On 8/7/22 3:39 AM, Liam Proven via cctalk wrote:
:-D I see what you did there.

Do you /really/?  ;-)

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 see / hear people use the word "pickled" as in the phrase "pickled eggs" or whatever else has been pickled. Usually just the word "pickles" is analogous to "pickled cucumber". But people pickle all sort of things.

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?

I see things sold by Imperial liquid units and metric liquid units. We can't forget fractions thereof either. Then there are people that sell things by weight.

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.

Interesting.

What happened to my gherkins was very _very_ nasty and I never bought such a big jar again.

And disgusting. Though there are probably people that are into that sort of thing. I obviously am not. They can have my share.

You /might/ have been okay, for at least a little while, if the container had been sealed and unrefrigerated.

I might be able to keep a goldfish in the jar, though...

Picked or not?  }:-)

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.

To each their own.  I'll be messing with old computers / networks / phones.



--
Grant. . . .
unix || die

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