned the shit out of bugs with my big-ass magnifying glass when I was a kid -- ants, beetles, worms, centipedes, my thumbnail. Caterpillars were the best to fry -- as they'd get hotter, they'd start inching really fast and then that big ol' greenish plume of burning caterpillar flesh would waft up into my fucking nostrils and I'd have some sort of 10 year old fucked up larval mind-fuck acid trip. It was cool as shit.
Unfortunately, I'm crabbydad now and I'm a goddamn hypocrite, so Miss O will experience no such smoky joy.
Okay, at least not until she's seven.
3 comments:
Maybe you can just have her learn how to set fires, since it will help when she applies for Survivor. (And NOT Survivor:Lansing...though it does seem to be the kind of place where fire starting might be a common past time).
You might also want to suggest some other less bug-killing uses of creativity, such as making a homemade laser! Love the disclaimer.
http://lifehacker.com/software/diy/turn-a-flashlight-into-a-handheld-burning-laser-287252.php
I wish I had a giant magnifying glass to burn some annoying kids.
I used to set up glass shards around bugs and then use a magnifying glass on them. It sometimes created a spectrum effect, so in their last seconds of life they could feel like they were in that scene of "Raiders of the Lost Ark" where Indy puts the amulet in the map room and reveals the location of the ark.
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