Mark Andrews: It's gonna be a blue Christmas without Ronco
It can't be much fun being a fly. You spend you life being whacked with newspapers, eaten by fly traps, having aerosol cans pointed at you. And the highlight of your week is when you find a nice big pile of horse doings for you and your mates to sniff around.
Well, this week, for once, it looks like the insects are having the last laugh. Members of the South West France Fly Collective have been laughing their tiny socks off after hearing how a pensioner in Bordeaux managed to blow up his house while trying to swat one of their brothers.
It seems the 80-year-old, who lived in Dordogne, got a little irritated when one of the creatures started buzzing around as he settled down to eat his dinner. So, as you do, he took his electric fly-swatter to exterminate the pesky critter. Unfortunately for him, there was also a gas leak in the kitchen, and instead of dealing a bit of street justice to the tedious intruder, the device caused a spark which blew up his kitchen.
You have to say, though, that an electric fly swatter does sound like a rather over-engineered way of dealing with a rather low-tech problem. What is wrong with a rolled-up newspaper?
It's a bit like the heated ice scraper I bought a few years ago. In the Argos book it looked like a great idea. No more getting your hands cold on frosty mornings. Just plug it into your cigar lighter, and the ice just melts away.
