[Bordermarch] Ants

[Lathrop, Dave]

Greetings Bordermarch
 
As I listened from my semi comatose state of awareness to the discussion
at last nights officer's meeting, pertaining to the use of cinnamon for
ant control, my mind wandered into that wonderful realm of creative
thinking. 
I finally regained some semblance of consciousness when someone mention
sticking an Oreo cookie on top of the ant mound. The cookie was supposed
to preoccupy the ants until
our events were over and all the people had left site. the problem I see
with this train of thought is the well know fact that ants can eat very
fast and we would soon run out of cookies. We would have to have a new
coordinator position
called the "Cookie Ant Man", and that person would have to spend an
entire event delicately placing Oreo cookies on all the ant mounts
throughout the site. Another huge problem with this 
cookie idea is the fact that they blend in with the color of the local
soil at our site, and birds just happen to love Oreo cookies.
I pondered upon this dilemma and kept pondering real hard about it until
I finally started to snooze off and drift off to sleep that evening at
home. My dreams are usually very lifelike and full of vibrant colors so
I wasn't surprised to
 find myself in garb, riding on the back of a big can of blue and orange
Spam that had wings. One moment we were soaring at a breath-taking
altitude, crashing through puffy white clouds, and the next 
moment the flying can of Spam and I were plummeting towards mother
earth. As our speed increased I began to hear a high pitched,
fingernails scraping on the blackboard sound of shredding metal. 
My flying can of Sam was disintegrating beneath me!
The bottom of the Spam can was the first thing to go and then all of the
coagulated jelly-like packing juice that always covers the meat product
we call Spam left. I imagined that if someone looked up 
from the ground and saw my flying Spam can and me it would have looked
like a jet airliner crashing to the ground with apple jelly spilling out
of it tail section. 
When my spam can finally spread its wings and slowed our decent, I
noticed that we were slowly circling our event site and there were
hundreds, if not thousands of yellow dots all over the ground.
I willed the Spam can to land so I could investigate these yellow
anomalies that might pose problem during our upcoming Autumn Melees.
As I approached the nearest yellow dot I realized just what they were,
they were yellow bananas stuck into the top of every single ant mound on
site. Then everything came together; the Oreo cookies, the ant problem,
and the cinnamon. My superior brain had led me to a solution to our
problem with ant control during one of our events. 
It's a scientifically proven fact that when ants eat too much sugar they
go into diabetic shock. One might wonder why they don't go into shock
when they eat an Oreo cookie, but the truth is , one cookie 
does not contain very much sugar when you think in the grand scheme of
things. Now a banana is another beast all together. HE Elisabeth has
warned me over and over about the deadly effect a banana can 
have when your on a sugar free diet. She cringes every time I peel one
of those bright yellow obelisk and throw it into the blender along with
some ice cream, milk, and diet protein powder. I need the banana to
conceal the horrible taste of the powder!
I do get a little woozy after I drink one of these concoctions, but I
never put two and two together. 
It was like an epiphany; place the fruit of death in the ant hole, and
the ants will have more than enough sugar in that one banana to put the
whole mound into diabetic shock. As they consume the soft pulpy 
fruit we call banana fruit, the tough yellow  banana skin will begin to
sag and eventually cover the ant hole when all the fruit inside is gone.
The ants will have consumed the soft fruit, the banana skin will sag and
cover their
hole, hence blocking out the sunlight, and the ants, thinking it's
nighttime, will return to their ant beds and fall into a deep sleep of
no return by way of diabetic shock. An added bonus to this would be the
banana skin covering
the ant hole would act as an airtight seal thereby suffocating the
sleeping ants before they could revive themselves.
Our new coordinators position could be called "The Banana Ant Man", and
much word fame would certainly fall upon this special individual for
sparing so many the horror of suffering from ant bites.
Right now your saying to yourself, "What if a bird comes along and
carries off our bananas." Once again science comes to the rescue with
proof that birds cannot carry bananas in their beaks due to the fact
that birds do not have very big lips.
Without a big lip it is very difficult to grip a slippery object like a
banana, and since they don't have opposing thumbs it would be impossible
for a bird to peel a banana.
These are some of my deep thoughts on the subject of utilizing a natural
method for ant control, please feel free to come up with a better
solution if you can.
 
 
By the way, I think it's that protein powder I'm mixing up in the
morning that's helping me come up with these revolutionary solutions to
seemingly impossible problems.
 
 
HE Santiago