Animals
We may actually see a few stragglers from the different groups of cicadas that are expected to hatch at the same time this spring, broods based in Georgia, Illinois, and Tennessee, but I'm not sure why the Kingsport Times-News called the concurrence "cicadageddon." Cicadas don't fight with each other. All they do is buzz loudly, in ways that identify subspecies, until other cicadas come around to tell them to shut it off. Then they mate. Then the females go off and lay eggs in the tips of tree twigs, producing little grubs that will burrow into the ground when the dead end of the twig drops off the tree, and the males resume buzzing.
What can you do about this? Stay indoors for the weeks it lasts if you're phobic enough, but what Washington does about their "Brood X," every seventeen years, is market the big dumb insects as a tourist attraction. Cicadas have literally just crawled out from under rocks and are as stupid as that phrase implies. They don't care what they perch on and will happily perch on humans while they stridulate. They explore the world and invade houses, stores, offices, buses and trains. They take a bit of getting used to but birdwatchers look forward to them because they attract masses of songbirds, who think of cicadas as manna in the wilderness. The birds stuff themselves silly and, with the added protein in their diet, mature and sedate bird couples who haven't thought of such things in years find themselves building nests again. Cicadas mean you can watch baby cardinals or robins grow up outside your office window.
Cicadas were also responsible for my own observation of mockingbirds' "mocking" behavior: As the cicadas died off (they spend either 13 or 17 years as grubs and usually live a week or less after they grow wings), I saw a mockingbird alight on a rail near a few other songbirds and make a noise like a cicada. The other birds turned around. Eagerly. And drooped disappointedly as if to say "Oh, him again." Mockingbird was like "Made ya look!" Birds do fight, but, setting a good example for the rest of us, they usually just ignore and/or avoid mockingbirds.
As insects go, cicadas are "clean." And, unlike most North American insects, they have enough meat on them that they can be shelled, gutted, and eaten like shellfish. I've never eaten one but some people fancy them in stir-fries.
In any case they're expected to be numerous in Middle Tennessee. Note that Hawkins and Sullivan Counties are not on this list.
Etiquette, Fine Points of
Speaking of the Times-News, a reader expresses disgust with that newspaper's new format. "Hardly anything in the paper any more," the reader laments the loss of the national and world news stories of which the Times-News never could afford much, "but the worst part is, they're putting the obituaries in the sports section. That's not right."
Small local papers always have been taken apart in families where different people wanted to read different pages first, and the newspapers were too small to print whole sections. Nevertheless, the sports and comics section inherently just clashes with the obituaries. The older we get--and Times-News readers are a community dominated by seniors--the more likely the obituaries are to trigger grief reactions, during which the sports, comics, and classifieds are likely to aggravate emotions. "Joe Jones dead, and they played a stupid ball game!"
Actually, I've noticed less of this faux pas in this year's papers than in last year's. I think advertising is starting to trickle back in; perhaps within my lifetime the Times-News will get back to having proper sections, whether or not they're organized according to the traditional stereotype that Daddy read the world news, Mommy read the "society" news, Junior read the sports and comics, Princess read the local news, and Grandpa used a magnifying glass to read the classifieds. It's a sad commentary on our government that the reader thinks obituaries belong next to such national news as the Times-News still gets, instead.
I think the Times-News editors need to think about this, and also about their related bad habit of printing obituaries and other legal notices in nasty sans-serif fonts. Serifs help us distinguish letters and numbers, at least those of us who have learned to rely on them. Serifs may confuse children just learning to print--somebody claimed to find sans-serif fonts easier to read--but for us older people who rely on them, serifs are obligatory. Save the sans-serif fonts for advertisements, where nobody actually reads anything but, with luck, they associate a store's logo with a product the store sells..
Food--A Different Kind of Yuck
Why I don't eat venison...I've seen what looked like CWD right in my neighborhood. A very confused-looking little doe walked out into the road and stood there, glaring like a suicidal possum on the highway, swaying a bit on her little feet. Luckily she ran when I brandished a shopping bag and yelled at her. In any case, the kind of person who would eat a doe may well have been diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's Disease. (Don't blame Canada. Some animals may be bringing the disease from there, but it's been in the US for a while.)
Writing
Wordplay:
Zazzle
Save the Butterflies backpack, green background:
Gray background:
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