The Endorsement Series: this one goes to 11

Ants are just amazing. They are better than even Asians at being orderly and devoted to the collective well being. They can carry the human equivalent of a car in their mouths, and having been sampled by soldier ants and fire ants, I can vouch for their ability to destroy an opponent the equivalent of a skyscraper.

My grandpa used to spend entire summers stomping out ants on his sidewalk... maybe that's where my OCDish comes from... and when I visited, I was right there with him, studying these little machines just before grinding them to dust with my tennis shoe. I never felt good about killing the ants, but killing ants is the 12 Mile, Ind., equivalent of watching television.

A few months ago we started noticing the occasional rogue ant in the bathroom or the kitchen. And a couple weeks ago we noticed a river of ants climbing the post outside our back door. I don't particularly like the neighbors, so I was fine to let the ants infiltrate their lives.

Then those little fuckers took a wrong turn.

I opened the pantry on Friday and saw about 20 scouts making themselves at home under the sugar, so I immediately relocated pantry items to my very spacious 14" by 24" kitchen counter and started to wage war. I sprayed them with cleaner, bug spray and pretty much anything else I could get my hands on. But they kept sneaking in.

Luckily Leiah was staying the night and she mentioned that her landlord had used Ant Terro at her condo when it had bad ants a couple of years ago. I called Chevy Chase Hardware, scooted over there, and procured this weapon of mass destruction.

Ant Terro is boric acid. The ants flock to it like elephants to a watering hole, forming a cute little ant daisy around a droplet. Then they drink it, guzzle it, fill themselves up with it until their butts swell. Then, they disappear.

Google says they go back to their houses, throw up like drunk fraternity boys after a night of binge drinking, and explode from the accumulation of gas in their bodies. See, ants, unlike frat boys, can't fart.

After they puke, all their little ant friends are like, mmmm, and they eat the barf and then they meet the same fate as their friends. Within 24 hours, all the ants inside and outside of our house were gone. And I had my gigantic counter space back.

Ant Terro is the bomb.