One of the nice things about living with a child is that one is afforded opportunities to become acquainted with icons of popular culture that might otherwise be overlooked. I have, for example, become quite conversant with characters that appear on Saturday morning cartoons. Not only can I sing the “My Little Ponies” theme song in its entirety, I can also recognize and name all of the Rugrats (including nonrecurring characters) and can distinguish between Yakko and Wakko Warner on “Animaniacs ” (as can, needless to say, my daughter Hannah). But even my extensive Saturday morning experience didn't prepare me for one particular animated character—“The Tick,” the title character on a short-lived series on Fox network. The Tick appears to be a tall man in a blue skintight outfit with two antennae dangling limply from the hood. Baffled by what I saw, I consulted my husband, Richard, who, as then-president of the Society for Animation Studies, certainly qualified as an expert on animated cartoon character. Richard attained this lofty status in life despite the childhood trauma of discovering that his mother had thrown away his entire comic book collection, including a number of mint condition vintage issues of “Uncle Scrooge.” Richard informed me that the

Tick came to television after a limited run on the printed pages of comic books.

After calling a few comic book stores in town, I did locate one, A-Plus Comics and Sports Cards Shop, which carried back issues and re-releases of The Tick. According to The Tick's Giant Circus of the Mighty (Edlund, 1992), the Tick's alter ego, Neville Nedd, is the Weekly World Planet crossword puzzle editor. His superhero origins are obscure—evidently suffering from amnesia, his first memory is of escaping from a mental asylum called the Evanston Clinic. He professes to be a “blood-sucking arachnid ” but has never been observed living up to his reputation and actually consuming blood or any other kind of body fluid. He is very strong and has the usual assortment of superhero gadgets, including a Hypnotic Secret Identity Tie, a Secret Crime View Finder, the Mighty Diner Straw, and the Pez Dispenser of Graveness.

All told, the Tick didn't strike me as a very impressive superhero. In the hope that other arthropods have served as the inspiration for more remarkable superheroes, I consulted The Encyclopedia of Superheroes (Rovin, 1985). In his preface, Rovin writes “. . . one can't classify superheroes with the finicky detachment of an entomologist distinguishing between varieties of insects.” As a finicky entomologist, though, I couldn't help but feel that much could be gained by just such a classificatory scheme. For the most part, arthropod-based superheroes are easily placed in well-defined taxa. Arachnids far outnumber insects and include in their ranks the Scarlet Scorpion, the Scorpion, the Spider Queen, the Black Spider, the Black Widow, Spider, Spider-Man, Spider Widow, Spider Woman, the Tarantula, and the Web Queen. Running a close second to the arachnids are hymenopterans: Ant Boy, Ant Man, the Green Hornet, the Queen Bee, the Red Bee, the Wasp,

and Yellow Jacket. The Coleoptera are well represented by Blue Beetle, Firefly, the Silver Scarab, and the Blazing Scarab, and the Lepidoptera by the Butterfly, the Moth, Gypsy Moth, and Mothman. Among the minor orders (at least among comic book arthropods) are Diptera (the Fly, Mosquito Boy), Odonata (the Dragonfly), and Hemiptera (Ambush Bug).

Certain aspects of arthropod biology appear repeatedly in the pages of comic books irrespective of the superhero's taxonomic status. Most of these superheroes have the “proportionate

strength” of insects—the familiar old misinterpretation of the surface-area-to-volume ratio. Insects appear to have disproportionate strength because their surface area is large relative to their volume; muscle strength is proportionate to cross-sectional area so insect muscle, which moves very little volume relative to what human muscle has to move, appears to be quite strong. In the real world, an arthropod the size of a human would possess the relatively unimpressive strength of a human. In the comic book world, though, Spider-Man's alter ego, Peter Parker, “bitten by a radioactive spider . . . has gained that insect's proportionate strength.” In the comic book world, too, spiders, which are of course really arachnids, are considered insects. The Fly possesses “muscles 100 times more powerful than humans.” Ant Man presents an interesting variant on the theme—he is capable of shrinking to the size of an ant while retaining his human strength. He also possesses the ability to communicate with insects and order them to do his bidding.

Another recurrent theme is the ability to deliver venom, or at least an electric equivalent thereof. Yellow Jacket can shoot “energy stingers, ” the Scorpion can shoot “ bug tracers,” the Red Bee has a “stinger gun,” Spider Woman fires “bioelectric venom blasts,” and the Wasp possesses “sting wristbands.” Even Mosquito Boy can sting, something his arthropod equivalents can't do. Many of the arthropod superheroes can scale buildings with the assistance of a combination of suction-cup devices on their feet (Tarantula, Black Widow, Butterfly) and a resolute disbelief in the laws of gravity. In some cases, attributes are highly taxon-specific. Web-shooting devices are restricted to spider-based superheroes— the Black Widow has her “widow's line,” Tarantula a “web gun,” Web Woman her “web rope,” and Spider-Man a “web shooter.”

Spider-Man 2099, a genetics engineer of the future, has the genetic code of a spider accidentally imprinted on his own DNA, conferring upon him most spider attributes, except for the ability to “shoot webbing out of his butt”—instead (perhaps in the interest of decency), it comes out of spinnerets on his forearms.

What bothers me most about this assortment of arthropod superheroes is not so much the liberties taken with arthropod biology but the human dimensions of these characters. Every superhero, arthropod or otherwise, has a story to explain how his or her superpowers came to be. Over the years, many superheroes began their careers as scientists, although by far and away the most common profession for superhero alter egos is millionaire playboy, this being the only occupation that permits you to disappear for days at a time saving the world without having to explain your absence to your boss. Some are generic scientists—sort of computer scientist/roboticist/engineer/nuclear physicists—but others are highly specialized professionals. There are oceanographers (Amphibian, Piranha, Stingray), biochemists (Beast, Giant Man, Steel the Indestructible Man), zoologists (Bwana Beast, Jaguar), geophysicists (Havak, Polaris), and, most of all, physicists (The Atom, Captain Britain, Dr. Fate, Dr. Solar, The Hulk, Human Bomb, Mr. Fantastic, Sasquatch, and Static). Distressingly conspicuous by their absence in this bunch are entomologists.

