Spider Armageddeon

So the end of the world is obviously at hand.

No, it's not because of the frightening conflicts in the Middle East, nor some obscure Nostradamus prophecy coming true. It's not a passage in the book of Revelation that's eerily mirroring reality, or a psychic reading I had lately foretelling our impending doom.

It's because the spiders have invaded.

See, the AP just released a story under the headline "Spider Invasion Creeps Out Austrians." They're nasty, they're flailing, and they've come to claim the planet as their own. I knew it. It was only a matter of time.

Apparently, there's been an epidemic of people in Austria being bit by the creepy, ugly, twitchy yellow sack spider, whose bite is poisonous and painful, though "not deadly." Oh, no. Victims merely have headaches and nausea that can last for eight, count them, eight weeks, plus they get to live with the cheery knowledge that THEIR COUNTRY IS BEING INVADED BY YELLOW SACK SPIDERS.

The AP claims that the Austrian press is fueling mass spider hysteria, slapping so many stories of a country-wide arachnid infestation on the front pages of city newspapers that 182 people erroneously went to the hospital with psychosomatic yellow sack spider bites. (Thereby making the eight people who were actually bitten by yellow sacks wait in interminable lines to be seen by undoubtedly bored doctors.)

The yellow sack is known in German as "Dornfingerspinne," which is way too pleasant for such a nasty creature. How about "dornnastyasscreepymeister" or "dornvomitousvonpoisonousspiel?" Dorningerspinne sounds like something to name a nice ladybug variation, or a pretty butterfly, people. You all in the EU are way too nice, even to spiders.

Christian Komposch of an animal ecology institute in the southern Austrian city of Graz told the Austrian public "the most important thing is: Don't panic!"

Yeah, whatever, Christian. I don't need a PhD to know that every person on this planet is deathly afraid of either snakes, spiders, or rats. Pick your poison, and I'll come to your house and dangle it in front of your smug, know-it-all eyes. We'll see how non-panicky you are when I show up with a Burmese python and a couple of sewer rats from Brooklyn, and then I'll throw in a few newspaper stories about how one or the other is infesting the country for good measure.

Men.

Because this is how my brain works when it comes to spiders (AAAAHHH! AAAHHH!), I was thinking it's only a matter of time before the yellow sack starts migrating into other countries in the EU, drifts down to Africa and the Middle East, and eventually hitches a ride to the US on a boat full of cocoa beans, creeping into a port city and then infesting our unsuspecting country in a miniature yet no less creepy arachnid version of War of the Worlds. Further following this train of logic, I was also thinking it might be time to start investing in a high-quality moon colony I could rocket launch myself to when that dark day dawns. But then I got to this sentence in the AP article: "Collectors are willing to fork over more than $255 in U.S. dollars for a single [yellow sack] specimen, according to Kurier, an Austrian daily."

People out there collect spider specimens? Maybe we should rocket launch THEM, because that is just sick and wrong.

Although I wonder how much they'd give me for a yellow sack squashed under an ottoman?