(Does whatever a spider cup does?)

This seems like a somewhat common problem: woman sees spider in her house and, since she cannot bring herself to kill something "icky", traps it under a cup. That leaves her with a small dilemma: the spider is still alive, and she either has to let it starve or asphyxiate, or she can cross her fingers, pull up the cup really quickly and whap the space under it with a magazine. Hopefully, she kills it before it scampers away.

So here's a simple specification for a spider-killing cup:

1. Cylindrical in shape; the diameter doesn't taper from one end to the other, and an opening on one end.

2. Has a plunger that, when pushed, will push a circle down to close the open end. (This kills the spider.)

3. The end of this plunger has several layers of a tissue-like substance covering its surface.

4. When you retract the plunger after the kill, the lowest layer of tissue crumbles itself up into a ball and falls out.

Something for us to work on while we wait for Mother Nature to engineer an ecosystem that doesn't depend on creatures with eight legs. [shudder]