It seems that arthropod superheroes almost never owe their origins to the scientific insights of an entomologist. Whereas chemists can develop chemicals to enhance strength, and physicists can manipulate atomic forces to allow themselves to defy gravity, entomologists as a group appear incapable of applying their scholarship to save the world from crime and evildoers. More likely than not, arthropod superheroes owe their origins to

accidents. Insect Queen, for example, alias Lana Lang, newscaster, possesses a Biogenetic Ring that allows her to assume the form of any arthropod; the ring was a gift from a six-armed alien whom she rescued from underneath a fallen tree. Ambush Bug stumbled across an alien space suit that conferred teleportational powers upon its wearer; thus can Ambush Bug ambush his adversaries. Thomas Troy became the Fly after finding a fly-shaped magical ring; when he's not busy crawling up walls, he's a lawyer. If that weren't bad enough, the 1975 version of Tarantula is an investment counselor when he is not doing super-deeds. Although not an entomologist, Ant Boy at least acquired his powers honestly, having been raised from infancy by ants. About the only entomologist in the whole bunch was a character called Odd John, an obscure and short-lived villain who could control insects and mutate them into super-bugs.

It strikes me as a waste of potential that entomologists have never been able to turn their insights into superpowers. There are tropical termites that shoot acrid solutions out of the tops of their pointed heads, odd carnivorous creatures called berothids that live underground and capture prey by releasing toxic, paralyzing fumes, and oil beetles that shoot droplets of toxin-laden blood out from each of their leg joints. Any of these abilities would make for some impressive superhero antics. Comic books may actually turn out to be a great way to educate the general public about the remarkable abilities of insects. Hey, don't scoff—a lot of people read comic books. After all, it's not like there's an A-Plus Entomology Book and Monographs shop in town for people to flock to and buy their favorite out-of-print collectible books about insects.

Given the frequency with which people cross paths with cockroaches, one would hardly think that such close encounters would be considered newsworthy. It's therefore somewhat surprising to see how frequently cockroaches turn up in tabloid newspapers. Their exploits, as recounted in the tabloids, are certainly surprising to entomologists. It's not that I'm a subscriber, or even a regular reader, of tabloids. But I do go to the grocery store and wait in long check-out lines and, like everybody else (even, I suspect, Nobel laureates), I can 't help reading the headlines. When I notice an entomological headline, I confess that I slip a copy in among the cans of cat food and quarts of milk.

For example, cockroaches made the front page one day of the Sun. Right underneath the banner headline (“Missing baby found alive inside pumpkin”) was the headline “Killer roaches invade home and attack family.” The story described the terrifying experience of coffee grower Santiago Morales, whose Venezuelan home was stormed by “an army of killer cockroaches.” Morales speculated that a powerful storm flooded the coffee plantation, driving the cockroaches into his house. Although Morales, his wife, and his two children survived the attack, the family dog was

not so fortunate. The dog succumbed to the ravages of “dozens of greedy gobbling roaches,” proving yet again that coffee and cockroaches do not mix.

Even more insidious than such natural disasters as coffee-crazed cockroaches are the ones engineered by unscrupulous insect trainers. The Sun also carried a story titled, “My husband trained roaches to attack me . . . claims terrified wife. ” In Toluca, Mexico, Roberto Guarvez “groomed a houseful of cockroaches into fighting-and-biting machines that would attack only his wife as she slept helplessly in bed.” Regina had her suspicions after awakening on three separate occasions covered with cockroaches while her husband slept undisturbed, but she didn't fully comprehend her husband's involvement until she actually heard him ordering the cockroaches to kill her. Evidently, in Mexico, a person cannot be booked on charges of assault with a deadly arthropod, so Regina Morales filed for divorce on the grounds of mental cruelty.

At least one judge would have been sympathetic. “Judge attacked with roaches!” according to an edition of the Weekly World News. Maria Terwen, of Berkeley Springs, West Virginia,“dumped thousands of cockroaches” on the desk of Judge Margaret Gordon to “emphasize bad living conditions in her apartment complex.” Maria Terwen received a contempt charge for her efforts. Although no details are provided, I would guess that the attorneys present in the courtroom allowed the cockroaches to scuttle off without smashing them, as a professional courtesy.

Elisabeth Muller's marital problems, while not in the same class as Regina Morales ' woes, were nonetheless deemed newsworthy by the editors of Weekly World News. Her “wacky hubby eats roaches—he mixes those creepy critters with cereal, muffins and

even meatloaf, says his fed-up wife.” Werner Muller, a biologist from Hannover, Germany, considers cockroaches “one of nature's most perfect foods. . . . They're a superb source of protein, one of nature's best-balanced snacks.” Since they're not available at local grocery stores (at least, they're not for sale at local grocery stores), Werner maintains his own cockroach supply by breeding them in shoeboxes in his garage. The Mullers' marriage, you will be relieved to hear, is not at risk, since Werner has promised not to eat cockroaches or talk about them in front of Elisabeth (although he did pose for Weekly World News cameras for three different photos, downing cockroaches on cereal, on pancakes, and right out of the shoebox).

Cuban refugee Jorge Torres of Miami, Florida, who installs fire sprinklers for a living is, like Werner Muller, favorably disposed toward cockroaches, although as a source of inspiration rather than a source of nourishment. As reported in the Sun, cockroaches helped him “win lottery millions.” Torres used “special Cuban symbols” to pick numbers—according to his system, lucky number 48 is symbolized by cockroaches. Speaking through an interpreter, Torres claimed that he actually didn't like cockroaches but thought he'd “take a chance” on cockroach number 48. His decision was worth $6,230,000, with which Torres intended to buy a Corvette and a new house. No mention is made in the story of sharing his winnings with the local cockroach community.

