If only there was only something you could do from orbit that would solve the bug problem....

Plus that town makes some weak-ass chili.

^

Even though I live here, that may be a good solution given all the vermin around here...

What else would you expect from a town settled mostly by Germans?

Anywhere BrunelloBabe is isn't all bad.

Met a lot of very friendly women there, actually.

Wow. That must require tiny little uniforms...

Klingon Penis: BrunelloBabe

Do want.

Wow.

I wanted to smoke crack here. But now not so much.

They were just talking about this on WKRP. Oh that Dr. Johnny Fever...

Klingon Penis: Anywhere BrunelloBabe is isn't all bad.

Met a lot of very friendly women there, actually.

Oh did you just impugn somebody's honour on the internet? You are in so much trouble. Gasp and shock! Although I guess it doesn't matter because according to the article she has bugs.

Frankly, her morning after pic is ten thousand times hotter than her Paramour pic. They ought to be reversed.

What that town really needs is a Bengals Improvement Task Force.

Manhattan has a "bedbug hotline" too.

Bedbugs have made an impressive comeback, Smitty.

I hate bedbugs sooooo much....

I remember a history prof (in a class 17 years ago) saying that in post-civil war Cincinnati, pigs roaming the street outnumbered the people. It may have been a discussion about the book The Good Old Days: They Were Terrible!

PseudoNic: Plus that town makes some weak-ass chili.

*reaches through internet, slaps pseudonic

Recoil Therapy

Damn. I checked your profile and did the leader thing, answered 18 questions and the bastage told me I am Hitler.

My previous London flat had these. I bought a steam cleaner and cleaned them out myself. They die at somehing like 40c.

Still very gross when you first find them, filled up with your blood.

PseudoNic: Plus that town makes some weak-ass chili.

BLASPHEMY! Mmm now I want some Skyline... too bad I have to drive 30 minutes to get it. Might be worth it.

My father volunteers with St. Vincent de Paul Society in northern KY (across the river from Cincy) and when he goes into peoples' homes he tries not to touch anything upholstered. And they can't take furniture donations anymore, which makes their work pretty difficult.

Now I'm all itchy... ugh.

PseudoNic: Plus that town makes some weak ass-chili.

I bet you have bad breathe.

shivashakti: Wow. That must require tiny little uniforms...

The amount of Win in this comment goes to 11.

Ow My Balls: I remember a history prof (in a class 17 years ago) saying that in post-civil war Cincinnati, pigs roaming the street outnumbered the people.

I think we had the same history prof. According to him everyone used to call Cincy Porkopolis. it's actually somewhat believable... in the days before railroads, it really helped turn a profit if your product would walk itself to the slaughterhouse where you could sell it.

PseudoNic: Plus that town makes some weak-ass chili.

Ill have you know . Cincinnati is the chili capital of the woild!!

Chili is better when it doesnt have all that flower patch crap floating in it and six pounds of cayenne pepper to cover up the awful taste.

Cincinnati style chili rules!!!!

So get a few of these...

Ow My Balls: I remember a history prof (in a class 17 years ago) saying that in post-civil war Cincinnati, pigs roaming the street outnumbered the people. It may have been a discussion about the book The Good Old Days: They Were Terrible!

Hey thanks Balls. I completely forgot about the existence of that book. I bought it for my grandma many years ago, she would go on about the good ol days a lot, and it was my idea of a joke. I wonder if the book is still in with her things. I'd like to read that again

hyperspacemonkey: Oh did you just impugn somebody's honour on the internet? You are in so much trouble. Gasp and shock!

Uh, no.
Learn to read.

oldebayer: What else would you expect from a town settled mostly by Germans?

I would expect a radical bed-bug extermination plan.

Actually the problem in the cincinnati area is that many building departments are choosing to treat the problem as the responsibility of the landlord or owner, not of the tenant.

Dont believe it when they say it can take several exterminations before the problem is solved. The minimum treatment time is 1 year and requires 12-20 visits by exterminators....plus removal and destruction of all infested furniture....laundering and storage in plastic containers of all clothing......etc....

Despite this being true, the local section 8 housing inspectors give a landlord 30 days to eliminate the problem or loose the contract.

Its hugely traumatic for the tenants, as they often wind up throwing out all their furniture and sleeping on air matresses.

And its all because we arent allowed to use effective pesticides like DDT.

Unless you spray current pesticides directly on the bug, it will not kill them, and if they are living inside something, that is impossible to do. I actually use a high temperature steam gun in my apartments because it penetrates into cracks and furniture and kills the eggs as well. But there isnt enough time in the week to treat everything every month.

