Revival of the Fittest
When I was living abroad, my friend Ed told me about a bar trick that so transcended the standard scope of run-of-the-(gin-)mill bar stunts that it could easily be upgraded in the Pantheon of Trickery to “Legitimate Magic Trick.” I was skeptical at first -- Ed’s tales tended towards the hyperbolic -- but he swore he’d seen the trick turned twice himself, first-hand, and with his own two eyes.
Here is what you do:
Step 1. Think like a Boy Scout: Be prepared.
Setting: A bar or pub where houseflies may be found (see below -- “Materials Needed”). Usually this will be a bar with an outdoor seating section or patio, but a sufficiently shady dive bar may also suffice.
Materials Needed: housefly (alive), glass of water, coaster (optional), spoon (optional), 2 TB table salt
Step 2. Catch a fly without injuring it. The best way to do this is to wait until the fly alights on the interior rim of your water glass or beer mug, then trap it inside with a coaster. You can also use the palm of your hand. If the fly prefers to buzz around rather than alight on drinking utensils, you can try the ancient Chinese cupped-palm clapping method to trap the fly.
(Warning: Do not use chopsticks. Man who catch fly with chopsticks can do anything -- except this trick… for fly likely end up kaput.)
(N.B. Although this is the first real step in the trick, it may be the most difficult, involving as it does agility and adeptness to secure the fly, and even more skillfulness to do so in a harmless fashion.)
Step 3. Knock out the fly. With the fly trapped between the water and coaster, pick up the glass and shake vigorously. Slosh the fly around until it becomes sufficiently disoriented.
(Using beer instead of water may augment the disorientation process, though the effects of alcohol on insects have not been thoroughly researched.)
Step 4. Drown the fly. Once unconscious, the fly should soon become waterlogged and sink slowly but steadily to the bottom of the glass. If it does not, you may abet the sinking process with a spoon (or, God bless you, your finger). The fly now appears drowned and dead.
Step 5. But wait.
Step 6. Wait some more. It is unknown how long you can actually wait without killing the fly, but some spectators have claimed to have witnessed comas as long as twenty or thirty minutes.* It is a bit like sex in this respect: the longer you can hold out, the more dramatic the climax.
Step 7. Play it up. With the fly long since drowned and “dead” at the bottom of the glass, bet any and all dubious witnesses that you can bring it back to life. Gather a crowd around, even those who missed the first half of the trick. Throw twenties on the bar to show you’re for real. Smile at the ladies. Wink at them if you’re the type of guy who can pull off a wink. Then tell everyone to prepare to be astonished.
Step 8. Revive and astonish. To bring the fly back to life, simply pour all contents of the glass -- water and “dead” fly -- onto the bar, counter, or table. Pour two tablespoons of table salt on the fly, forming a miniature salt mine/gravesite. After several minutes, the fly will miraculously crawl out of the salt pile, no longer dead, and soar away as spirited as ever. The crowd will cheer. The guys will slap your back and congratulate you. The chicks will kiss you. You will be a hero. Fame and glory will follow.
Sound apocryphal? My friends and I thought so too, so we decided to find out for ourselves, and we ended up getting more excitement than we could have hoped for.
I thought the first real step, catching the fly, would cause us the biggest problems. For one thing, flies do not routinely alight on the inner rims of water glasses. How many opportunities would we have? For another thing, flies are fast little fuckers. It’s not like we invented the fly swatter because wads of Kleenex were doing the trick. Nevertheless, my friend JC trapped the first fly that landed on his glass under his coaster. He sloshed the fly under tow and pushed it down with his straw. (In the spirit of full disclosure, I should admit that we were never able to keep the fly fully submerged. Whenever we pushed him under, he kept floating back to the top. But he was definitely unconscious -- he was completely motionless the whole time -- so I don’t think our experiment’s results should be dismissed as partial or inadequate.) With the fly floating upside-down between chunks of ice, we put the glass aside and finished our breakfast.