Perhaps the most surprising of all cockroach stories in past issues of tabloid newspapers was the one from Weekly World News for January 15, 1991. A two-inch headline under a foot-long photograph of a cockroach proclaims,“Don't stomp on this guy—he's your kissin' cousin! Cockroaches and humans are kinfolks, says expert.” Although the expert in the story is unnamed, he is

reported to be one of the “government scientists who've spent a lot of time smashing roach heads and checking out all the bug juice” who went on to author a “startling report in the scholarly journal Science.” As far as I can determine, that would be either Ronald Nachman, G. Mark Holman, William Haddon, or Nicholas Ling, who published a paper entitled, “Leucosulfakinin, a sulfated insect neuropeptide with homology to gastrin and cholecystokinin” in Science in 1986. Nachman and company isolated the substance leucosulfakinin from extracts of three thousand Leucophaea maderae heads, purified it, and sequenced it, to discover substantial homology with the carboxy terminus of the human brain-gut hormones gastrin II and cholecystokinin. In fact, six of eleven of the amino acid residues of leukosulfakinin match those in gastrin II, “the highest percentage reported between insect and vertebrate neuropeptides. ” This striking similarity prompted the authors to suggest that the peptides “are evolutionarily related.”

The Weekly World News reporter described these findings differently: “The next time you stumble into the kitchen for a late night ham on rye and come eyeball to eyeball with the ugliest bug in the universe, don't start squealing, swatting, and swearing. Just pucker up, pal. Scientists have discovered that you and that creepy old cockroach are kissing cousins. . . . You and those garbage-gobbling stomach churners under the cupboard are descended from a common ancestor —and you're more closely related than you'd care to admit.”

While a tad on the sensational side, the report is for the most part recognizable and even accurate, right down to the fact that it does take a lot of time to smash roach heads and check out bug juice. It's gratifying, on the one hand, to see the popular press

running stories based on research reported in Science—even 4-1/2 years after it gets published. These days, when more than half of all scientific papers go uncited, even by other scientists, mention in the popular press is real recognition. On the other hand, it's definitely unsettling to discover that tabloid stories are based on real incidents. I had always kind of dismissed the entomological accounts along with the stories of Bigfoot babies and Elvis sightings as fantastic. Now that it appears that at least some of the reports are firmly based on legitimate refereed scientific literature, I 'm going to have to reevaluate my attitudes toward the tabloids. In fact, next time I buy one, I just might pick up a lottery ticket, too.

I've never been what you could call “cool”—ever since junior high school, I have been pretty much totally unaware of changes in taste, style, and fashion. Fortunately, being cool does not appear to be a necessary prerequisite for a successful career in entomology. There are occasions, however, when being just a little cool could be a professional boon. Every spring, I teach a general education course in entomology for nonscientists. I have discovered over time that the majority of the 150 or so students who take this course each year sign up for one of three reasons:

1. the class fits their schedule

2. they think it will be easier than the general education courses in physics or chemistry

3. the class fits their schedule AND they think it will be easier than the general education courses in physics or chemistry.

The point of the course is to teach students about the biology of insects (and thus about the science of biology in general) by relating aspects of insect biology to their lives. Because general education students come from across the entire campus, this

objective is differentially easy to achieve. Students from life sciences, premedical and preveterinary curricula, and the allied health professions readily accept the relevance of insects to their lives; even engineers can see the connections. It's a tougher sell, however, to students in the humanities. As a result, in addition to the usual sorts of lectures about insect behavior, physiology, and classification, the course includes lectures on cultural entomology—insects in art, music, literature, history, and the like. I have to say that, of all of these lectures, the most challenging one for me to give is the one on insects in music. The challenge arises from the fact that I am basically uncool, as far as music is concerned.

When I first began teaching this course, I based my lecture on the music I was personally most familiar with—mostly folk and pop songs of the sixties and early seventies. There was certainly no shortage of material to cover. Practically all of the sixties acts had insect-related songs in their repertoire: the Beach Boys had “Wild Honey,” Herb Alpert did “Spanish Flea,” the Beatles performed “A Taste of Honey,” and even Elvis got into the act (albeit in 1958) with a number called “I Got Stung.” And most of these songs weren't obscure in their day: Bob Lind's “Elusive Butterfly of Love” hit Number 5 on the pop charts in 1966, and Jewel Akens' “Birds and the Bees” reached Number 3 the year before. But after a few years of trying to explain to the students who Donovan was (of “First There Is a Mountain” fame, with the verse “Caterpillar sheds its skin/to find the butterfly within ”), I realized I was failing to reach them. In fact, playing Burl Ives' classic rendition of the folk song “Blue-Tailed Fly” (a.k.a. “Jimmy Crack Corn”) caused so much eye-rolling and gagging that I feared momentarily the class had somehow become demonically possessed.

Fortunately, fellow entomologist Deane Bowers, from the University of Colorado, took pity on me and provided me with a temporary solution to my musical problems. She assembled a tape with an assortment of songs that were much cooler than the ones I had been using. At least, I assumed they were cooler, since I had never before heard of most of them (I actually hadn't heard of some of the artists before, for that matter). Students generally agreed, and responded enthusiastically to “Hey There Little Insect” by Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers (“Don't land on me baby and bite me, no”),“Animotion,” by Obsession (“I will have you like a butterfly. . . . I will collect you and capture you . . .”),“Tsetse Fly” by Wall of Voodoo (“I'm feeling kind of sleepy now/I was bitten by a tsetse fly”), and “King Bee,” by the Rolling Stones (“I'm a king bee, baby, buzzin' round your hive . . .”). The tape, however, was made in 1987, and, as far as the students were concerned, had become a golden oldies compilation by the time the Democrats had regained the White House in 1992.

