Letters

Something of a full mailbag this time out so please excuse us for having to edit your responses. Writing letters to Götter has never really caught on, has it? So I suppose there’s not much point in us being gurny bastards about it.

Cuyler Brooks <nedbrooks@sprynet.com>

Much thanks for the zine, though I must admit I could understand little of it... Perhaps it’s because I am almost 60... I have put you on the list to receive It Goes On The Shelf so you can be equally puzzled.


From: Darroll/Ro Pardoe <pardos@globalnet.co.uk>

Cockroaches. I suppose we all have at least one cockroach story. Years ago, I used to work in a lab in an old building on the Ohio State University campus. I had a little lab all to myself, and it had water pipes around three walls at about 3ft above the ground. The building was infested with cockroaches of the largest size, so when I arrived in the morning I would open the door quietly, and look around the room to spot the tell-tale feelers of a cockroach sticking out above the pipes (behind which it would be hiding). I then seized my trusty squeegee bottle of chloroform which I always left handy to the door, and squirted a stream of chloroform in the appropriate direction. After a few seconds a dead cockroach would drop down from behind the pipe. For some reason I always found that most satisfying.
Chloroform was good for wasps, too: a direct hit, or even a near miss, just dropped them straight out of the air.

Visiting the toilets in the lab building late at night was an interesting experience, too. It was dark, and quiet, and so when you turned on the light to go in the men’s, the floor would for a brief few moments be a heaving mass as the hundreds of roaches gathered there made for the nearest shadow. I always tried to hold on until I got home (only five minutes’ walk away, fortunately...)


(Once again we suspect there were also responses from Pamela Boal and Steve Brewster but they disappeared after yet another attempt to install Windows 95. Sorry Pamela and Steve.) .

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