Word: ladybug
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...known then, as now, as the Cherry Hill prison. One night last week, over Philadelphia's KYW, the inmates of 110-year-old Cherry Hill staged their Christmas musicale. Sixteen pent-up voices serenaded The Little Man Who Wasn't There; assorted whistlers, fiddlers, ladybug plunkers whanged away at heart strings beyond the walls. But the tune that dampened the eyes of Warden Herbert ("Cap") Smith and beefy Deputy Tom Meikrantz was a Chinese prisoner's song, written and sung in quavery, North China dialect by Canton-born William Yun. (Yun was jailed six weeks...
...sprawled on his stomach in the grass, wriggled forward, stared intently at a ladybug...
...watched," he later wrote, "I began to wonder how the world must appear to a ladybug: what the sensation would be if my six feet of height dwindled down and down until I was hardly a quarter of an inch long; if I shrank to a thousandth, a ten-thousandth ... a millionth of my present bulk. Like Alice, I began to feel I was 'shutting up like a telescope...
...Then, I imagined the quarter-inch insect expanding to my size, with everything around it enlarging in proportion. It was a curious sensation-like breathing in and out-this contracting and expanding viewpoint. The six-foot ladybug, I perceived, would live in a world where grassblades would be as wide as a highway and would tower hundreds of feet in the air. Crickets twenty-four feet long would crawl through the grassroot jungles. Moths, with wings stretching more than 100 feet from tip to tip, would soar through the air at dusk. Bushes would have the appearance of frowning cliffs...
...jars had been filled with ladybugs and placed in a cold-storage warehouse last Autumn by a force of men under Commissioner Wheeler, who scoured the countryside near El Portal, Calif. Some 8.000,000 bugs had been netted and stored. The reason: A ladybug is capable of eating in a season several thousand of the Aphis (green plant lice) which annually menace vineyards, peach and apricot orchards, and truck gardens in Mercer County...