A term paper requirement provided a more permanent solution to shifting cultural standards. All students have to turn in a term paper for the course on the subject of their choice, and I encourage them to select an aspect of insects and culture about which they know more than I do. Not surprisingly, the role of insects in popular music has turned out to be a popular topic. This is how I have come to possess over a dozen audiotapes of collections of insect songs organized around various and sundry themes. I have a particularly impressive collection of insect punk and grunge rock songs. Not only are these artists and songs I would never otherwise have heard of, these are entire genres I would never otherwise have heard of. The subtle taxonomic distinctions between “hardcore/funnypunk,” “hyperoffensive

punk” and “neopsychedelic post-punk” I confess escape me entirely. Any entomologist over the age of forty will be absolutely astounded to discover the frequency with which insect references appear in contemporary music. The nineties may even qualify as an arthropod musical golden age.

Calls for celebration, however, may be a little premature; musical insect references just aren't what they used to be. Back in the sixties, insect songs were happy and pleasant, with titles like “Bumble Boogie ” (B. Bumble and the Stingers, 1961),“Sugar Bee” (Cleveland Crochet and Band, 1960), “Butterfly Baby” (Bobby Rydell, 1963) and “Funny Little Butterflies” (1965—by Patty Duke, of all people). Today, insects appear in songs with titles that are for the most part unprintable here. Among the less offensive more or less contemporary entries with lyrical references to insects are “Let's Lynch the Landlord” by the Dead Kennedys (“There's rats chewing up the kitchen, Roaches up to my knees ”), “Fly on the Wall” by Jesus Lizard (“That damned fly I told you about is keeping me up again”), “Bugs” by Adrenalin O.D. (“Armies of bugs, training to attack. . . . Coming out of the woodwork, coming through the floor. . .”),“I am the Fly” by Wire (“I'll shake you down to say please/As you accept the next dose of disease”), “Mindless Little Insects/Too Many Humans” by No Trend (“You breed like rats . . .”), “Moth in the Incubator,” by Flaming Lips (no printable lyrics), and “Crabby Day” by Pansy Division.

“Crabby Day” is an account of an infestation of pubic lice acquired after a one-night stand:

“To sleep with him I was excited

But later I was less delighted

When I found that special present

He left in my pubic hair.”

The biology in the song is most accurate but I have trouble lecturing about the song without cringing between verses and wondering when I'm going to start getting phone calls from incensed parents. Possibly the song least suitable for lecture purposes is a song from the group Ween, the title of which can be loosely rendered as “Flies landing on my uniquely male body part.” As far as I can tell, it's a love song but then again I'm so uncool I might have completely missed the point.

So, times have changed and insects in music have changed with them. I know it's not cool to say so, but I'm not convinced the change has been for the better. I miss the oldies, collectively light-hearted and vermin-free as they were. While kids today may not enjoy listening to “Blue-tailed fly,” I've always liked the song, and I'm deeply grateful that Burl Ives managed to sing a song about flies without dragging his private parts into it.

A chance conversation with a colleague who happened to be teaching a course on women in science got me to thinking about game-playing. She showed me a passage from an article by J. B. Kahle (1985) evaluating “factors contributing to the under-representation and under-utilization of women in science.” Among other things, the author attributed disparities in computer literacy between boys and girls at least in part to a male bias in available computer software; “out of seventy-five titles, appropriate for middle-school children, more than a third have been rated as being exclusively for males. Only four titles, 5 per cent, have been identified as being of primary interest to girls.” On reviewing those titles identified as being of primary interest to girls, I gained little insight on how the author did these identifications; as a former middle-school girl, I can't recall ever being even vaguely interested in “Typing Fractions.” Notwithstanding, it occurred to me that a similar phenomenon might account for the “under-representation and underutilization ”of entomologists in science. Think about it—we all have high school classmates who went on to become doctors, but how many of us can name high school classmates who went on to become entomologists? There's

probably a higher probability that we have classmates who went on to become serial killers than went on to become entomologists. I thought that maybe, at some critical juncture, young boys and girls simply weren't given toys appropriate to piquing their interest in the professional possibilities of working with small, crawling animals.

So I went to the toy store. My suspicions that toy manufacturers are not targeting the entomologically inclined were instantly confirmed. At first glance, some games may actually seem to have educational value. Take the venerable Milton Bradley game for preschoolers, Cootie. The object of the game is to be the first player to construct a Cootie Bug from various and sundry Cootie pieces (body, head, antennae, eyes, tongues, and legs). Anatomical relationships are even fairly accurate—a complete Cootie Bug has three clearly discernible body regions, three pairs of legs, one pair of appropriately located antennae, and a nicely coiled proboscis, as do so many flesh-and-blood (or cuticle-and-hemolymph) insects. So why do I feel that this game might not entice youngsters to further their entomological educations? Basically, because they're COOTIES, for crying out loud. What kinds of conversations are transpiring all over the country, probably every day?

Six-year-old: “What exactly is a Cootie Bug, Mommy?”

Mommy:“Well, dear, a Cootie Bug is a body louse—a repulsive, disease-carrying ectoparasite that lives under your clothing and sucks your blood.”

Six-year-old: “Waaaaaaaaaa!”

Milton Bradley, by the way, now sells a Giant Cootie Game, so kids can assemble even larger disease-carrying ectoparasites that live

under clothing and suck blood, as well as a game called Ants in the Pants, the object of which is to propel, tiddlywink-style, sixteen ants into a pair of oversized pants with suspenders, and yet another, called Bedbugs, which consists of removing jumping bedbugs from the bedclothes of a nightgown-clad sleeper. These games seem more likely to promote insomnia than they are to promote a healthy interest in insects.

