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I remember sitting by this window in my senior year high school history class. For some reason, in the spring, flies always ended up flying around this window. I never saw them in any other class. At any rate, I would get sick of their buzzing me and figured out a fail safe way of killing them - rubber bands. I would use the wide kind and slip one end over my thumb and pull the other end back. Then cautiously I would get into a good aiming position. The fly would be doing exactly what the article described - watch my hand, determining what threat it caused and the proper predetermined angle of escape. Of course the thing didn't realize that it wasn't my hand that was the threat but the rubber band that it was serving as the delivery system for.

As you might guess, all it took was careful aim and timing and the simple release of the stretched end of the rubber band, and suddenly that fly was getting hit with enough force to stun it at least but many times knocking it into the glass window or some other hard surface, causing fatal injuries if not instant death.

I never tried a towel before, I like more control than I think that a towel would give me. A fly swatter can cause too much of a mess sometimes as well. I eventually figured out how to deliver a blow with a rolled up piece of paper so fast that the fly couldn't see it coming. I'd yank the blow back at just the right moment so that the energy of the blow was transfered to the fly but not the crushing follow through behind it that usually squashes it against whatever it's sitting on, causing a mess. I got pretty good at it and was able to leave a fly intact but yet very, very dead.