There Aren’t Any — new cartoon 6/22
June 22nd, 2007 by Stephanie McMillan
This gecko lives behind the shelves in my office. I often see her/him in the evenings coming out to hunt. Unfortunately s/he’s letting some great prey get away — namely two mammoth cockroaches that have been frolicking in my kitchen. So I killed them myself, smashed them with a rolled up newspaper. I feel guilty (I know this has been their home first and I’m the interloper) but I really don’t want them to proliferate inside. I once lived in a roach-infested apartment and they’d sometimes crawl on me when I was sleeping and I just found it horrifying. I usually like insects, but I have a very deep-seated, strong reaction of revulsion when I see these inside (if they’re outside they don’t bother me). They’re actually palmetto bugs, who fly and are about two inches long. Their legs are prickly. I wonder if I should try to overcome my negative feelings about them, and if I could. Maybe I’ll explore this in my cartoons.
Mosquitoes are the only other insect that I’ll kill, and usually then only if they’re driving me crazy or preventing me from sleeping. Other times I just let them have a little blood, which seems okay here because we don’t have malaria or dengue fever in Florida (yet). If one bites once or twice, I’ll tolerate it, but if one keeps coming back for multiple bites, or if there are a lot of them biting at once, then I do try to kill them.
[edited a few minutes later to add: I just remembered one other type of bug I'll kill in certain circumstances. There's a tiny round brown bug, some kind of weevil I guess, that gets into food, and I'll kill them if I see them in the kitchen too. They've ruined grain and flour and other food here, and they can chew their way into plastic bags and crawl through the threads of jar lids to get inside].
In Friday’s cartoon, Kranti’s neighbor doesn’t see much. Click on the fragment below for the full cartoon at comics.com:
The more you click on my cartoons at comics.com during 2007, the better the chances they’ll appear in daily city papers in 2008. If you like Minimum Security, please see a new cartoon each weekday!
