Our squirrels have become obese and I think it’s safe to say that the daily all-you-can-eat cicadas are at least partly to blame.
Yesterday we were watching a couple of huge squirrels heave their ponderous bulks about the yard and one stopped to groom himself, giving us a good view of his forelegs. They weren’t legs, they were arms. Beefy arms. Beefy squirrel arms. You can use a lot of words to describe squirrels, but beefy should never need to be one of them.
Some people in cicada-free zones have developed envy for regions infested with the bugs.
In other cicada news:
Here’s a very cool cicada molting picture that the Bunny brought to my attention. The site where the Bunny found that picture, irritatedvowel.com, has lots of fun info. Scroll down to the bottom of this page on 17 year cicadas for some great links (the page also has lots more great pictures).
…but I could be wrong.
I need to build the prototypes and then I’ll do the step-by-step with documentation thing, because I know you’re all just dying to build your own giant cicadas.
Poor Husband. He probably feels like he lives with Doctor Frankenstein. Deceased cicadas all over the living room in specimen cups. Sketches of the little buggers from every angle. A crazy woman wandering the house riffing on the 6 Million Dollar Man narration while wielding bug parts at him…And yet, it’s not really any stranger than what passes for normal here.
Last night we had a hell of a hailstorm, although the tornados (thankfully) missed us. We were transfixed by the mental disintigration of Doug Hill (WJLA) and Topper Shutt (WUSA) as they sought to inform the viewing area of the nasty weather. Shutt must have been fielding angry viewer calls (this was during prime time) as he babbled apologies about the inconvenience and muttered things about how “this is why the FCC gives us a license.” Hill, being a veteran at this sort of thing, went straight for the zen reporting approach, informing us, “It is where it is, at the moment.”
We finally broke away from the weather reporting and started watching The Greatest ’70s Cop Shows (Charlie’s Angels / Starsky and Hutch / S.W.A.T. / Police Woman / The Rookies), a DVD of pilot episodes from the aforementioned shows. Lots of really tight man-perms on S.W.A.T.
Gotta return to my project now. Probably a good idea to clean up a bit before Husband sees his kitchen…
I think cicadas have reached the height of mindfullness practice, but in today’s Post Joel Achenbach prefers to refer to their mindstate as obliviousness. Either way, we’re both on the same page with this:
But they teach us something. They remind us that the world isn’t about just us.
As the human population grows and our technology expands, it is easy to assume that we have dominion over the planet. And then these cicadas crawl from deep in the ground and pay no attention to our needs and wants and various crises.
Good article. Go read the whole thing.
Also check out yesterday’s Kid’s Post section (which, mysteriously, is not currently on line) for a nifty little chart highlighting the differences between periodic and annual cicadas.
Email from Alec in Africa (go read of their adventures and look at the pics) reports that he misses the cicadas desperately. See. Other people love them.
I found these fun cicada pictures here at the shrewdness of apes, a site I’ve been enjoying recently although I can’t remember how I found it.
If you time your stop by the del ray dreamery for cicada crunch custard just right, you can apparently be interviewed for the Newshour with Jim Lehrer.
And people say we don’t have our priorities straight in DC.