Other arthropod characters popular with game designers are slavering vicious predators. Milton Bradley offers Spider Wars,“the Spider Fighter Game,” the object of which is to “knock all of your opponent's spiders off the web or get to your opponent's nest first.” The back of the box exhorts youngsters to “push your spider legs in and pop your opponent's spider legs out! Make enemy spiders dangle, then knock ‘em off the web!” I can't help wondering whether kids who enjoy these sorts of games might well be the sort to grow up and eat their mates. TSR Incorporated offers Web of Gold, a treasure hunt through a gold mine that features “a giant spider, one of the terrifying creatures that drove away the conquistadors and inspired the legends. Spiders are not interested in gold, only in silencing the noisy intruders who disturb the quiet of their cold and lightless lair.” The box cover features an irascible-looking tarantula, ill-tempered, no doubt, at being depicted dangling from an orb web inasmuch as tarantulas never spin aerial webs.

More egregious than even these spider games (which, remember, exhort players to pop the legs off arthropods) are the cockroach games. Now, admittedly, I'm no great admirer of cockroaches, but even they don't deserve what they get from Milton Bradley. Milton Bradley markets a game called Splat—“The Bug Squishing Race Game,” the object of which is to “get 2

of your bugs to the midnight snack before they get splatted.” To play the game, players make their own bugs (with the plastic Bug-O-Matic provided) out of “colorful Squish-It dough.” Large, hand-like objects are provided to do the squishing should a bug be unfortunate enough to land on the wrong square. Along the same lines, from Iwaya Corporation in Taiwan, is Wacko the Cockroach, a portly, furry winged insect-like creature with the requisite number of antennae that squats engagingly on the floor with a sort of sleepy-eyed expression. Accompanying Wacko in his box is a long-handled plastic mallet. The object of the game (I kid you not) is to smash Wacko with the mallet, causing the battery-powered cockroach to make plaintive squeaking noises and to run frantically around in circles. The box explains in fractured unpunctuated haiku-like verse:

“I'm WACKO THE COCKROACH, the

Toughest roach ever you can hit me on the

Head with my own hammer I'll run away

Squealing, but I'll be back I have courage,

It's brains that I lack!”

I bought Wacko the Cockroach for my then three-year-old nephew Adam; my sister said he cried when his father, demonstrating the game, slammed the mallet down on Wacko's head. Little Adam never played with it again (although my brother-in-law ordered another one for himself).

About the least offensive role that insects play in children's games is as prey items. Such is the case for Milton Bradley's Melvin the Motorized Looney Gooney Bird, who gobbles up plastic antlike creatures, and for Mr. Mouth, The Feed the Frog

Game (“flip flies into frog's snapping mouth and his eyes jiggle and his head spins round and round”—not exactly a reaction to promote experimental entomophagy). Tyco's “Grabbin' Grasshoppers the Jumpin' Grasshopper Game” allows players to wait expectantly for spring-loaded grasshoppers to leap up off the playing surface and snag them with insect nets.

The one saving grace in this great arthropod toy desert, the one game that restores my faith in an industry that is ostensibly dedicated to educating impressionable youth, comes from Waddingtons Games Ltd. of Leeds, England. Bizzy, Bizzy BumbleBees is the “Bee-Boppin' Pollen Poppin ' Race Game”(note: games manufacturers seem to drop the final ‘g' a lot; viz., Grabbin' Grasshoppers the Jumpin' Grasshopper Game and, right next to it on the shelf, Superdough Sparklin' Butterfly Maker). Up to four can play. Each player equips himself with a beehive and a colored headband, attached to which is a matching magnetic bumblebee. The object of the game is to pick up steel pollen marbles from a rocking flower with the magnetic bumblebee attached to your head and place them in your beehive until all of the marbles are gone. The bumblebee that picks up more pollen marbles than anyone else is the winner.

This game is obviously extraordinary in many ways. First of all, nobody gets squashed, swallowed, or mutilated in the course of playing, although, one runs the risk of losing one's marbles. Secondly, the players' objectives are actually constructive. Along those lines, according to the instructions (“Bee-4 you play”), all players must take the “Bumblebee Oath”—

“I promise NOT to purposely hit someone else's bumblebee with mine.”

“I promise NOT to slam the flower with my bumblebee.”

“I promise not to laugh too much at how silly grown-ups look playing this game”—

words all of us surely can live by.

Actually, the Bumblebee Oath is probably the best preparation for a career in entomology. Lawyers, doctors, and business executives rarely are called upon to engage in professional activities that may leave them open to public ridicule—but it's really hard to keep one's dignity upon being confronted while swinging a butterfly net chasing nearly invisible insects on a blazing hot day illegally parked on a highway overpass. “Well, officer,” you can always say, “sometimes grown-ups look silly playing this game.”

California has a well-earned reputation for cultural innovation. So it's not altogether inconsistent that, way back in 1929, it was the first state to officially designate an insect as a state symbol. Even as long ago as 1929, state flowers and trees were old news— Washington, Delaware, Oklahoma, Maine, Montana, and Nebraska had all selected state flowers even before the turn of the twentieth century. State birds were also fairly widespread by 1929. But, because of California's progressive thinking, state insects became a reality decades before there were any state dogs (Chesapeake Bay Retriever, Maryland 1964), state drinks (tomato juice, Ohio 1965), state vegetables (chile and frijole—New Mexico 1965), state shells (Scotch bonnet, North Carolina 1965), state horses (Appaloosa, Idaho 1975) or state sports (jousting, Maryland 1962). In fact, the California state insect antedates by more than 20 year the state “animal,” the California grizzly bear. State animals, by the way, are all fur-covered creatures with mammary glands; in the political arena, insects, fish, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and anything extinct don't count as “animals.”

