Three things I learned on the Internet

6/24/07

…and none of them relate to porn!

A great replacement for those thousand-dollar propane mosquito traps: all you need is a two-liter bottle, some sugar, and some yeast. There’s only one catch: it doesn’t work. At all. Three of these traps, sitting at various locations outside our house during two full weeks of peak mosquito season, caught a) nothing, b) enough rainwater to cause a sticky yeasty mass to overflow onto the lawn, and c) a single housefly.

While I was googling around trying to find that chinese video where I first learned this, I also came across a whole website where some swiss people are trying to monetize the technique. Good luck to them. It does work, in that your shirt is more or less folded when you’re done, and it’s kind of nifty watching the shirt sort of origami into itself while you do it. But it takes so long to lay the shirt out flat and arrange it properly before you can start that it winds up being slower than just folding a shirt normally.

This one works. It totally, totally works; it’s easier and faster and better than the way I’d been tying my shoes for three decades. I’m not quite obsessive enough to try the fifteen other shoelace-tying methods obsessively collected on that obsessive shoelace-tying-method site, but I’m glad someone out there is obsessive enough to have not only done so, but to have made obsessively detailed diagrams for each one.

Final score: Internet 1 1/2, real world 1 1/2. Draw. Rematch scheduled for some time to be scheduled later.