About a half-hour later, after we’d paid the bill and had our table cleared, we resumed the experiment. We dumped the contents of the glass -- water, ice, and “dead” fly -- onto the table. (Lest you think us ugly Americans, I should point out that this was an outdoor café.) We covered the little guy with salt and waited, then waited some more. Sure enough, within four or five minutes the fly stirred beneath its briny grave, like a phoenix rising from its ashes (I know what that looks like, incidentally, because we’d performed that particular revival trick several months earlier). The clumped grains of salt at the top of the pile began to slide away, down the side of the mini-volcano. A tired wing emerged, then the other, and then a pair of antennae and a quadruplet of bug eyes. He surveyed us exasperatedly, then rolled his four eyes -- perhaps this wasn’t the first time a group of scientifically-minded diners had done this to him.
And then, the real surprise. An ant, alerted by the Homo-sapienic “Ooh!”s and “Ahh!”s from above, crawled onto the table and scuttled towards the fly. He sniffed once or twice, then ran back under the table. A second or two later -- it couldn’t have been more than three -- the ant returned, accompanied by about two hundred of his closest buddies. In a veritable insect blitzkrieg, they charged at the fly from all directions to execute the dramatic coup de grâce.
As we all know, there’s nothing like an entire entomological infantry brigade literally nipping at your heels to encourage a little hustle. Our new friend, who, to that point, had been taking his sweet time with his reversal of being temporarily dead, suddenly snapped to life. Vibrating like a dog shaking itself dry, the little guy flapped the remaining salt from his wings and took to the skies, lending credence to his species’s common name and leaving an army of disgruntled predators with nothing for breakfast but a soggy heap of sodium chloride.
My friends and I cheered in astonishment. The guys slapped each others’ backs. The girls kissed the boys. We were heroes. We soon became famous throughout Southeast Asia.
The fly, meanwhile, died several days later, having a two-week lifespan and all. That made us sad, but we later heard he died in his sleep a happy bug, reminiscing about his two victories over certain death and surrounded by his 271 children and grandchildren.
* Devoted readers of this blog -- both of you (hi Mom & Dad!) -- will recall that the fly isn't the only common household pest with the ability to hold its breath a freakishly long time (see "Big, Black, & Nasty" -- 10/14/06). On a related note, I'm not sure what it is with me and sadistic abuse of insects. I swear I wasn't one of those kids who hung out on the driveway roasting ants with a magnifying glass.
Here is what you do:
Step 1. Think like a Boy Scout: Be prepared.
Setting: A bar or pub where houseflies may be found (see below -- “Materials Needed”). Usually this will be a bar with an outdoor seating section or patio, but a sufficiently shady dive bar may also suffice.
Materials Needed: housefly (alive), glass of water, coaster (optional), spoon (optional), 2 TB table salt
Step 2. Catch a fly without injuring it. The best way to do this is to wait until the fly alights on the interior rim of your water glass or beer mug, then trap it inside with a coaster. You can also use the palm of your hand. If the fly prefers to buzz around rather than alight on drinking utensils, you can try the ancient Chinese cupped-palm clapping method to trap the fly.
(Warning: Do not use chopsticks. Man who catch fly with chopsticks can do anything -- except this trick… for fly likely end up kaput.)
(N.B. Although this is the first real step in the trick, it may be the most difficult, involving as it does agility and adeptness to secure the fly, and even more skillfulness to do so in a harmless fashion.)
Step 3. Knock out the fly. With the fly trapped between the water and coaster, pick up the glass and shake vigorously. Slosh the fly around until it becomes sufficiently disoriented.
(Using beer instead of water may augment the disorientation process, though the effects of alcohol on insects have not been thoroughly researched.)
Step 4. Drown the fly. Once unconscious, the fly should soon become waterlogged and sink slowly but steadily to the bottom of the glass. If it does not, you may abet the sinking process with a spoon (or, God bless you, your finger). The fly now appears drowned and dead.
Step 5. But wait.
Step 6. Wait some more. It is unknown how long you can actually wait without killing the fly, but some spectators have claimed to have witnessed comas as long as twenty or thirty minutes.* It is a bit like sex in this respect: the longer you can hold out, the more dramatic the climax.