Just give me DDT and I'll solve the problem myself without a task force.

The only thing I would like from local governments is a way to sterilize large quantities of furniture , like a shed that heats to 150 degrees that I can park a trailer full of furniture inside for 20 minutes....that would be sweet, roast the critters where they live.

Anyway its all the environmentalists fault, and when they discover that the bugs can actually transmit AIDS from one housing unit to the next by multiple feedings there will be hell to pay. I recall when the bugs first appeared the experts told us they didnt travel on people.....bullshiat, I've picked them off myself after walking through an infested apartment. We have a quarantine room in one of our buildings where my employees can go to change clothes and run their outfits through a gas dryer so they dont transport eggs home with them.

PseudoNic: Plus that town makes some weak-ass chili.

As a former Cincinnatian living in new York City, eating imported Skyline Chili right now, I frown upon your shananigans.

I have friends ship me cans of the stuff 10 pounds at a time.

Also, there are more bedbugs here than in Cincinnati.

Yes, the are making a comeback. We've seen this pattern for about a year now. In the hotel world, the main problem is the way people handle the infestation. You can't take the cheap way out. I've been a hotel manager for about 20 years and take it from me, they suck. If you find them in a particular room, you need to, at a minimum, treat that room, each room next to it, and the same on the floor above and below. So if you find them in one room, you treat 9 rooms, minimum. It takes about a week. We're talking about the possibility of 63 lost room nights. Now, depending on the hotel, (my average rate is about $150/ night) we're talking about 10K in lost revenue. Most hotel managers don't even want to think about that and that's EXACTLY why they are part of the problem.

Another mistake: Removing anything from an infested room. Don't do it. Triple bag it if you do, then burn it. If you take the sheets of the bed and take 'em to laundry, you're farked. You now have a hotel wide infestation, not to mention the fact that at least one employee will take them home and bring them back after you have taken care of the problem.

Bed bugs are by nature, some resilient SOBs. They can live like 6 months without a food source. They just sit in a seam of the wallpaper and wait it out until they find a host. Then it's "game on."

Morale of the story: Nuke 'em from orbit.


Link (Cornell link)
This is from Cornell Entomology. They also host the best Hotel Administration program in the country.

/A degree in Hotel Administration is about as valuable as a degree in Art History or Underwater Basket Weaving.
// sorry for the length - these suckers get me amped
/// one last note. when you check in to a hotel (ANY HOTEL), pull back the bedding at the head of the bed and check it. Bed bugs travel. Most have traveled internationally. They are just a prevalent in 5 star hotels as they are in a 1 star hotel. Probably more so due to the travel habits (home-hotel-hotel-hotel-home, rather than home-hotel-home) of the guest. Pull of the comforter with a set of BBQ tongs and throw it in the corner. Don't use the glassware (unless you're in a Hilton or Marriott, I can vouch for them), and always tip your housekeeper.

PseudoNic: Plus that town makes some weak-ass amazing chili.







The Fail is for anyone who has not had a good Cincy threeway!

Now I'm hungry for Skyline!

Oh come on... Lousy with louses! Missed a golden opportunity there, submitter.

Also, "literally" would have been more satisfying than "seriously." But I know some people are gun shy about the whole "figuratively vs literally" thing.

I laffed at subby's headline.

/thinks subby meant "louse-y", for those who don't get it. Louse. Lousy.
//+1, subby

My wife works for a major hotel chain in Cincinnati. What HectorSchwartz described is what they have to do any time they get bedbugs. (Which to defend Cinci, are brought in by out of town visitors.) It is very expensive, but you HAVE to do it. She has a co-worker that is married to a fire fighter. He sleeps in a chair at the fire house, because of the situation with the beds.

UGH, EWW and all that.

It's cool, the trolley through OTR will fix everything.

lostcat: Oh come on... Lousy with louses! Missed a golden opportunity there, submitter.

Also, "literally" would have been more satisfying than "seriously." But I know some people are gun shy about the whole "figuratively vs literally" thing.

Don't try to teach your grandmother to suck eggs.

Shadyman: I laffed at subby's headline.

/thinks subby meant "louse-y", for those who don't get it. Louse. Lousy.
//+1, subby

lous⋅y
/ˈlaʊzi/ Show Spelled Pronunciation [lou-zee] Show IPA Pronunciation
-adjective, lous⋅i⋅er, lous⋅i⋅est.
1. infested with lice.
2. Informal.
a. mean or contemptible: That was a lousy thing to do.
b. wretchedly bad; miserable: a lousy job; I feel lousy; Cinnamon makes for lousy chili.

