Word: cockroaches
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Entomologists have long known that female cockroaches use perfume to advertise their nubility. Army chemists at Natick, Mass., once extracted a powerfully attractive substance from filter paper crawled over by virgin females, but it was mixed up with too many other materials to be analyzed successfully. The Beltsville system is better; the air passing through the cans carries the cockroach perfume to a flask cooled by Dry Ice. There the vapor condenses and is periodically collected. After an elaborate purification process, Dr. Yamamoto has saved up 12.2 milligrams (.0004 oz.) of pure attractant, equivalent to the perfume produced...
Sneaky Scheme. When this is done, it may mean the end for at least one kind of cockroach, Periplaneta americana, the species bred by Dr. Yamamoto. The males cannot resist its attraction, so they can be lured easily into baited traps. But this simple scheme does not satisfy the anti-cockroach forces. The females will not be affected, they point out, and a few males attracted to them in the age-old way will work overtime to make them lay fertile eggs...
...breakdowns on Havana's streets in one day alone recently. "What am I supposed to do when this thing finally goes-join the militia?" said the disgruntled driver of a 1953 Cadillac taxi. Cubans are leary of the Coca-Cola they drink-it has been known to contain cockroach eggs; in bars they pointedly order Coke "sin bacilli" (without germs). "My father would be very sad to see this," said the son of the late president of Coca-Cola in Cuba...
Sail Away (by Noël Coward) is carbon-copy Coward. All it needs is a carbon-copy audience from the dated musical comedies of the '20s and '30s. Sample dialogue: Englishman, in tweeds and monocle: "I've just found a cockroach in my bath." Steward: "I trust it was a British cockroach...
This newspaper ad, printed a month ago in the New York World-Telegram and Sun, and paid for out of the pockets of a Harlem school staff, touched it off. The teachers begged for a cleanup of their rat-and cockroach-infested building, protesting against "sagging walls, unsanitary toilets, leaking roof, refrigerator temperatures in the winter and oven-like sweltering during spring." By last week that appeared to be a rough description of many New York City schools, and four sets of investigators were looking into far-reaching corruption in the most colossal, colossally troubled school system in the nation...