Pests

As the Philadelphia cop tells the story, he was off duty one Saturday night a few years back when he and his wife decided to see Windwalker at a Center City movie theater. Midway through the family film, three guys in the row behind them began talking. Loudly. After a while, the cop's wife said, "Do you mind, please, we're trying to watch the movie. " They only got louder, so her husband turned around. "We're trying to watch the movie," he said. "Could you keep it down?" "We'll be waiting for you outside," said one of the men. When the cop and his wife left the theater, they were met by the trio, standing at the entrance to an alley.

HERE'S HOW to keep fleas, ticks and other pests from bugging your dogs and cats this summer. Animals thrive during the warm, active and social summer months. Unfortunately, so do the pests that can affect their health. The good news? There are many preventive options, which means you can customize a safe and effective plan for your animal. "Pest control can involve a combination of approaches based on the pet, lifestyle of the pet and owner, and where the pet lives," said Melinda Miller, hospital director of Smith Ridge Veterinary Center in South Salem, N.Y. She advised owners to use natural solutions whenever possible.

Mite is never right, when we're talking about the tiny, spider-like creatures that linger in carpeting, bedding and drapery. Afflicting many people with respiratory and allergy problems, mites thrive when the temperature is between 77 and 82 degrees Farenheit, and when the humidity is between 70 and 80 percent. In apartment buildings, curiously, the creatures are most prevalent on upper floors. Mites are so minute that when sucked into conventional vacuum cleaners they fly straight out the exhaust.

The garden is beautiful now - and you are proud of your work and ready to show it off. But a close inspection reveals unsettling news. Pale green creatures are massing on the rosebuds. There are holes in the cabbages, tears in the hostas, streaks on the iris, and a group of seedlings flat-out dead - severed at the soil level by an invisible enemy. Could it be that this peaceful oasis is, in reality, a battleground? You want to declare war. But against what? How to wage it?

Movie pests? How about the movie theaters themselves? Those Eric and Budco closets masquerading as theaters, the crummy prints, the abysmal sound, the comatose ushers, the filthy floors. No wonder there's noise. The owners don't care. Why should the patrons? Yes, I have tried complaining. The manager began yelling and accusing me of trying to rip him off. If just a few more patrons raised a ruckus, perhaps the management would begin taking steps to handle all the problems movie theaters face, including movie pests and poor-quality screenings.

Just when you thought it was safe to put away the bug spray and open the windows, a new home invader has appeared to infest your autumn nest: the overwintering pest. The culprits: According to the experts at Terminix, the two most common perpetrators are the stinkbug and the box-elder bug. More than 200 species of stinkbugs live in the United States and Canada. But the brown marmorated stinkbug (Halyomorpha halys), a nonnative species, was first discovered in this region in Allentown in the late 1990s.

It's an inch long and beady-eyed, glossy black with white rings on its twiddling feelers. It is hungry. And as it bores a half-inch-round hole deep into a maple, it leaves bleeding sap and a pile of sawdust on the ground. This is a killer named the Asian longhorned beetle. And it is drilling into trees in a Chicago neighborhood, just two years after a similar onslaught in New York. The voracious beetle has not begun attacking Philadelphia's parks and street trees, or trees anywhere in Pennsylvania, but it could be on the way. "It's very easy for these things to hitchhike around the country," said Hal Fingerman, director of a port inspection detail for the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Philadelphia.

The United States, its borders growing more porous by the day, is under constant assault and, to hear the front-line fighters tell it, the battle against the minuscule attackers is slowly being lost. "The rate of introduction of these organisms is increasing, and the efforts that we use to exclude them are decreasing," is how Vic Mastro, the director of the United States Department of Agriculture's Plant Protection Center, puts it. "These organisms" are, for the most part, bugs.

Being the most annoying guy on the ice isn't the easiest thing in the world. As Kris King puts it, "You don't really like to be known as a pain in the butt. " The sentiment is warranted, though, because playing hockey against the New York Rangers left winger is like playing catch with a barbed-wire baseball - even throwing it away, you still cut your hand. King aggravates, he agitates. He probes and probes until he finds the nerve that sets off your fury. "That shot wasn't cheap enough?"

THE PHILADELPHIA Parking Authority really has its priorities all wrong. Instead of being concerned right away with those being caught running red lights, they warn them. But those who don't want their registration stickers cut off their license plates don't get a warning, they get a $100 fine. Safety should be the authority's main concern - instead they want to set up "special units" to ticket people who keep their registration stickers in their cars. Eugene Clarke, Philadelphia Katrina & New Orleans The mayor of New Orleans was well aware that the levees would not hold for such a strong hurricane.

Martin Overline doesn't like to brag, so he leaves it to others to say what he will not: He ranks among the best mouse men on the East Coast. He doesn't breed mice or collect them for study. He kills them. Sends them on their furry, four-footed journey to that giant mousetrap in the sky. And metes out similar fates to other creeping, crawling pests. In Philadelphia, Overline is an exterminator extraordinaire, the go-to, get-rid-of-'em guy for some of the region's major universities, corporations, and government agencies.