The idea for a state insect in California came from the Lorquin Entomological Society of Los Angeles, whose members sought to

have their home state “be the first in the entomological field to record a local symbol of its science” (Gunder 1929). They selected three butterflies to be placed on a statewide ballot, sent to “every known person really interested in entomology in the state.” A whopping 88 ballots were received, revealing a landslide 77 vote victory for Zerene eurydice, the “California Dog Head” or “Flying Pansy,” over its opponents, the California Sister, Heterochroa californica (11 votes) and the Lorquin's admiral, Basilarchia lorquini (no votes). That the Lorquin's admiral received no votes suggests that even the person who nominated the butterfly for the ballot didn't even vote for it.

Times have certainly changed with respect to insect politics, regrettably for the worse, since that landmark election. I personally can't see anything named “Dog Head” or “Flying Pansy” winning any kind of election nowadays. State insects are now no longer chosen by powerful influence groups like the Lorquin Entomological Society of Los Angeles—rather, they are generally selected by statewide balloting of schoolchildren, who are of course otherwise not allowed to vote on any issues of substance. As I write, there are 27 states with official state insects and two states with arthropods as state fossils.

Given that there are at least 30,000 species of beetles alone in the United States, it would seem statistically unlikely that any two states should end up with the same state insect. It's not at all surprising, for example, that seven states have chosen “milk” as their state drink; there are simply not that many substances humans imbibe that can be regarded as wholesome and non-addictive. Yet 12 of the 27 states with official state insects have named the “honey bee” (an introduced species) as their state symbol (13 if you count Utah, which doesn 't have a state insect but which calls

itself the “Beehive State”). These states—Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Maine, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, South Dakota, Vermont, and Wisconsin— range geographically and politically all over the map. It's unlikely that voters in these states could agree on any issue other than state insect. Five more have named the “ladybug” as their choice—Delaware, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Ohio, and Tennessee (although Tennessee appears to have named the firefly as its state insect as well). Distributed among the remaining states are the “firefly” (Pennsylvania and the other half of Tennessee), the European praying mantis (Connecticut), the Baltimore checkerspot (Maryland), the “dragonfly” (Michigan), the monarch butterfly (Illinois), and the Oregon swallowtail (Oregon).

As far as I can tell, California was unique in having a state insect until 1973, when the forward-thinking people of Maryland designated the most appropriate Baltimore checkerspot as state insect (but I would expect nothing less from a people who designated jousting as their state sport). The inspired choice of the people of Maryland stands in stark contrast to the actions of residents of Arkansas, Nebraska, New Jersey, and North Carolina, who within the next three years all named the honey bee as the unique and distinctive symbol of their respective states.

Unfortunately, the concept of naming an insect to represent the spirit of the state seemed to have gotten lost in the political process. The proliferation of beneficial insects (bees, mantids, and ladybugs) among the ranks of state insects demonstrates this point dramatically. By and large, state flowers are not useful; otherwise, the soybean, and not the violet, would be the state flower of Illinois. By and large, state insects are useful. Why is it that only useful insects are “politically correct”? Admittedly, it is not only

insects that find the political environment hazardous. When New York was preparing to name the beaver their state animal in 1975, a disgruntled legislator in Oregon (which had designated the beaver as its state animal six years earlier) suggested that “the cockroach ” might be a more fitting symbol for the Empire State. And in 1987, Governor Jim Thompson vetoed a bill that would have named the Tully monster Tullimonstrum gregarium the state fossil of Illinois because “an election among schoolchildren . . . would resemble the Soviet electoral system.” The governor was bothered by the proposed election process, according to which schoolchildren would receive a ballot to mark either “yes” or “no” to the Tully monster, a 300 million year old marine animal known only from coal shale deposits in Illinois. The Champaign-Urbana News Gazette (September 16, 1987) quoted the governor as eloquently and persuasively arguing that “It's either yes or no on the Tully monster. That's un-American. . . . That's how they run elections in Russia. This is not Russia, it's Illinois.” Interestingly, the Tully monster finally did win approval as state fossil in December 1989 and Thompson declined to run for re-election three years later. It remains to be seen whether Governor Thompson will be nominated for anything in 300 million years.

That useful insects are overwhelmingly the choice of most Americans to represent their place of residence is not for want of trying by more entomologically enlightened voters. In the discussion over the Wisconsin state insect in 1985, for example, the mosquito was unsuccessfully pitched as a possible candidate due to its status as an important link in the aquatic food chain. During the long debate over a state insect for New York, legislators were unconvinced by conservationists who argued that an endangered species, such as the Karner blue butterfly Lycaeides melissa samuelis,

would be a more appropriate symbol of the state's natural resources than the ravening, aphid-devouring ladybeetles. In 1992, it was a politician who showed some imagination facing down the “bee boosters” in the Oklahoma Legislature when he proposed “the tick” as state insect. Although his taxonomic skills weren't exactly awe-inspiring, inasmuch as ticks are arachnids and not insects, his logic was impeccable. State Senator Lewis Long “lobbied for the tick because it would have something in common with mistletoe, the official state flower. Both are parasites” (Chicago Tribune, April 22, 1992). Senator Gilmer Capps, tool of the state beekeepers and proponent of the original bill, prevailed, however, and the honey bee bill was adopted unanimously. That unanimous ballot meant that, when the votes were counted, Senator Long didn't even have the backbone to support his own candidate.

It's true that insects have never really enjoyed good public relations —but politicians these days are hardly in a position to throw stones. What with influence peddling, pork barreling, sexual harassment, illegal campaign contributions, and all, it may well be that the next nominee for state insect will be a spineless politician.

