On Sun, 7 Aug 2022 at 00:02, Fred Cisin via cctalk <cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote: > > People who have never actually tried doing it constantly claim that you > can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.
:-D I see what you did there. Depends on the flies, of course. I discovered it by accident. I'm a Brit (and Irish now). We're not all that big on pickled cucumbers -- gherkins -- in the UK. A lot of people pick the slices out of their burgers and throw them out. (We pickle lots of other vegetables, especially onions and hard-boiled eggs, so "pickles" in British English is a generic term for anything pickled, and we very rarely use it because it's too vague. "The pickles aisle in the supermarket" maybe.) I love gherkins. Now I live in central Europe where they're big on gherkins and they eat loads of the things. So I do, with pleasure. You can buy *really big* jars of gherkins in ordinary supermarkets. I am hazy on US liquid units, as I never really knew the Imperial ones and yours are different anyway. So US ones make no sense to me, but maybe a gallon jar, or even 2 gallon jars? 8 pints is a UK gallon but I think 4 pints is a US gallon? Yeah well. I bought a ?2? ?gallon? jar of gherkins. It was too big to fit into the refrigerator. But they're pickled, right, so preserved, so I left them out. Mistake. You *do* attract fruit flies with vinegar. *Lots* of them. And their maggots can live in vinegar if they are at the surface and can breathe air. What happened to my gherkins was very _very_ nasty and I never bought such a big jar again. I might be able to keep a goldfish in the jar, though... Britain's a bit cold for fruit flies. Until I moved here they were _Drosophila melanogaster_ to me, a lab animal. The maggots' salivary glands have some of the biggest chromosomes in nature: you can see and count genes down an optical microscope. And a student can be taught how to anaesthetise and sort the sexes of fruit flies using an easy-to-use binocular microscope. https://teachersinstitute.yale.edu/curriculum/units/1996/5/96.05.01.x.html -- Liam Proven ~ Profile: https://about.me/liamproven Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk ~ gMail/gTalk/FB: lpro...@gmail.com Twitter/LinkedIn: lproven ~ Skype: liamproven UK: (+44) 7939-087884 ~ Czech [+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal]: (+420) 702-829-053