That's close enough for Fark purposes.

I don't wish bedbugs on anybody. I had them and the landlord of the house I was living in at the time refused to do any further treatments of the house and said that I brought them in to the house (probably true) and wasn't going to pay more than necessary.

Suffice to say, I lost EVERYTHING in my bedroom. Seriously, I could have set fire to everything and it would have had the same result. Had to buy a new bed, nightstand, bookcases and hundreds of dollars in bills for dry cleaning all my clothes.

Holy crap, it was beyond awful. My sincerest condolences to anyone who has to go through that crap.

There are tropical types that don't seem to care how hot they get but they don't like the cold so much but I don't think the heat treatments are going to work unless you can directly steam them like lobsters. I took 5 treatments when a friend brought some back from a weekend trip and that was with no one living in the rooms. The two live bugs I put in a jar were alive a month later and then one ate the other. Cockroach spray directly on the things has no effect other than it may wake them up. Same with ant and fly spray. They don't seem to mind laying their eggs on steel either. My solution was to wash everything that could fit in the washing machine or the hot top and trash everything else including the carpet. If it happens again, I'm going to consider making my own DDT.

jdmac The Fail is for anyone who has not had a good Cincy threeway!


^^^ This^^^

Just whipped up a batch of Skyline (prefers the spice packet to canned) in my California kitchen. The whole house reeks.

//ah.....

Thanks for the advice, HectorSchwartz. The little bastards make me nervous every time I stay in a hotel. I would hate to have to trash my furniture, especially the pieces from my grandparents.

I may be off to Chicago in a couple months. Anyone know the vermin situation in their hotels?

knucklebreather: I think we had the same history prof.

He was the GREATEST prof ever! Dr. Richard Neel (or Neal?) of Ball State. Had the class in about 1992. Wore a Pittsburgh Pirates jersey and ballcap every single day with a Rolling Stones' pin. In fact, he cancelled class every MLB opening day and attended the Reds' home opener, citing it as his "religious holiday." Had a huge ZZ Top beard. I didn't miss a single minute of class. History 152: American History 1877-present. The class culminated in a reading and paper of On the Beach by Nevil Schute.

God, I miss college...

Quantum Apostrophe: So get a few of these...

Farking house centipedes... those things might be "harmless", but they are creepy as hell and hard to kill. I had to chase one around a bit, gross little bastards.

Adding my voice to the Skyline lovers. NOM.

i once moved into an apartment in Providence, RI. I found a bed bug within like 2 days and I panicked and moved back home with my parents because the slum lord refused to do anything about it.

Such a bad experience =[

Ow My Balls: I remember a history prof (in a class 17 years ago) saying that in post-civil war Cincinnati, pigs roaming the street outnumbered the people. It may have been a discussion about the book The Good Old Days: They Were Terrible!

I have that book. It's very interesting and a powerful corrective to nostalgia. For example, many of the problems that China is currently experiencing with lead, fake milk, etc., harken back to the industrialization of America and other countries.

For an even more in depth look at the Bad Old Days, I suggest you read P.T Barnum's book on Humbugs. He was the Penn and Teller of his day--a great showman and a great debunker of less harmful impostures than his own. The things that were done to adulterate or fake food and other products are appalling but we're still exposed to many frauds that are just as bad despite the creation of such institutions as the FDA and the EPA, and similar bodies in developed countries.

Pigs were allowed in New York City as recently as the 1880s if I recall correctly. It took another 100 years or so to ban giraffes, hippopotamuses, lions, etc. Fortunately, very few New Yorkers have tried to keep large fauna in their apartments, although the fact that it was banned shows that some have done so.

The bad news is that they've been coming back roaring for years now. They were never totally exterminated--they survived in three poultry facilities in the US (somewhere in the vicinity of Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kentucky...and have bounced back from there although some people have inevitably blamed immigrants. The DNA evidence suggests that their ancestors are mainly domestic, however.

Given the current economic situation, their re-infestation of North America isn't likely to be delayed and is, in fact, well advanced in many urban areas.

Some household pesticides will work against bedbugs provided they haven't developed an immunity. Look for the words "residual effect". The pesticide needs to kill for at least a couple of weeks after spraying or it is useless.

You'll probably still need professional help--for exterminating the bedbugs and dealing with the stress and loss.