Step 7. Play it up. With the fly long since drowned and “dead” at the bottom of the glass, bet any and all dubious witnesses that you can bring it back to life. Gather a crowd around, even those who missed the first half of the trick. Throw twenties on the bar to show you’re for real. Smile at the ladies. Wink at them if you’re the type of guy who can pull off a wink. Then tell everyone to prepare to be astonished.
Step 8. Revive and astonish. To bring the fly back to life, simply pour all contents of the glass -- water and “dead” fly -- onto the bar, counter, or table. Pour two tablespoons of table salt on the fly, forming a miniature salt mine/gravesite. After several minutes, the fly will miraculously crawl out of the salt pile, no longer dead, and soar away as spirited as ever. The crowd will cheer. The guys will slap your back and congratulate you. The chicks will kiss you. You will be a hero. Fame and glory will follow.
Sound apocryphal? My friends and I thought so too, so we decided to find out for ourselves, and we ended up getting more excitement than we could have hoped for.
I thought the first real step, catching the fly, would cause us the biggest problems. For one thing, flies do not routinely alight on the inner rims of water glasses. How many opportunities would we have? For another thing, flies are fast little fuckers. It’s not like we invented the fly swatter because wads of Kleenex were doing the trick. Nevertheless, my friend JC trapped the first fly that landed on his glass under his coaster. He sloshed the fly under tow and pushed it down with his straw. (In the spirit of full disclosure, I should admit that we were never able to keep the fly fully submerged. Whenever we pushed him under, he kept floating back to the top. But he was definitely unconscious -- he was completely motionless the whole time -- so I don’t think our experiment’s results should be dismissed as partial or inadequate.) With the fly floating upside-down between chunks of ice, we put the glass aside and finished our breakfast.
About a half-hour later, after we’d paid the bill and had our table cleared, we resumed the experiment. We dumped the contents of the glass -- water, ice, and “dead” fly -- onto the table. (Lest you think us ugly Americans, I should point out that this was an outdoor café.) We covered the little guy with salt and waited, then waited some more. Sure enough, within four or five minutes the fly stirred beneath its briny grave, like a phoenix rising from its ashes (I know what that looks like, incidentally, because we’d performed that particular revival trick several months earlier). The clumped grains of salt at the top of the pile began to slide away, down the side of the mini-volcano. A tired wing emerged, then the other, and then a pair of antennae and a quadruplet of bug eyes. He surveyed us exasperatedly, then rolled his four eyes -- perhaps this wasn’t the first time a group of scientifically-minded diners had done this to him.
And then, the real surprise. An ant, alerted by the Homo-sapienic “Ooh!”s and “Ahh!”s from above, crawled onto the table and scuttled towards the fly. He sniffed once or twice, then ran back under the table. A second or two later -- it couldn’t have been more than three -- the ant returned, accompanied by about two hundred of his closest buddies. In a veritable insect blitzkrieg, they charged at the fly from all directions to execute the dramatic coup de grâce.
As we all know, there’s nothing like an entire entomological infantry brigade literally nipping at your heels to encourage a little hustle. Our new friend, who, to that point, had been taking his sweet time with his reversal of being temporarily dead, suddenly snapped to life. Vibrating like a dog shaking itself dry, the little guy flapped the remaining salt from his wings and took to the skies, lending credence to his species’s common name and leaving an army of disgruntled predators with nothing for breakfast but a soggy heap of sodium chloride.
My friends and I cheered in astonishment. The guys slapped each others’ backs. The girls kissed the boys. We were heroes. We soon became famous throughout Southeast Asia.
The fly, meanwhile, died several days later, having a two-week lifespan and all. That made us sad, but we later heard he died in his sleep a happy bug, reminiscing about his two victories over certain death and surrounded by his 271 children and grandchildren.
* Devoted readers of this blog -- both of you (hi Mom & Dad!) -- will recall that the fly isn't the only common household pest with the ability to hold its breath a freakishly long time (see "Big, Black, & Nasty" -- 10/14/06). On a related note, I'm not sure what it is with me and sadistic abuse of insects. I swear I wasn't one of those kids who hung out on the driveway roasting ants with a magnifying glass.
posted by Homunculus J. Reilly at 3:55 PM
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