I'm not really much of a sports fan, and women's track and field events in particular have never held any great fascination for me—no doubt the legacy of a sadistic tenth grade gym teacher, who used to send us back to the building from the school track with the promise to give C's to the last four people through the door. My interest was piqued, however, in 1993, when a controversy erupted during China's seventh National Games. In case you were following the pennant races at the time, I'll recapitulate—on Saturday, September 11, Qu Xunxia shaved more than two seconds off the world's record for the women 's 1500 meter race, only three days after teammate Wang Junxia broke the record for the women's 10,000 meter race by 42 seconds. Critics quickly accused the team of using performance-enhancing drugs. According to one newspaper account, the team's coach, Ma Zunren, rose to his team's defense at a news conference: “he held up a light brown box and said, to laughter and the excited clicking of cameras, that the key to their success is a health tonic made from caterpillar fungus.”

This kind of sports news I can relate to. I've actually had firsthand experience with Chinese medicinal insects —at least buying

them, if not exactly trying them. My first brush with Chinese insect materia medica was during the Tenth International Congress of Entomology in Vancouver, British Columbia, which also happened to be my honeymoon. Okay, so maybe giving two talks at an International Congress of Entomology is not everybody's idea of a romantic honeymoon venue, but it seemed like a good idea at the time. One day between sessions, my husband Richard and I wandered over to Vancouver's Chinatown and stumbled across a Chinese herb shop. Looking in the window, I saw what I recognized as a jar full of cicada exoskeletons prominently displayed; we went in, and, with a lot of gesturing and pointing, conveyed our interest to the non-English-speaking proprietor and headed off triumphantly with our purchase.

The next shopping expedition, in Honolulu a year later, met with substantially less success. In the midst of a Pacific Rim Chemical Congress, we headed for Chinatown and quickly found a Chinese herb shop. This time, however, there were no cicadas in the window and, instead of merely pointing, we were forced to explain to the non-English-speaking proprietor that we were looking for insects. After numerous gestures, flitting motions, and buzzing sounds, the proprietor, comprehending what we were looking for, stared at us as if we were nuts (this from a guy with dried lizards in his window), and motioned for us to try the shop across the street. Whether he phoned ahead to warn his competitor, we'll never know, but we had even less success at the next shop. This time, we got nothing but blank stares until I took out a piece of paper and pencil and drew a crude picture of an insect. The proprietor looked at us in horror, shouted something that I presume was unflattering in Chinese, and hustled us out the door. Standing out in the street, Richard thought for a minute and

then figured that the proprietor probably assumed we were from the Health Department there to accuse him of harboring cockroaches. Needless to say, we left Honolulu bereft of cicada exoskeletons or caterpillar fungus, although Richard did manage to pick up some nice eelskin wallets for next to nothing in the gift shop next to the hotel.

I thought my insect materia medica buying days were pretty much at a standstill until I went to the mailbox one day and found a catalogue from an outfit called Standard Homeopathic in Los Angeles, (where else) California. I hadn't ordered the catalogue, but I imagine I received it as a result of being on a number of very strange and not necessarily complementary mailing lists. I wonder sometimes what the mailman thinks when he delivers the Vegetarian Times and the Omaha Steaks International catalogue to the same person. Homeopathic medicine, I read from the enclosed brochure, is a “therapeutic system” developed during the early nineteenth century by Samuel Hahnemann in Germany. It's based on the ancient dogma, similia smilibus [sic] curentur—”let likes be cured by likes.” In a nutshell, the idea is that substances that in large quantities cause illness in humans can, when administered in much smaller doses, effect a cure of that same illness. “In a nutshell,” indeed, since most of the medicaments in the catalogue were of plant origin—a case in point being the use of Nux vomica, the “poison nut” for “gastric and living disorders occasioned by high living, overeating, or excessive medication. . . . Nux Vomica can also help break the laxative habit.” Scattered in amongst the plants, however, were some familiar names —among them, the honey bee Apis mellifica (an almost familiar name at least—entomologists spell it Apis mellifera), recommended for edema, insect bites, and skin problems, the Oriental cockroach Blatta orientalis, to be taken

for cough, the Spanishfly Cantharis, recommended for burns and sore throats, and the hornet Vespa crabro, prescribed for nausea and burning skin eruption. I was ecstatic—here was an opportunity to order insect-derived medicines in the comfort of my own living room, without having to undergo the fuss and bother of traveling to inconveniently far-off places like Hawaii.

Ordering these products was about as easy as communicating with Chinese-speaking proprietors of herb shops, however. These remedies were available either as tinctures, tablets, or pellets, in various potencies.Apis mellifica, for example, was available in all three forms. The remedies were also available in a variety of formulations, ranging in potency from 3X (a 1 to 1,000 dilution) to 30X (a 1 to 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 dilution). I just kind of closed my eyes, filled in the form, and hoped for the best. Several weeks and about $80 later, I received my bug drugs, no doubt raising the eyebrows of our mailman once more.

Most of the order arrived as promised, although, to my disappointment, Cimex (a medicinal preparation featuring bed bugs) wasn't available and Cantharis tincture was available by “prescription only.” I still haven't used any of these homeopathic medicines and I probably won't. I probably won't even order them again. If I feel the need for homeopathic entomological medicaments, I've actually succeeded in locating a local source for some of these products—a neighborhood grocery store with a health food section stocks a wide assortment of homeopathic remedies, including a product called Flea Relief, from Dr. Goodpet Laboratories, Inglewood, where else? California, which contains, among other things, Apis mellifica 3X and Pulex irritans (the human flea) 12X.

I was disappointed, though, not to receive the Cantharis. After

all, this is the one insect medicament with demonstrable pharmacological activity. While entomologists know it as Lytta vesicatoria, in popular parlance, Cantharis is known as Spanishfly. It's probably the world's best known and most widely abused aphrodisiac. As do many meloids, known collectively as oil beetles due to their propensity for exuding toxic oily body secretions through their joints, L. vesicatoria produces powerful defensive secretions, in this case containing the terpene anhydride cantharidin. Cantharidin is a potent vesicant, or blistering agent, and irritant of mucus membranes. Thus, cantharidin has dramatic physiological effects upon ingestion, which, depending on one's personal proclivities, can be regarded as either desirably stimulating or undesirably painful. Cantharidin's use as an aphrodisiac is fundamentally unsound, however, because it's extremely toxic even at low dosages—as little as 30 mg can prove lethal (and indeed, the infamous Marquis de Sade was prosecuted in 1772 for poisoning several prostitutes by administering Spanishfly to them without their knowledge). Needless to say, the use of Spanishfly and cantharidin for treating humans for erectile dysfunction has been illegal since the nineteenth century, although it is still routinely prescribed for warts.

