Word: cockroaches
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...Disco with some friends I made at the Winterhaven Mall. It was a "request" disco filled with pretty sedate people--slumped and smoking and going to the bathroom--except for a bunch of minor league ball players propped up behind the revolving merry-go-round bar playing "flick the cockroach." A big Thurman Munson clone walked up to me wearing a Harley-Davidson t-shirt and yelled in my ear that I wasn't drinking enough. A "Mother Harley" tattoo embellished his hefty forearm, set flatly in front...
...Adolphe Menjou has an answer to that. He said that the only director who worked actors as sensitively as Kubrick was the director of his 1923 film. A Woman of Paris, Charles Chaplin. Kirk Douglas gives a good performance, and Ralph Meeker, waiting for the firing squad, squashes a cockroach with his thumb after his comrade sees it and begins to wait, "That cockroach is going to live longer than I am!" "Now," Meeker says, after performing his own little execution, "you've got the edge...
...insect made its appearance on earth some 400 million years ago, and in the intervening time has become well equipped to survive. (In fact, the durable cockroach evolved into something very similar to its current unpleasant form some 320 million years ago and apparently saw little need for further improvement.) An insect has a strong exterior skeleton and seems disproportionately powerful in relation to its size (an ant can lift 50 times its own weight). Its capacity for flight (most but not all insects can fly), attained about 100 million years before the first flying reptiles or birds, enables...
...female insect, for example, automatically draws males of the same species for miles around. Other pheromones identify members of a colony, trigger fight or flight reactions, or are used to mark a path toward food sources. At Beltsville, Jacobson has identified the sex pheromones of the American cockroach. Oriental fruit fly, Mediterranean fruit fly and southwestern pine tip moth. Synthetic forms of such chemicals could, if spread in large quantities over an insect-infested field, so confuse male insects that they might never find females and mate with them...
...family resemblance, many of these stories have an outlandish ingenuity that marks them as uniquely Russian. Take, for example, the tale of the peasant Bukhtan, whose habitation was "a stove built on pillars in the middle of a field. He lay on the stove up to his elbows in cockroach milk." Since it is axiomatic in folk tales that the more wretched a peasant, the better his chances of making good, Bukhtan naturally ends up marrying the Czar's daughter...