Cockroaches
When I lived in Tucson, Arizona, I had trouble with cockroaches. Sometimes, when I was trying to sleep on hot summer nights, the cockroaches would get on the bed and crawl across my bare belly. I would quickly awaken, grab the bugs, throw them hard, and in the dark I could hear the chitinous crack as they went splat against the wall. I quickly grew tired of this.

One day, I discovered cockroaches drown easily in soapy water. So, I created little meat shishkebabs, with unwound wire clothes hangers as spears and spam as bait. At sunset, I suspended the meat over little pots of soapy water all through the apartment and waited for revenge.

I guess the cockroaches were too lazy to try and reach the spam, or maybe too smart, because they never fell into these diabolical traps. Instead, I now had an apartment full of booby traps. I accidentally kicked over the pots of soapy water in the darkness and created a slippery tripping hazard for myself.

In time, I moved to Phoenix, Arizona, where it was even hotter in the summer, and where even more cockroaches would wait in the (relatively cooler) lawn outside until sunset, when they would charge the house en masse. I created a perimeter of inch-deep berms of powdered boric acid outside the house to impede their progress, but the cockroaches formed battering-ram brigades to penetrate the berms and create open pathways to the house.

So, I live in California now.
(Perv With A Dog had his eyes pecked out by scrub jays on, Fri 4 Dec 2009, 23:00, 4 replies)

Berms?
/Clouseau
( Michael Ellis contributes nothing, Fri 4 Dec 2009, 23:07, closed)

Berms
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berm
( Vambo, Fri 4 Dec 2009, 23:12, closed)

The best cockroach trap is
A glass jar with cat biscuits or beer in the bottom and Vaseline liberally smeared around the inside of the rim. You leave it out overnight, it fills up with roaches and in the morning you boil the kettle and drown the fuckers.
(misskitty reeks of sex and turpentine; laudanum afternoons, Sat 5 Dec 2009, 0:08, closed)

Beer As A Marinade
That's brilliant - hops can mask the repulsive bug odor! Damn - I feel like moving back to Arizona to give it another try!
(Perv With A Dog had his eyes pecked out by scrub jays on, Sat 5 Dec 2009, 0:34, closed)