IN THE DEBATE about old media versus new, a subject you rarely hear discussed is the vast superiority of the former when it comes to swatting flies. It’s not something they were designed for, admittedly. Even so, as well as informing readers and safeguarding democracy, newspapers – properly-deployed – are unparalleled weapons against that scourge of humanity: the housefly.
No doubt Steve Jobs will in time introduce the iSwat: a slim, flexible tablet-computer enabling users to upload news from a variety of sources while also, when the need arises, flattening insects against the nearest wall.
But in the meantime, the humble print-edition newspaper remains untouched as combined source-of-information and killing-machine. The human hand aside – not something most people want to use for this purpose – evolution has provided us with no better way to dispatch flies, wasps, bluebottles, and all the other six-legged enemies of our species.
God knows, there have been a few wrong turns along the way. Who of a certain age can forget those poisonous aerosols we used to spray around kitchens in the name of insecticidal progress? Or, by complete contrast, that medieval “fly-paper”, on which insects were condemned not only to a slow, sticky demise, but also to having their bodies displayed posthumously as a warning to others.
Yes, there are actual fly-swatters you could – and apparently can still – buy for the purpose. But I don’t know anyone who has one. For me, such things belong to 1950s America, when there was a household gadget for every need. And even if they work, buying one would make one feel like a cheat. Somehow, the hunter-gatherer instinct prefers us to kill insects with materials we find around us naturally, and that require some skill to use: which is where the newspaper comes in.
Not just any newspaper, mind. It may be only a question of what one is used to, but I find that the standard broadsheet (folded three times into a cricket-bat shape) works much better than the tabloid format. Which said, however, for the right combination of weight, strength, and flexibility, you usually have to remove all the supplements first.
This paper’s weekend edition, for example, while excellent value, makes a very cumbersome weapon. Even with the Magazine, Weekend Review, and Sports bit removed, the basic package may still be too bulky for the swatting speed you need to catch a fully-fit housefly unawares. Whereas the midweek newspaper – like yesterday’s 26-page main edition – is probably optimum.
With the firm, mid-page part clutched between thumb and index finger, and the page-ends facing away, such a newspaper promises swift and certain death to any insect that crosses its flight path. At time of writing, I have already struck twice with Wednesday’s edition: bluebottles in both cases, their smudges now decorating the bottom-right-corner ad (for An Post’s National Solidarity Bond, with its promised return of “50 per cent gross”).
I introduce the word "gross" here deliberately lest squeamish readers question my insect-directed violence. Allow me to cite just one justification. Yes it was only a film. But the unforgettable scene from the 1986 remake of The Fly, in which a metamorphosing Jeff Goldblum vomits digestive enzymes on his food to liquify it before eating is, I gather, based on the thing real flies do in your kitchen. Ugh! And don't even get me started on bluebottles. I have no objection to these creatures outdoors. In fact, they may even sometimes be of service to humanity there. Without getting into the ghoulish detail of forensic entomology (readers who want to find out more should check out Patricia Cornwell's crime novel Blow Fly), for example, their ability to smell carrion from several miles away, and the predictability of their egg-laying once they reach it, can be a big help to pathologists establishing time-of-death, and hence to cracking murder cases. But it's partly because of their very talents in that area that, as soon as they enter my living quarters, bluebottles forfeit their right to life.
The presence of insects indoors is a tax on summer. Especially in a house with children, conditions for invading flies and bluebottles are ideal during the warmer months: with permanently open doors, and lots of discarded food – often sugary – lying around.
I can ignore one or two such invaders for short periods. If time allows, I may even sometimes engage in non-violent exclusion techniques, such as wafting them towards an open window. But, every so often the room I'm in starts to resemble an insect version of the helicopter attack scene in Apocalypse Now. This is when I reach for my folded-up newspaper and declare war.
The fitness-for-purpose here of print media is only helped, incidentally, by the way edition-size varies throughout the year. I don’t think I’m giving away any trade secrets when I say that, in July and August, print newspapers tend to be more compact than in winter. Supplements fall away, and even the number of pages in the main paper is reduced.
Of course, there are socioeconomic reasons for this, including the cyclicality of advertising and the shortage of news during the “silly season”. But I mentioned evolution before. And in this sense, it is surely no coincidence that the murderously aerodynamic properties of a newspaper peak in high summer, when the conflict between humanity and the flying insect is also at its fiercest.