The Room 101 thread - for things you hate or just having a bloody good moan

[Stormbringer]

Spiders. Worst things ever.

[Hatredsheart]

Spiders. Worst things ever.

Sorry but no.
That would be wasps.
Evil. Little. Bastards.

[Alan]

They’re both fascinating and awesome. Not a fan when a huge one drops out of the sun visor when you’re doing 70 down the motorway like yesterday but if you stop and just watch them do their thing they’re amazing.

[The Jackal]

Spiders. Worst things ever.

Sorry but no.
That would be wasps.
Evil. Little. Bastards.

There was a wasp in the barbers yesterday, in which three people were working the chairs - only two matter to this story, the one working on me, and an older bloke relentlessly giving him stick from across the way. Anyway, the older bloke had a Japanese guy in his chair when I got into mine (I know he's Japanese because I heard it mentioned in convo with his mate, shut up) who then left while I was still having my hair cut.

Anyway, this wasp had taken preference to that end of the line. After a bit, yer man begins on this story about how he was trying to shoo the wasp away, and he was about to call it a Little Yellow Bastard - but he stopped! Because his customer would've clearly thought the barber meant him! What a close call, eh?

No, mate, that didn't happen. You thought that up, and either didn't go through with it or never intended to do more than use it afterward as some hilarious racial observation.

[Stormbringer]

This kind of attitude:

Brexiters, a bunch of inbred ingnorant cunts that don't understand the tinniest amount about the complexity of the world around them. Fucktards. I'd like to sit down with a bunch of them in a locked room and take a baseball bat to each on of the ignorant cunts.

Seriously. You live in a democracy, which means you don't always get what you want. But you think the answer is to blame it all on people you don't know, lumping them all together -- people's grandmothers, grandfathers, mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles -- calling them "inbred" and "ignorant", not understanding the "complexities" of the world -- and you think the answer is to...bash them over the head with a club?

That is the most savage, primitive, barbaric and idiotic method of problem-solving. It is cave-dweller philosophy. You, and people who come out with similiar homicidal statements, are the real problem.

[Snowy]

I find the Brexit mentality truly nuts and the many drooling mouth-breathers who chest-bang about it on any social media platform available generally vile. While I understand the sentiment though, I agree with Doug.

All said though I suspect Arqueturus was stretching a point to make one, not being literal

[Snowy]

Spiders. Worst things ever.

Sorry but no.
That would be wasps.
Evil. Little. Bastards.

Saw this a while back which is food for thought:

August is the time of year when people start to ask 'what's the point of wasps?' The answer may surprise you.

Did you know that there are approximately 9,000 species of wasp here in the UK? These include the parasitic wasps, some of which are so diminutive they are like pin heads. Of the 250 larger wasps which have have a stinger, the majority are solitary and cause no upset to humans.

However, when we talk about wasps, we're almost certainly referring to the our nation's nemesis, the Common wasp (Vespula vulgaris). To understand why these wasps become really annoying this time of year, you first need to understand their life cycle.

Common wasps live socially like bees but, unlike honey bees, they haven't evolved a way of storing food to allow the colony to survive the winter. In fact the only survivors are the young, fertilised queens who hibernate over winter. They emerge in the spring to build little walnut sized nests where they they lay around 20 eggs.

The queen feeds the resulting larvae until around May, when they mature and become workers. Then she focuses on more egg-laying and the workers get on with feeding them, enlarging the nest as they go along. By this time of year the nest has grown to around 40cm in diameter, often larger, and that nest can contains up to 10,000 wasps!

Then, in August/September, a dramatic change takes place. The queen quits her egg laying (save a few that will go on to be future queens and males to fertilise them) and no longer releases the pheromone that causes the workers to work.

Basically, these workers are made redundant, and are left jobless and disorientated. And the problem for us is that, although adult wasps are insect predators, that meat is to feed the larvae not themselves. In their adult state wasps are not able to digest solid food and need sugary liquid to survive. Now, with fewer or no larvae to feed, they become uncontrollably and insatiably hungry.

Wasps love easy food such as over ripe fruit and your fizzy drinks. Towards the end of their brief lives, their hunger drives them to search for easy sugar at exactly the time when we are more likely to be using our gardens and outdoor spaces for eating sweet things. The timing couldn't be better for them or worse for us.

So why are those who panic and try to swat them away more likely to be stung than those who remain calm?

Well the problem is that these redundant workers have their own pheromone, which helps protect the nest from attack earlier in the year, and that's essentially a chemical rallying cry to other workers that the nest is under attack.

So when you swat that annoying wasp and it feels under attack, that rallying cry will go out. Suddenly it all kicks off, and loads more wasps will start arriving in aggressive 'red-mist' mode, fired up and ready to defend their nest. This is why the best advice is to stay calm.

Think of it this way, from May that wasp has been working its socks off helping to keep things nice on planet earth. Now it’s going to die. So why not give it a break, save your swats, put a bowl of sugary drink somewhere out of your way, and let it go out on a nice sugar rush. At the very least don't kill it.

What's the point of wasps? Without them it’s likely that human life would not survive because, in the absence of their role as predators, our planet would be overrun by even more damaging insects such as aphids, ants and caterpillars."

Well, who'd have thought. The humble wasp, saviour of the planet.

[Sly Boots]

Was bordering on tl;dr, but glad I did, thanks Snowy

[Mantis]

I did not expect that to be quite so fascinating.

[Animalmother]

I was in Berlin last summer, wasps everywhere. Crawling over food in deli's and sandwich shops. Sit outside a restaurant or bar and they will go for your food or drink. It made going out a wee bit stressful to say the least. You learn to eat at night. I don't hate wasps, they are fascinating but fuck me they are annoying little wankers.

[Wrathbone]

Kind of pissed off that I can't blame all my problems on wasps anymore.

[Snowy]

I did not expect that to be quite so fascinating.

My thoughts when I read it too, glad others enjoyed it.

Kind of pissed off that I can't blame all my problems on wasps anymore.

Ah well at least we are back on track and properly fucked off

[Rossell]

I was in Berlin last summer, wasps everywhere. Crawling over food in deli's and sandwich shops. Sit outside a restaurant or bar and they will go for your food or drink. It made going out a wee bit stressful to say the least. You learn to eat at night. I don't hate wasps, they are fascinating but fuck me they are annoying little wankers.

Odd this, because my trip to Berlin had almost zero of the buggers. Was end of June so maybe I was too early.

[Animalmother]

I was in Berlin last summer, wasps everywhere. Crawling over food in deli's and sandwich shops. Sit outside a restaurant or bar and they will go for your food or drink. It made going out a wee bit stressful to say the least. You learn to eat at night. I don't hate wasps, they are fascinating but fuck me they are annoying little wankers.

Odd this, because my trip to Berlin had almost zero of the buggers. Was end of June so maybe I was too early.

I think it was about this time last year. The bastards were everywhere. After reading Snowy's post I'm guessing they were the poor feckers that were aimless and hungry.

[Sly Boots]

Wasps: the misunderstood, hangry menace.