Oh The Humanity...

Ladies and Gentlemen, I come before you as a man changed. I find myself as weary as a Greek soldier battered on the open waves after 10 years of war. I find myself as weary as a man who has just traveled through Hell, only to find there is yet more to climb. I have fought a war. And I have won. But at what cost? Mentally, and physically, I am not who I used to be. My adversary is not a fellow man, or even one of his lofy ideas such as religion. The one I challenged was far simpler, and far more dangerous:


The Housefly.


Laugh, you might, but I have gone toe to toe (in a sense) with a creature who nurtures Hell within its eyes. But now, I tell you the story, in full:

Upon entering my bathroom (I seem to be beginning a bathroom theme to my posts) I did not yet notice the danger that lurked in the most private of my rooms. But soon, he made his presence known. Once registering the noise, I understood what I was facing. The harbringer of disease. The portent of Doom. In an instant I knew what must be done: he must be ended. And so the arduous task began. My thrusts, he parried. My slashes, he avoided. My gaze, he escaped. Everytime he came to a rest, I would approach him, with such caution as to not raise any suspicion within his minute brain. Alas, Fate always interceded. Was I condemned, like Sisyphus, never to succeed? Yet, with each failed attempt I gained a greater resolve. Fully aware that my brain is exponentially larger than his entire body, I had to succeed. If not for the sake of humanity, for mine. With the patience of a monk, I waited for him to cease his endless flight. I waited. I watched. And finally he stopped. I made my move. I crept, gently towards the wall. I prepared my weapon. I bent down to get a better angle. I calculated. I decided. I thurst my napkin forward. As synapses raced the message to my muscles, our eyes met. His of acceptance. Mine of rage. In no more than a second, he was dead. And I had saved myself, my family, and maybe an entire generation from falling victim to this messenger of Hades. In my proof that I have done something good for society, I present this excerpt from a well respected website:

Mind you, this is after a man claimed he killed 52 houseflies one summer. Read...

"The female Musca domestica, or common housefly, typically lays 600-1,000 eggs in the course of her roughly two-month lifetime, most of which grow to maturity in 10-12 days, whereupon they can set about raising little maggots of their own. Under ideal conditions (which invariably prevail in this column), you may get as many as 12 generations a year.

Let's suppose that 132 generations would have been born, or laid, or whatever the appropriate term might be, had you not committed the aforementioned massacre 11 years ago. Let's further suppose that half of the 52 flies were female, that half of all subsequent generations were female, and finally that each female deposited 1,000 eggs.

The total number of female descendants is 26 x 500¹³², and the total fly population, of course, is twice that many. Having performed various subtle mathematical manipulations on my handy calculator, I may categorically state that your house would presently be infested by roughly 9.550892 x 10³⁵⁷ flies. At 128 flies to the cubic inch, we get 3.25 x 10¹⁶ per cubic mile, or 2.292 x 10⁵⁶ per cubic parsec, which means that all the flies would fit into a cube a little more than 3.45 x10¹⁰⁰ parsecs on a side. The galaxy in which we presently reside, by way of comparison, is 25-30 parsecs across. It's easy to scramble up your decimal points in calculations of this type and I may have lost a few billion parsecs here and there, but the implication in general is clear: with that selfless act long ago, you single-handedly saved the cosmos."

And with that I leave you to your thoughts.