MikeGyver

Way back in 10th grade we had to read a story called "Leiningen Versus the Ants." It's a short story about that episode of Macyver. You know, the one where Mac helps some guy that isn't Jack Dalton protect his plantation from a killer onslaught of ants that may or may not have been sent by Murdoc.

Guns or ants? He hates them both.

It just so happens that an identical (but possibly smaller and less deadly) colony of ants has invaded my backyard. I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to kick off a new feature, "MikeGyver," in which I'll build and/or explode fun stuff throughout the summer. Humor me, it's going to be a little better than Ask the Professor.

Just out of frame left: haunted house where the lady was dead for a week!

As you can see in this map of the giant nature preserve (except for ants) that is my backyard, the ant mound is definitely within a feasible distance of overrunning my basketball court. An unacceptable situation, indeed.

The first hole I dug didn't reveal nearly as many ants as I would have expected, since when I was poking it with sticks a few days ago I was almost eaten alive. My only remains would have been a pair of glasses which in movies and tv always signify that the glasses-wearing guy was eaten by whatever he was trying to kill.

Sorry, Vada!

Remembering the old blog adage "No ants does a shitty update make," a fistful of sugar and subsequent prodding yielded a much more acceptaple and potentially fatal pile of ants. Unfortunately I had to zoom in and crop most of these pictures for the ants to really show up, so imagine what you're seeing in the following images in perpetual motion and covering an area roughly the size of the Wal-Mart patriotic car magnet department and Toby Keith cd section combined. That's God damned huge, stupid.

Either these ants are gigantic, or they've somehow figured out how to shrink baked potatoes down to ant size. Neither scenerio is very comforting, unless you're the kind of weird idiot that enjoys very tiny potato skins. I'm not, so it's time to get down to work.

One of MacGyver's methods for destroying the ants was to blast them with a giant homemade flamethrower. Nobody can deny MacGyver's clutch abilities in certain doom situations like this, but sometimes he takes the more difficult path. I chose the standard route of bug spray for my task for a handful of reasons including the fact that my hands would probably get blown off. Besides, it was hard enough to get this far without the kids playing in the woods coming over and making fun of me for digging toxic holes instead of smoking and looking at boobs, without the benefit of a flaming pile of ants sending up smoke signals of my dorkiness.

Unleashing half a can of generic ant spray onto a giant mess of brand-name ants doesn't kill them as much as it makes them drunk. They continued to go about their ant business, although much more slowly, clumsy, and vulgar.

Not pictured: flaming ant car overturned in the street.

I bet you're thinking of something dirty.

Like MacGyver before me, and Leiningen before him, I too was going to have to flood these sumbitches.

In nature shows, huge colonies of ants make that creepy squeeky chirping sound. In MacGyver, they sort of screamed when he flooded them. In the most disappointing turn of events since Brad and Jennifer went splitsville, neither of those things happened today. Regardless, it was still pretty fun.

Sweet, disgusting success.


MikeGyver conquers nature... this time.

Next Episode: building an A-Team van!