A few great moments in fly slaughter:
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• In 1958, Mao Zedong, founder of the People's Republic of China, began a five-year program of untested agricultural innovation called The Great Leap Forward. One of its public health initiatives, "the Four Pests," ordered everyone to kill flies, mosquitoes, rats and sparrows every day.
According to the National Institutes of Health's U.S. National Library of Medicine, "The campaigns were short-lived and unsuccessful" -- except with regard to sparrows, whose decline led to a proliferation of grain-eating and disease-spreading insects. Mao rescinded the death order on sparrows.
A fact-finding visit to the People's Republic in 1977 funded by the National Academy of Sciences (bit.ly/2glHP5T) observed that "house flies are controlled to a high degree, but in places one or two could be easily spotted."
• In July 2009, a fly buzzed President Barack Obama while he was being interviewed by CNBC's John Harwood. "Hey, get outta here," Obama said, before -- without uncrossing his legs -- he crushed it one-handed. "Now, where were we?" he said.
The blog of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, terming the episode an "executive insect execution," promised to send the White House a handy dandy bug catcher for future dealings with "exoskeletal beings."
• May 23, 2010, in the 10th episode of the third season of the AMC drama Breaking Bad, aspiring criminal kingpin Walter White stalks a fly through the sub-laundry superlab in which he is forced to cook meth for actual criminal kingpins. As White obsessively tracks the fly, he reflects on recent actions by his partner Jesse Pinkman that threaten the operation. Eventually, Jesse shows up and kills the fly himself. As the episode ends, White lies in bed in his sad bachelor condo, drifting off to sleep, when a buzzing wakes him. He watches a fly land on the blinking light of the smoke detector. Fade to black.
• In 2014, the British tabloid Daily Mail picked up a story from Chinese television about a retiree in Hangzhou City whose hobby was fly-swatting and who estimated she could dispatch 1,000 of the little guys per day. Photos depict her happily strolling city streets with her swatter.
"She told local television: 'I feel it is a great honour to help neighbours to wipe out disgusting flies ... and it helps me to keep fit.'"
-- Celia Storey
ActiveStyle on 11/28/2016