Cockroaches are bedbug predators. This is about the only good news in the bedbug story. It's pretty sad when cockroaches are the White Knights but they can keep a place clean of bedbugs and are a lot easier to be rid of than the bedbugs because they will take poison baits.

It's not the loss of DDT which is the problem. DDT was very dangerous stuff to all kinds of harmless pests such as pets, children, beneficial insects, birds, you....

The real problem is that since the bedbugs took a temporary powder, exterminators have relied on less-toxic products, such as baits and contact poisions, while being less likely to use poisons with residual effect because people don't want toxins hanging around.

With bedbugs you need harsher measures than with most other pests because they can survive longer in a dormant state than they can feeding. Numbers vary but they can live over a year without food.

Females lay two or three eggs a day. You have to exterminate or else they'll only get worse.

Many people don't know they have bedbugs because they only come out at night and because not everybody reacts to the bites.

They typically bite in a pattern called "breakfast, lunch and dinner"--three bites in a row. This is difficult to mistake if you see it.

Bedbugs, unlike cockroaches, feed only on blood and therefore don't care how well or poorly you clean.

A study from the turn of the last century suggests that they can be killed with a solution of ordinary vinegar so you could always try spraying and doing the laundry with vinegar. Let me know how that turns out.

It is a bad idea to dumpster dive unless you can inspect, disinfect, and if possible, quarantine items. Throwing everything out is probably not necessary but it's a bugger of a job to de-infest books and other items.

Heat will kill (provided it is hot enough, long enough and can penetrate the object being disinfected); cold can kill (but it takes quite a long time at very low temperatures. If given a chance they can escape from the heat and cold treatments by burrowing deep into mattresses, etc.

In other words, bedbugs are a passport to Hell.

Items being laundered need to be transported in sealed plastic so the bedbugs, nymphs and eggs don't drop off along the way.

Sending things to the dry cleaners may just infest the drycleaners.

Steam cleaning of mattresses, furniture, rugs, etc., works but may need to be repeated.

In other words: WELCOME TO HELL KIDS! if you ever get bedbugs.

Also, although most sources say that they don't carry disease, they may carry Chagas disease, a tropical disease that you may not have to worry about if you don't live in Chagas disease territory.

Farks And What You Meant To Me: Quantum Apostrophe: So get a few of these...

Farking house centipedes... those things might be "harmless", but they are creepy as hell and hard to kill. I had to chase one around a bit, gross little bastards.

Yeah but they eat bedbugs, they are beneficial.

My kids, they love the Skyline.

/kids these days
//I work downtown
///Cincinnati is very much a strange town
////wretched hive of scum and villany...
//and slashies!!!

Gold Star is way better than Skyline

We got 'em about two months after the new upstairs neighbors moved in: two terrorists drug dealers students from Pakistan. They did a shiat-load of traveling to god knows where, always leaving at 2am and clattering down the stairs with absolutely huge, incredibly heavy, duffle bags. We figure that they brought the bugs back with them from where ever they went to plot whatever they were plotting.

The little bastards (the bedbugs, not the terrorists drug dealers students) came down the insides of the walls into the apartment through the phone jack and power outlets.

PSA: this kills 'em deader than doornails and is absolutely positively safe for use around humans (and probably cats and dogs, though I would not use it around birds): Orange Guard Home Pest Control.

http://www.amazon.com/Orange-Guard-Water-Based-Control/dp/B00030BBMS
and
http://www.orangeguard.com/order.html

We basically flooded the carpet and sprayed down the walls multiple times with the stuff, Had to toss the matresses and bedding, though, as well as wash every single piece of clothing multiple times on hot. Took about 3 months to totally eradicate them, since the eggs can stay save in pinhole-sized cracks, and the little farking bugs can travel 30 feet in a night to find blood or a hidy-hole.

The apartment management went insane and started blaming us - until people in every other apartment in the building started complaining. The the OTHER buildings started reporting them -v some idiot had left a pile of infested clothing in the laundry room, and the bugs apparently started jumping into just-washed/dried clothing.

Bedbugs and terrorists drug dealers foreign students -- not a laughing matter.

PS: pest exterminators see bedbugs as their Hawaiian vacations. Do NOT let them bullshiat you on what it will take to get rid of them. Just use LOTS of Orange Guard and wash everything washable on hot. Also: stuff you don't need for six months can be put into airtight plastic bags and sealed for 6 months, Starves/asphixiates the little bastards.