The Corpuscle

As you probably know, the City That Never Sleeps is lying awake at night worrying about bed bugs.

So I was listening to a Leonard Lopate show "Please Explain" segment the other day on the subject of bed bugs (.mp3 here) and I accidentally learned something other people probably already know.

You can get bed bugs from the Laundromat.

That is, if you wash your laundry in a machine that someone with bed bugs has used, you could end up with the little bastards coming home with you. Apparently, a preventative is to wash your clothes in hot water (as opposed to warm or cold, of course).

Obviously you can't wash all your laundry items with hot water -- some pieces won't survive. My small building has one washing machine and one dryer and so what I've decided to do is always start my laundry day with a load I can wash in hot water -- in the hope the machine will be more or less sterilized -- and then do the warms and colds afterward.

And then if I ever have to resort to the Laundromat (it sometimes happens), I will do the same thing, sticking with one "sterilized" machine (or more, if I have more than one "hot" load) rather than loading up a bunch of different machines as I usually do at the Laundromat.

NEWT: My mommy always told me there were no such things as monsters. But there are.

RIPLEY: (brief pause) Yes. There are.

Yes. There are.

Okay, so they aren't the worst monsters in the world. They aren't in the same league as Dick Cheney, for example. Still.