A brief Intermission

Wow, school has started with a bang, and I am swamped!

I will be on the road for a meeting most of next week, so posting will be a bit spotty.  I still need to write my presentation for that meeting, so I’m forcing myself to shut the internet off and write something that I’m actually supposed to be working on.

While I do have to actually work, as part of this trip I will get to go on a boat and look at sea birds, which I am very excited about.  This is the kind of science I like.

I will not, alas, be staying at this Damn Inn, or visiting their Damn bar.

While I’m away, take a look at the wonderful entries posted in the comments on the Ribald Entomology Limerick Contest.

Amazing! I have no idea how I am going to pick a winner!  If you want to suggest some ways to categorize them, please feel free to offer up suggestions.

International Rock Flipping Day

Just wanted to remind everyone that September 11, 2011 is International Rock Flipping Day!  This is the 5th annual IRFD, and I think it could not happen on a better day.

What better way to remember the events of 10 years ago?  Take a break from the constant, disturbing images and voices in the media about 9-11. Go outside, and spend some time with your inner kid (Or an actual kid).

There are beautiful and amazing things in the world, despite the best efforts of humans.  Rediscover them.  Rejoice in the joy of secret complexity hidden under a rock.

If you’re joining in for the first time, here’s a quick rundown of the procedure:

• On September 11th, find a rock or rocks and flip it/them over.
• Record what you find. “Any and all forms of documentation are welcome: still photos, video, sketches, prose, or poetry.”
• Replace the rock as you found it; it’s someone’s home!
• Post your photos online; it can be on your blog, or load your photos to the Flickr group. (You don’t need a blog to join!)  Send Wandering Weta a link to blog posts. If you’re on Twitter, Tweet it, too; the hashtag is #rockflip.)
• There is a handy IRFD badge available here.

Important Safety Precautions:

A reminder from Dave:

One thing I forgot to do in the initial post is to caution people about flipping rocks in poisonous snake or scorpion habitat. In that case, I’d suggest wearing gloves and/or using a pry bar — or simply finding somewhere else to do your flipping. Please do not disturb any known rattlesnake shelters if you don’t plan on replacing the rocks exactly as you found them. Timber rattlesnakes, like many other adult herps, are very site-loyal, and can die if their homes are destroyed. Also, don’t play with spiders. If you disturb an adjacent hornet nest (hey, it’s possible), run like hell. But be sure to have someone standing by to get it all on film!

About Respect and Consideration: (from Wandering Weta)

The animals we find under rocks are at home; they rest there, sleep there, raise their families there. Then we come along and take off the roof, so please remember to replace it carefully. Try not to squish the residents; move them aside if they’re big enough; they’ll run back as soon as their rock is back in place.

Entomological Limerick Contest!

The Entomological Society of America has announced a Limerick Contest for the Annual Meeting!

Prizes will be awarded for the top three most creative limericks, as judged by an anonymous panel of entomological punsters. The limerick topic can be anything about arthropods, the Annual Meeting, ESA’s officers or other well-known entomologists, just keep it clean! 

I predict some very entertaining limericks will be submitted.  (And why does this sound like something Tom Turpin dreamed up?)

Alas, the ESA’s admonition to “keep it clean” seems to run directly contradictory to what a limerick is all about.  Nearly all descriptions seem to contain the word “bawdy.” They are described thusly: “The true limerick is always obscene” and “From a folkloric point of view, the form is essentially transgressive; violation of taboo is part of its function.”

I pointed this out on Twitter and a few other social media spots, and was instantly deluged with requests to have an UnClean Entomology Limerick Contest. So here you go.

 

My deadline will be October 1, 2011.  Submit your entries in the comments on this post!

RULES:

1. Limericks should be naughty and transgressive, but not gross or squick-inducing.
2. All taboo violation must be consensual.
3. The basic Limerick form is couplet/triplet, or AABBA (where A and B represent rhyming words, not Swedish pop bands).
4. The Limerick must have an arthropod theme of some sort.
5. Aedeagus and smegma don’t rhyme. Let’s not even go there.
6. Bribes are encouraged and accepted via PayPal.

I’ll get you started with this classic:

A flea and a fly in a flue
Were caught, so what could they do?
Said the fly, “Let us flee.”
“Let us fly,” said the flea.
So they flew through a flaw in the flue.

Let the Games Begin!

Bad Alien Theatre

Ah, Labor Day weekend. I was going to get so much work done, and have lots of posts drafted so that I could return to a regular publishing status here.

That didn’t happen, in part because my curiosity got the better of me and I wasted time reading a terrible book called “Bug Naked,” and then watching a truly Epic Bad Sci Fi movie, The Last Days of Planet Earth. Leonard Pinth-Garnell would have been proud.

From a description:

You might have thought ABC’s V remake gave us the most cheese-tastic take on the “evil alien queen” trope — but you haven’t seen Daryl Hannah in The Last Days of Planet Earth. 

If you missed it, Last Days is a 2006 miniseries that aired on the Hallmark Channel…. Hannah plays Liz Quinlan, a former astronaut who is secretly the queen of the alien insect people, who’s planning to lay a ton of eggs and use humans as a food source, and as “jackets” to grow her eggs in.

Honestly, that doesn’t even begin to describe the level of WTFery in that film. One of the main characters is also a beautiful PhD graduate student in entomology, working as an exterminator to pay her way through graduate school.  Um.  No one seems to have told them that you get paid to go to grad school in entomology.

But at least the entomologist had the great idea to use smoke bombs to “calm the alien hive.”  And you get to see Hollywood’s conception of what happens inside the mind of a honey bee in a smoked hive.  Duuuuude. Trippin! The colors!

The plot is crazy implausible except for one part–how they acquire humans.  They’re using the DMV as a collection center, and kidnapping and implanting everyone who tries to renew a license or pay a parking ticket.  Yes. That part is quite believable.

You can watch the whole thing on YouTube, although it’s almost 3 hours long.  It isn’t until the last 20 minutes or so that you see the aliens’ true form–but the buildup to it is so peppered with dubious plot lines and dialog, it’s almost worth watching the whole thing. Almost.

Best line: “They’re just bugs. They put their humans on one leg at a time.”

Ricky Gervais Explains Spiders

There is a fair amount of swearing, so you might not want to play this at work. Otherwise, enjoy!