True Confessions

This was weird.

I was called in to a public school down in Chinatown.  They had been battling crazy rats since the beginning of time.  I actually saw a rat poke its head through the ceiling in the boys bathroom, and the entire cafeteria reeked of rat feces.

The school had been doing their own rat control, with limited success.

As I came down into the basement locker room, I saw several snap traps set for rats, and I saw this one, which just made me laugh and gasp at the same time.

Obviously, the pencil makes me think they were trying to catch students instead of rats.

But notice also that the snap trap has been baited with open rodenticide, the bright blue substance.  Even though it looks like blue raspberry bubble gum, it's actually rat poison.

So yes, I definitely think the goal was to catch kids more than rats.

I wonder how successful they were before I showed up.

Ew York City will be back tomorrow.

I Can't Wait To Fall Down the Neck of Your Shirt and Crawl Around On Your Back

Here is the ceiling of the office in a restaurant.  Looks pretty normal to me.

A little closer and I'm starting to see something.  Something has caught my eye.

Yep, there you are my darling.  This spindly spiky leg is connected to the big juicy body of a large American Cockroach, aka Water Bug.

The office workers have no clue that this huge bug and its friends are crawling over head all day long, at any moment capable of dropping onto a keyboard or down the back of your blouse.

They're not paying me to say this, but right now Ann Taylor is having a 25% off sale on all women's blouses.  I like the leopard print one.  Very chic.

Ew York City will be under your skin again tomorrow.

Mucky Monday

It's a nice mucky Monday here in NYC, and it's a nice mucky Monday in a lot of restaurants.

We dug this out from underneath an ice machine in a restaurant kitchen downtown.  They had a lot of problems with fruit flies and houseflies, and this type of muck is exactly what they're looking for to breed in.

The only way to get rid of these flies is to get rid of these breeding sites, and that means getting down on your belly face down in the muck and digging it out piece by piece and slime by slime.

It's a war, soldier.  There will be casualties.  Understood?

Ew York City will be digging out again tomorrow.

Pupae Station

Continuing the tradition of Gnarly Fridays, here we have a close up of a rodent bait station and some fly pupae.

The black plastic is the rodent bait station, the bright blue stuff is the rodenticide, aka rat poison, and the little brown things are empty fly pupae, which were once larvae, aka maggots, but are now flies, aka flies.

This is a good reminder how that flies can and will breed anywhere they can, and that your anti-pest measures may be effective in one way and counter productive in another way.

You can treat your rodent bait stations with an insecticide to reduce this sort of thing from happening, but you want to be careful that it is not repelling the rodents from the bait.

The best thing to do is keep the bait stations maintained regularly.

Another thing to keep in mind is that these flies will feed on the rotting rodent corpses, so nature knows exactly what its doing.

All right, get out of here.  Have a good weekend.

Bombin' Jerry

Sometimes you just have a gift entry point handed to you.

This was right next to a kitchen stove in a restaurant basement.

Notice all the dark markings around the hole.  Remember, rodents leave "sebum" wherever they go, so look for that just as much as you look for droppings.

We baited it up, sealed it up, and that was that.

Not bad.

Sometimes I wish I could crawl down a hole like that and get away from everybody who's trying to stomp on me.

Ew York City might be back tomorrow.

This Floor Tile Grout Is Nuts

I kept looking at this restaurant kitchen's floor, thinking to myself, "That's a weird design for a floor."

As you can tell, this is not by design, at least not by the design of the original builders of the kitchen.  This is a long term neglect of sanitation, wherein almonds find their way into the missing grout grooves between the tiles.

The nuts then mix with moisture and other decaying organic matter, producing a rancid smell and perfect conditions for fly breeding.  The larvae (aka maggots) have plenty of food, and the kitchen will soon be full of flies.  The flies will fly around the kitchen, landing on the prepared food, leaving excrement and vomit everywhere they go.

It's kind of pretty though.  Its like that art you buy when you're on vacation.

Ew York City will be back tomorrow.

Return of the Real

"Let me outta here!"

Sorry every one.  Due to a personal problem that I've been dealing with over the past week, I have been tardy on updating Ew York City.

But hopefully, we are back in action.

The end.

See you tomorrow hopefully.