I liked the book! I know I must have seen the movie at some point but have no particular recollection of it.
Did Angela Lansbury move to playing middleaged astonishingly young? How old was she when she was the mother of an adult man in The Manchurian Candidate?
Her son was played by a man three years younger.
Angela Lansbury often chafed against the tendency to cast her as lovable matronly types starting at age 25. But I've seen A Life At Stake, where she plays a femme fatale, and it just doesn't work at all.
You guys, I watched so much Murder, She Wrote when I was a kid. It was my parents' favorite show.
I always wanted to live in a quaint town with a murder every single week.
I think the moral of the show was, "If you value your life, stay the hell away from that novel-writer lady."
"A 2012 study of episodes found that Cabot Cove had a murder rate of 1,490 per million, more than 50 percent higher than Honduras, which has the real world's highest murder rate."
Although, to be fair, the murderiest part of Honduras, San Pedro Sula, has a murder rate of 1,870 per million. So Cabot Cove isn't all that.
Also, Moby should move to San Pedro Sula. I hear its quaint.
All facts ripped off the wiki, of course.
Angela Lansbury should have done a Gaslight remake as Jessica Fletcher.
AAAAUGH LICE. Talk me down.
Apparently central Texas lice has become resistant to the OTC stuff so the doc (pokey had a "rash") prescribed us shampoo, and also some for Hawaii. Insurance doesn't cover it. $200. Plus, what, burn the house down?
13: Noooooo! I have no talking you down. Burn it all. Probably start with your insurer. Then, maybe the rest of the state.
If you deprive them of fresh blood for a pretty short period of time they die an entirely deserved death. Couple of days at most. Book a hotel room as close as possible to one of those nit picking salons and swap the open veins to the louse for one benefitting the bank account of the nit pickers.
Good luck!
THIS ISNT HELPING MY MORGELLONS.
Spiders. You need lots of tiny spiders.
13: desert essence used to make a tea tree blue cypress shampoo that was extra great. Can't hurt to use something like that to try to keep them at bay.
They don't have those nit-picking salons everywhere, alas.
hey bostonienne, did you do the deed? Wasn't the date recentish? If so, congrats and hope it went off without any non-charming hitches!
Sorry if I got the timing wrong, file these felicitations away for future savoring and hope last preparations are going well.
Rub all the furniture down with turps and iron every piece of cloth, including the towels, is how nineteenth century city households seem to do. I'm sure you have the time, and it won't be any trouble in June weather.
When I had lice as a kid my grandmother combed them out successfully. It took several hours with a magnifying lamp and a special nit comb. IIRC that worked far better than any of the shampoos my parents tried.
Yeah, combing the heck out of my sons hair seems to have done the trick. Actually, everybody in the house has to do it a whole bunch.
Lice are more memorable to me than B&B, which I know I watched but cannot remember. Don't worry about your furniture and rugs and such; they can't survive there. Clean the sheets and do the interminable comb-out and wash the fuck out of the kids' hair and prepare to do it again.
Also everyone who can shave their head do so stat.
26: Well, you probably get someone else to shave it. It's hard to do the back without leaving an weird rat-tail.
I'm talking you down. This is going to be fine. Wash the bedding, get a nit comb, use the shampoo, (wow that's expensive), it'll be okay. We sat my stepchildren on the kitchen counter under bright lights, I stood on a chair and combed. That was years ago. With my little son, I've prepared by investing in an electronic nit comb. This will act as a guarantee that he never gets lice. But I kind of want to use it to see if it works.
Nit picking salons, I heard it here first!
Good nit comb, lots of conditioner, it's not so bad. Comb a lock of hair, bobby pin it up, comb the next, repeat until done. A jar of rubbing alcohol to rinse the comb off, and a week or so of repeating nightly, it'll all be over.
We actually had a bout just a year and a half ago, and it wasn't difficult at all. (Admittedly, I cut about a foot of my own hair off, because you can't pick your own nits easily, and Buck was too impatient, but I got the kids clean no problem.)
Ok. The nit-combing is a task whose parameters I understand. I am happy to thoroughly comb the fuck out of them. I don't yet know if I have it.
Conditioner, tons of it, leave it under a shower cap all night if you can, then comb comb comb. Then only let your kids play with black children because apparently lice have legs that can either handle straight hair or curly hair but not both so you need them to socialize where they won't be contaminated again. You will all so totally survive!
Oh, huh. I knew there was a hair texture thing, but I thought tightly curled hair was either immune or nearly to lice. It's just different populations?
I've never had lice -- I think we all had to wash with Kwell for a coupla days once when there was a lice alert from school, but there was never a nit on me -- but I have had fleas, which sucks about a million times worse. It's not so much that *I* had fleas, I guess, as there apparently aren't really human fleas as such anymore, but I was in situations where dog fleas had free reign to bite me too, and apparently my blood has always tasted particularly succulent to biting insects.
