You know, if I were holding a giant bug in my hand that was big enough to eat a frickin’ carrot, I’m not so sure I’d leave my fingers that close to his mandibles.
That, my friends, is a giant weta, one of 11 species of grasshopper-like insects that live in New Zealand. The weta weighs more than a sparrow and can be up to 4 inches long.
Watch this Japanese television clip of a giant weta pwning a camel spider:
Now how are you going to sleep tonight?
Check out this bug courtesy of a few pictures at Dark Roasted Blend.com. It’s a Brazilian treehopper, and is related to the cicada. Entymologists aren’t even sure what those balls on the top of its head are for, although apparently they are not antennae.
Me, I don’t even mess with them dudes.
If It’s Not Scots, It’s CRAP!! — Scottish food importer Great Scot International recently announced plans to begin selling haggis-flavored potato chips here in the U.S. The chips are made by a British ice cream maker looking to expand into the snack category by launching a handful of “Scottish flavors” including Scotch Bonnet Chili Pepper (hmm…), and Aberdeen Angus (beef flavor). Apparently it’s the number one selling potato chip in Scotland, but that was to be expected in the first place.
Erich Vieth at Dangerous Intersection recently pointed to this TED Talk video featuring Dutch agricultural specialist Marcel Dicke, who explains why Westerners should learn to eat more insects as a source of protein. The ultimate reason is a no brainer:
The main reason that we should eat insects is that “we will have to.”
Okay, but if they come in haggis flavor, I might have to think twice about it.
Serious Eats editor and chef J. Kenji Lopez-Alt offered a counter-argument to the widespread belief that the production of foie gras is cruel with this piece about a tour he took of one of the three farms in the U.S. that produce foie gras. It’s generated a lot of controversy as both sides of the debate have used it as a touchstone for their arguments; I thought MetaFilter’s thread about the piece did a very good job of highlighting the arguments, as well as both the strengths and weaknesses of Lopez-Alt’s article.
As a sidebar to that, just to give you a sense of the inherent cruelty in all industrialized meat processing, and to highlight how wrong things can go, please read this Atlantic.com food blog post about reported animal abuse at Smithfield Foods pork processing facilities.
Looking backward for a moment, John Ptak dug up an old advert for Lea & Perrin’s Worcestershire Sauce that inspired him to consider the evolution of the humble hamburger in the pantheon of American cuisine. The ad, which he dates to 1956, comes from a time, he says, when the hamburger was not yet quite the icon of food that it would become, but even now it holds on to its origins as inexpensive, everyday fare.
One of my clients is an artist and she has been working on a series of bronze plaques that have engravings of various insects on them. On one of my recent visits to her, she showed me a book she had been looking at by an artist named Cornelia Hesse-Honegger, who has made hundreds of drawings of insects mutated by radiation in places like Chernobyl and other sites in Europe that were affected by that disaster. Earlier this week, coincidentally enough, Wired had a post about Hesse-Honegger that features a great slideshow of some of her excellent drawings. You can read more about her work here.
Last year, there were lots of reports about the huge losses of bee populations in the U.S. due to what is called “colony collapse disorder”. Sadly, things are only getting worse for bee keepers, as the latest survey shows that a full one-third of all managed bee colonies in the United States died over the winter, but only about 5% due to colony collapse disorder. Most of the die-off is being attributed to weather-related starvation and harsh conditions. You know, that “giant conspiracy of government and industry” called global climate change.
Last week, the NY Times had a story about the rise of Roundup-resistant weeds on farms that used Monsanto’s Roundup-resistant GM soybeans, and now there is this story from the Manchester (UK) Guardian about the emergence of huge insect infestations in China, where farmers have been using Monsanto’s GM varieties of cotton. On one hand, this ought to shut up all the people who continue to insist that evolution is “just a theory”, but on the other hand didn’t everybody SAY this was what would happen with GM crops about, oh, a BAJILLION TIMES?!?!
We watch a LOT of “Hannah Montana” around here. The current season is the final one for the show, and one thing that’s quite noticeable in the most recent episodes is how much all of the kids on the show have matured over the last year. Except for Jason Earles, the actor who plays Miley’s brother Jackson. And do you know why???? Because he’s 32 FREAKIN’ YEARS OLD, that’s why!! Or maybe not; Wikipedia says he might be only 24.
I was practically dumbstruck the other day when an old high school friend trotted out the “soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan are fighting for your freedom” line on Facebook. Is it possible than even now, eight years into a pair of wars that show no sign of stopping ever, that there are still people who believe that there’s any other reason besides oil for our military presence in Central Asia?
Pretty much everybody knows that the United States is the single largest consumer of petroleum in the world, right? But did you know that the Department of Defense accounts for so much of that consumption that if it were an independent nation it would be #4 on that list all by itself? (in per capita consumption) Or, if you just use the absolute figures, the DoD would be #38 on the list, just behind the Philippines.
We’ve had a bit of a fly problem in our house recently. Due to the town’s trash collector coming by our house several hours earlier than usual a few weeks ago, I missed getting our garbage to the curb, and in the week that all of that rotting food had to sit in the mudroom waiting for its next turn to join the local landfill, some flies got in and got seriously busy with each other. At first it only seemed like a couple of flies here and there, but apparently there is no such thing as “a couple of flies”. Something had to be done, but we didn’t want to be spraying pesticides in the kitchen, which is where most of them had taken up residence, so Bridget bought some of those adhesive fly strips at the dollar store. In the space of a couple of days, the carnage was intense. You would think we were doing genetics experiments for the number of flies we found wriggling fruitlessly (HA!) on those sticky strips of doom. BWA-HAA-HAAAAAAA!
Ahem…sorry about the cackling. My point in telling you this story is to lead up to this link: the BBC reports that a new paper from a team of evolutionary biologists in Canada has concluded that most insects (and probably a fair percentage of other species) developed a “Stink of Death” mechanism so that the oleic acid given off by the decaying bodies of dead bugs would act as a repulsor mechanism to tell other bugs to stay away from a potential danger.
So, while the fly strips were successful in and of themselves in ridding our kitchen of the fly menace, leaving the strips hanging, covered with decaying fly corpses, is also probably convincing other flies to get the fuck out of Dodge. They’ll stay up for a couple more weeks, by which time the cold weather will have finished off whatever stragglers have escaped my lethal clutches! BWA-HAA-HAAAAAA!
The fourth annual “Most Corrupt Members Of Congress” report is now available for your perusal. This year, the report only lists 15 members of Congress, down from 24(!) last year. CREW, the organization behind the non-partisan effort, says the list is smaller because many of last year’s “honorees” were not re-elected in 2008, and some likely “honorees” have not been charged, censured, or indicted…yet. The list is pretty evenly divided between Democrats (8) and Republicans (7), though it is heavy with members of the House (12) compared to only three senators (McConnell, Ensign, and Burris). There are some pretty familiar names, too: Maxine Waters, John Murtha, Jerry Lewis (no, the other one), and Charlie Rangel. All people who pop up again and again as crooks. And, no, that moron Joe Wilson (the “YOU LIE!” guy) is not on the list — it’s not a crime to be stupid, especially if you’re a member of Congress.
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