The reviled brown marmorated stinkbug has made its nasty presence known throughout the Mid-Atlantic, eating fruit and vegetable crops and invading homes. But there's one good thing about the pest. It has created jobs. Farmers have hired more workers to monitor and spray for the pest, exterminators are seeing increased demand for service, insecticide-makers are selling more product, and insect-trap-makers are doing gangbuster business. In Spokane, Wash., business at insect-trap-maker Sterling International is booming.

HERE'S HOW to keep fleas, ticks and other pests from bugging your dogs and cats this summer. Animals thrive during the warm, active and social summer months. Unfortunately, so do the pests that can affect their health. The good news? There are many preventive options, which means you can customize a safe and effective plan for your animal. "Pest control can involve a combination of approaches based on the pet, lifestyle of the pet and owner, and where the pet lives," said Melinda Miller, hospital director of Smith Ridge Veterinary Center in South Salem, N.Y. She advised owners to use natural solutions whenever possible.

SWAINTON, N.J. - When Melissa Roy took over as the third-generation operator of her family's motel, the V.I.P. in Wildwood Crest, she found a cartoon from the mid-1960s that her aunt had drawn for the inn's original brochure. It featured - of all things - a couple of bedbugs. "We had a good laugh over it. It had one bedbug saying to the other one, 'Hey, let's get out of here. This place is too clean for us,' " Roy said. "Maybe we'll use it on a new brochure. It seems like a timely idea now. " That's because at its last monthly meeting before the summer season, the Cape May County Chamber of Commerce last week wasn't talking about economic projections or the best place to buy mini-soap in bulk.

W HEN I'M King of the World . . . Special Edition.   Annoying people I am exiling by Royal Decree to faraway places with strange-sounding names: Joe Paterno. Two weeks in American Samoa for OctoPa. But this isn't an exile. Nor is Joe annoying. It's the only way I could get the guy to take a vacation. Joe and Sue go to their place in Avalon, N.J., a couple of weeks each summer. I guarantee Joe sits on the deck diagramming plays. Why Samoa? Joe would freak after a half-day in Aruba, St. Martin, Barbados, Maui.

LIKE IT OR NOT, a lot of trends that start in New York slowly find their way to Philly, from pricey mojitos to diners-as-gourmet-restaurants to industrial lofts. But did it have to be bedbugs, too? A new report by pest-extermination company Terminix aims to rip the covers off what some local cleaners, bug experts and residents say has been the city's dirty secret for the last year or two - that Philadelphia is quietly experiencing a major bedbug attack. In fact, the Terminix study - which the company based on call-center stats and from canvassing its 350 service centers coast-to-coast - comes out like the 2009 World Series, with New York on top and Philadelphia the runner-up, ahead of urban rivals such as Detroit (No. 3)

The American way of life is facing a new threat, one as profound as climate change or pandemic flu. Bedbugs. OK, that's a bit hysterical. But without DDT and the other now-banned pesticides that kept bedbugs in check for more than 50 years, the United States is as vulnerable as parts of the world where the insects remain a plague. From New York to Los Angeles, and everywhere in between, these apple-seed-size vampires are spoiling sleep, vacations, and the bottom line of just about every business except pest control.

The 90 or so landscapers toiling over the bent grass at Aronimink Golf Club for this week's AT&T National tournament aren't the only ones charged with keeping the course immaculate. Curled up in an office during most of the golfing hours and flitting about dozens of cedar-and-redwood nest boxes scattered around the course are, respectively, a border collie who runs Aronimink's Canada goose patrol, and flocks of bluebirds and swallows whose presence is courted for their insect-eating prowess.

Dan Carcillo is a lot of things. He is a pest, an agitator and - as Peter Laviolette has proved this season - a pretty decent hockey player. Most surprising of all, to some, is the fact that Carcillo is a good teammate. Carcillo, believe it or not, represents exactly what the Stanley Cup playoffs are all about. Before the Flyers' 3-0 win in Game 4 on Saturday in Montreal, Laviolette was forced to scratch Carcillo and third-liner Andreas Nodl to make room for Jeff Carter and Ian Laperriere.

Gardening is awfully good for the soul, but it can be hell on the body. The former is the stuff of February daydreams. The latter - all that pain from hauling and bending, raking and pruning - fades in winter. We're in delicious denial till spring. And then, filled with primordial anticipation, we head outside, only to inflict pain upon ourselves once again. "Sore muscles come with the territory, but when you get such a positive result, you tend to block that out of your mind," says Winnie Harris, program and volunteer coordinator for University City Green, which has planted thousands of trees and bulbs in West Philadelphia neighborhoods over the last dozen years.