Talk of the Town Ernie Anderson

I think my house might be bugged
Midweek, I wrote a column about a giant mosquito that harassed a guy in Sabattus. The very day the piece ran, my kitchen was suddenly overrun by flies. Fruit flies? Drain flies? Pop flies? No idea, but there’s a lot of them. The bug mafia is a real thing, yo. You cross one, you cross them all. I’ll probably find a severed beetle head in my bed tonight.

To the hunt!
To rid myself of all those flies, I set up the usual traps, which typically involve bowls of vinegar with plastic sheets over them. These flies actually landed on the rim of the bowl and laughed at me. Then I tried the ol’ apple cider vinegar with dish soap mixed in and the flies flew in mocking formation around it. By the end, I was reduced to chasing the suckers around the kitchen with vacuum cleaner, shouting obscene things about their mothers as I went. It didn’t go well. I don’t think I captured any flies, but I sucked up a few things that clanged and clanked inside the vacuum cleaner so you just knoooow my wife is going to start complaining about missing rings and such. Deal with it, woman. In warfare of this type, one must make sacrifices.

Pickleball
So, it appears I’ll soon be writing a feature story about this popular sport, which is sort of a mishmash of tennis, ping pong and racketball. It’s all new to me. I’ve heard of pickleball, of course, but I always thought it was some kind of medical affliction — some painful and hilarious medical affliction.

Can I freshen that up for you?
Ahhhh! I didn’t get a beetle head in my bed, but I DID find a couple floating flies in my coffee. I drank at it, anyway. You dump out a full cup of joe for something like that and you let the terrorists win.

Shake it like a Polaroid
Saw a guy downtown the other day who was either twerking on a sidewalk or trying to shake a bee loose from his pajama bottoms. I suppose I could have stopped to ask, but where’s the fun in that? Either way, he looked ridiculous.

One more for the right Jack
Heard from a fellow earlier this week who says he witnessed a rare and coveted 29 cribbage hand in Sabattus less than a year ago. Remember kids, the odds of achieving cribbage’s highest possible hand are 1 in 216,580, so this is an occasion that deserves some ooooh-ing and ahhhhh-ing. I oooooh’d and ahhhh’d myself when I heard, but then one of those %!#@!! flies flew down my throat so it turned into more of a gag cough. A gag cough of great respect and admiration, though.