Shoes, Ships, and Sealing Wax

Bugsbugsbugsbugsbugs

Any day now my knowledge of cicadas will be qualifying me as a geek.

One of my co-workers presented me with an exoskeleton this morning.

One of the newscasters on the radio station I listen to referred to themselves as the "news, traffic, and cicada station" this morning. I am looking forward to the special cicada flashback feature, a 1987 retrospective, which starts tomorrow.

Washingtonpost.com has a special section.

My alma mater has a cicada news desk staffed with entomology grad students ready to answer questions...and they are also selling t-shirts (Don't fear the cicada).

I've only seen the few bugs around the office, none at home yet. In 1987 I was living in a neighborhood that had been build only eleven years prior, so the construction had pretty much knocked out the local cicada population. Around my office then, though, were two wooded lots full of them, and I can remember cruching my way through the exoskeletons in the parking lot every day.

Victor is carrying his camera around waiting for his first sighting, so I expect he'll have a cicada album up soon enough. For those of you west of the great plains (or outside North America) who have no earthly idea what I'm talking about, here's a picture from the University of Maryland's collection.

(And I haven't forgotten our other local creepy-(sometimes) crawlies: somebody caught another snakehead fish.)

Posted by Nic at May 13, 2004 02:52 PM