Still got stinkbugs from the October invasion? Get to know your tenants. #
News and meta-news about Charlottesville, VA, since 2001.
Sideblog
Police announced this afternoon that their investigation into what was initially believed to be a fatal fire on Rugby Avenue is now a homicide investigation. #
The Virginia Supreme Court has denied George Huguely’s appeal. His second-degree murder conviction will stand, WRIC reports. #
In a carefully worded story, and not citing specific sources, WTVR reports that forensic evidence belonging to Jesse Matthew Jr., the main suspect in the disappearance of Hannah Graham, matches forensic evidence collected during the investigation of Morgan Harrington’s 2009 murder. #
In the wake of Hannah Graham’s disappearance, and the evidence that came from private security footage, city officials are revisiting the question of installing security cameras on the downtown mall. #
Both Charlottesville Registrar Sheri Iachetta and former Electoral Board member Stephanie Commander have turned themselves in to the police on
foursix and four felony counts of embezzlement, respectively. #Ten years ago, the National Institutes of Health budget doubled and schools like the University of Virginia built massive new research facilities. A decade later, those buildings remain largely underutilized. NPR visits UVA in this story on the effect of federal binge and spurge spending in the sciences. #
In 2012, Council approved a new student housing complex on West Main—now some council members are questioning whether what they were shown matches what was built. #
The Architectural Review Board has approved a bike-themed mural on West Market, below the McGuffey Art Center, although at least one member expressed concerns that it might look like the bicyclists were riding away from Charlottesville’s downtown. #
City Police Chief Tim Longo is meeting with city leaders to work on protocols regarding the use of military surplus police weapons in Charlottesville. #
A 100-year-old Colonnades resident received military honors for her service in the WWII Women’s Army Corps #
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I’ve seen a few where I live, but only a handful. And for the most part they stay where I find them, and stay in the exact spot for weeks on end. Occasionally they’ll fly and one of my cats will decide it’s a new toy. 15 percent of the time that will mean- “problem solved.”
Otherwise there’s nothing here for them to eat, unless they like bat poo (in the attic), lead paint (around the windows), or crumbling plaster (behind the fake 1970’s wood paneling- the plaster circa about 90 to 100 years ago).
Bad idea to censor, especially for petty reasons. Censoring the name of a commercial product someone says works on these bugs merely because he said the same thing somewhere else is a horrible idea.
No one – take that seriously – no one hates commercialism more than I do, but I hate it one giant step less than censorship.
If you think it’s commercial hype, say so. We can check it out. Don’t tell us what we can and can’t read. Without the name, we can’t check it out.
Today’s fight for individual freedom is against two enemies: old testament-style assertive family dictators who know what’s good for us, and socialist nannies who know what’s bad for us.
Neither is a good role model.
Looked it up. The internet has plenty of information on Spray Nine. It’s a big product, not something marketed in blog comments.
It’s sold not only by a company of that name, but also by Permatex, for more than half a century one of the most respected names in automotive maintenance and repair chemistry.
In Cville we must buy it online, as the stores that carry it (Home Depot, Lowe’s, Ace Hardware, TruValue, others) only carry the product in their northeast outlets. Amazon carries both brands of Spray Nine.
If anyone cares to look for it, the chemical formulation is on line in a gov public database.
Oh, I think you’ll be much, much happier if I continue to delete comment spam. :) This blog has thousands of such attempts daily, and I block 99.99% of them automatically. The remainder I delete manually, as I did that comment (which was back in October, incidentally). I could not filter out comment spam for a few days so that you’d get the idea, but I suspect you can just turn off spam filtering on your e-mail for that period, evaluate every single e-mail for whether it’s “commercial hype,” and see what you think of that approach. That way the rest of us won’t have to suffer through it. :)
BTW, Viagra and Cialis are also “big products,” but they’re marketed plenty via blog spam. :) Products like that bug spray are promoted via affiliate links. Some affiliate-aggregating company strikes a deal with a reseller, saying “for every person I send to you who buys a bottle, I get a buck.” And then the affiliate hires spammers, who post billions of comments (no exaggeration: billions with a “b”) to blogs promoting it, like the comment that appeared here. It’s an arms race, and I’m not about to back down.
Beg to differ, but spam was not blocked in that October message. The message ran but a name was censored out. The name was the one thing that made the message matter. Without the name the message had no point.
That’s not filtering spam or any relation to it. Spam filtering eliminates entire messages. That was simply brand name censorship like we see Mondays on the Cville Rant Page.
That, too, should be no one’s role model.
And to boot, the affiliate link scenario mentioned above was imaginary in that case, based on the poster’s participation in, so far as we can tell, one thread beside this one. Billions of straw men are still straw men.
We all blow it occasionally. No big deal. Your removal of spam is mightily appreciated.
I awoke to a stinkbug on my toothbrush this morning.
He went down the drain under a sink full of water twice, crawling back out both times.
I couldn’t bring myself to squish something with that kind of survival ability.
So I put him on my wife’s toothbrush for when she wakes up.
That’s right—I rendered said spam useless. Isn’t that better that deleting it, given your perspective? Would you have preferred that I deleted it?
Oh, no, it wasn’t imaginary—the link went through an affiliate site, as I recall.
I have flushed them down the toilet and they sometimes manage to come back up into the bowl–but not always. Now that I know they like to lay eggs on fig leaves, I’ll be checking my fig trees.
They seem like harmless, bumbling bugs and I don’t want to drench my house with pesticides, but I do prefer to be able to open my curtains without stink bugs flying out of the folds.
I still have those damn mimic ladybugs!
They’ll all leave, en masse, within the next few weeks. And return on the last warm day in late October.
When the ladybugs disappear then you may see their more productive counterparts, their juvenile form, outside munching on aphids.
A friend of mine had a terrible aphid problem, so she released a couple adults she found around the house in the greenhouse. Now there are no aphids and a whole lot of aphid munchers in there.
The only reason they don’t use our native ladybugs for crops more is that they just fly off. The asian ones are more likely to colonize and thus stay where you put them. Always a bad idea though to just introduce random insects into the environment from elsewhere.
Speaking of introductions, there was recenty a really misguided plan to introduce non-native oysters into the Chesapeake Bay as a “restoration plan”. Next thing you know we’d have alien oysters crawling around in our house too! (Well, maybe not, but still not a good idea…)