One of the bits that rung truest to me in S&M Stirling's Nantucket trilogy was a scene where one of the Bronze Age warriors was musing as she went to sleep that, before the modern people were thrown back in time, she'd never even contemplated that it was possible to be free of lice and fleas.
$200 for shampoo. Your doctor is taking the piss.
Wash hair, put on conditioner, comb with nit comb. A metal one with barely any spaces between the teeth is best, not one of those plastic ones. We have Nitty Gritty combs here, don't know if they're in the States, but I bought a similar, different brand, comb in France, so there must be something. You'll probably want to comb nightly for at least a couple of nights until you feel like you've got rid of the adults. Then comb at least every three days, so any newly-hatched ones don't have time to grow up and breed.
And enjoy squashing them. Little fuckers.
Talking of little fuckers, I'm awake (5.30) because two cunts have just gone up our road, which only has cars parked on one side of it, kicking in the wing mirrors of every car. Wtf is wrong with people.
Yep, what Asilon said. Combing every three days or so for a couple of weeks gets rid of them very effectively. There's always a reservoir in schools, though, so when my kids were younger I got into the habit of combing them every couple of weeks just to check. They did pick up nits again several times, but that way I caught them early.
My next-door neighbour refused to believe that her children could possibly catch them. "Other families had them several times in kindergarten, but somehow we've always been immune. Perhaps your boys' Western hair makes them more susceptible?", That was until I lent her a nit comb. Ha, did she freak out when she discovered both her children were completely infested. They must have been carrying them (and constantly re-infecting all their friends) for years.
Everybody who has small children at school gets them occasionally. All good advice above.
If you need a morale booster, remember that in the original, not-bowdlerised-for-kids version of the Grimm brothers' folk tale collection, delousing each other was a common form of foreplay.
When a couple of kids in a school get lice here, they bring in a nurse or something to screen the whole school. It happens about once a year for us. That has so far stopped it before our household has needed to buy a little comb.
OT: This story is really interesting. Either that or I need something to avoid work and you all are being quiet. I knew the broad outline from when it happened, but the details were new to me.
My next-door neighbour refused to believe that her children could possibly catch them. "Other families had them several times in kindergarten, but somehow we've always been immune. Perhaps your boys' Western hair makes them more susceptible?", That was until I lent her a nit comb. Ha, did she freak out when she discovered both her children were completely infested. They must have been carrying them (and constantly re-infecting all their friends) for years.
Ho ho ho, sweet satisfaction was yours! That's great. (I mean, I guess the re-infecting for years is not great, but the narrative trajectory: very satisfying.)
I too love that story Ume. Ah justice! Our one infestation was fairly apocalyptic as both child and I have absurd quantities of hair and it was in the era when bedtime story naturally ended with a sharing the pillow cuddle chat. The horrid little buggers must have thought they'd discovered paradise when they traipsed over to me. The professional nit pickers to whom I am eternally grateful were skeptical that home combing would have done the trick on me, although it was somewhat effective with the kid's smaller head and shorter hair. I really think without someone who really knew what they were doing and willing to spend hours going through my hair I would have had to shave my head. Also they were really nice about me spending much of the time they were combing on interminable conference calls.
I'm on a conference call right now.
Yes, it was deeply gratifying. I'll always remember the tremble in her lower lip as she stood on my front doorstep, holding out the comb, on which at least 20 or so lice of all sizes were crawling, for my inspection, and whispered in a shaky voice "Is this ....?"
I've never heard of professional nit-picking before (outside copy-editing circles).
Still on a call, but a different one.
I'll always remember the tremble in her lower lip as she stood on my front doorstep, holding out the comb, on which at least 20 or so lice of all sizes were crawling, for my inspection, and whispered in a shaky voice "Is this ....?"
xoxoxoxox
That sounds like a beautiful treasured memory.
Got a call from daycare, "You're on the pick-up list for D, in Pokey's class, and we haven't been able to get in touch with anyone above you on the list...she has lice. TONS of it!"
[Sigh] So I went and picked up D, and used some OTC stuff on her, and then a babysitter came and got her.
I was explaining to the babysitter where she was in the treatment process and so on, and I had to say, "I know this is a naive question, but do you have conditioner around? D will need lots of conditioner if you are combing her hair out." Babysitter (who is black) told me that she doesn't use conditioner on her hair, so I gave her some, and was telling her more about how to keep her apartment lice-free, and she told me the "black people can't get lice" bit. I refrained from telling her about the different kinds of lice legs and so on, because that would have been anti-social of me.
I actually looked up pictures of scabies on the internet, because my skin has been so itchy since this all started. It's actually been itchy all spring, hence the Morgellon's bit. This has exacerbated it, though.
Sympathy for the itchiness, Heebie. This thread has been making my scalp crawl so much I'm feeling tempted to look out the nit comb, which hasn't been used for years, and comb myself through just to check. Can't do that now as I'm away from home, which is making it worse.