I may have an opportunity after all, however, to get my hands on some Spanishfly. The mailman came by and left a catalogue for my husband from an outfit called Leisure Time Products (located, surprisingly, not in California but right next door in Gary, Indiana). I won't tell you what's on the cover, or what's on most of the pages, although I will say the word “hot” shows up on an inordinate number of pages. I did ask my husband how he happened to receive the catalogue, though, and he shrugged, looked innocent and said,“Mailing lists—you know. . . .” I will say,

though, on page 47, there was an advertisement for a product called “Spanish Fly.” I can't help but wonder what it really is, since the over-the-counter sale of Spanishfly for human use is strictly forbidden by law (but, I guess, so are a lot of other things depicted in that catalogue . . .). I'd really like to order it, just out of scientific curiosity, but I'm hesitant. For one thing, I can't imagine what our mailman will think if I actually order something from Leisure Time Products. Second, it's $12.95 a bottle and I'm not sure I want to spend that kind of a money, particularly if it's lining the pockets of a less than savory operation. More important, though, I don't know how I'll ever decide which one of the 15 flavors to order.

Unlike many Americans, I do not view my computer as a recreational device. Actually, I tend to view it as more of an electronic tyrant that constantly makes unreasonable demands of me and that will keep tormenting me until I no longer have the strength to lift my fingers to the keyboard. While the amount of paper that can stack up on my desk is finite, as determined by such physical laws as gravity and friction, my computer seems to have a limitless capacity for storing things that aren't yet finished. Even when it's turned off, screen black and empty, it is a silent reminder of my inability to fulfill my obligations. I expect I owe an e-mail reply, a letter, a manuscript review, or a book chapter to at least 30% of the people reading this book.

So it goes without saying that I don't cruise the information highway casually. When I do venture out onto the Web, it's almost invariably for some work-related purpose. There's certainly no shortage of entomological information on the Web. If you conduct a search on the subject of “insects” using almost any of the popular search engines, you end up with a list of some 300,000 items to sort through. Here's another confession—I am not at all proficient at dealing with this information in byte form rather

than book form. Books are nice and predictable; if you found one in the library five years ago, odds are good that today, barring vandalism and budget cuts, it's still sitting approximately where it was and it still looks pretty much how it looked five years ago. On the Web, nothing stays put for very long. Finding information on the Web is a lot like looking for cockroaches in an urban apartment —you know they're there, and it takes a while to find them, but, when you do, you eventually find more of them than you ever imagined possible.

I guess it's not surprising, then, that cockroaches and the Internet are so sympatico. Querying the search engine Alta Vista about “cockroaches ” yields some 30,000 matching items. Conspicuous among these is Cockroach World, the self-proclaimed “Yuckiest site on the internet” with all manner of information, including video and sound files for the stouthearted. The site “How to care for pet cockroaches” offers tips on housing and feeding pet cockroaches at home. You can find out why, unless you're really fond of cockroaches, you might want to avoid staying in the Jolly Swagman youth hostel in Sydney, Australia; you can go about designing your own integrated cockroach management program; you can obtain expert opinions on cockroach allergies from the National Jewish Center for Immunology and Respiratory Medicine; and you can even look up every reference to cockroaches in the collected work of Monty Python, if you're so inclined.

But the home page that forced me out into the Internet in the first place was “Joe's Apartment.” “Joe's Apartment” is a home page devoted to a feature film of the same name—the first feature film to be produced by MTV, the cable station best known for rock videos, for Beavis and Butthead, and for contracting the attention

span of American 18-year-olds to about three minutes. “Joe's Apartment,” an expanded version of a three-minute short by the same name first seen on television in 1992, is basically the story of a guy from Iowa who comes to New York City and finds that the only friends he can make in the big city are the cockroaches that infest his apartment. These aren't your average New York City cockroaches—they not only speak (rudely, on occasion, as you might expect of a New York cockroach), they also can sing, breakdance, perform synchronized swimming routines, and otherwise perform remarkable six-legged feats. Although 5,000 live cockroaches, wrangled by Ray Mendez of the American Museum of Natural History, were used in the filming, many of the more complex scenes involved an impressive blend of puppetry and computer animation.

I actually didn't learn about the making of “Joe's Apartment” from the Website, which is mostly video clips from the movie—I learned about it from television, where I've learned so many other useful things in life (like, for example, all of the words to the theme song of “Mister Ed”). To promote the movie, MTV ran a couple of half-hour programs, one called “The Making of Joe 's Apartment” and the other “MTV Unbugged,” which featured clips from the films, interviews with the stars and special effects people, and clips from other great moments in cockroach cinema. It was the latter aspect of the program that especially aroused my interest, having had a longstanding interest in insects in movies. The program just didn't really do justice to celluloid roaches or even to the intellectual predecessors of “Joe's Apartment.”

In fact, the first full-length feature film about cockroaches was also an animated musical. In a deservedly forgettable moment of Hollywood history,“shinbone alley,” an animated jazz/opera about

a cockroach, was released in 1971. Based on a book of poetry written by Don Marquis in 1927, it's the story of a poet who drowns in a river and finds his soul transmigrated into a cockroach—archy—who breaks into the office of a newspaper reporter and types poetry at night on the typewriter. His poetry and his name both are rendered in lower case because, as a cockroach in pre-computer days, he couldn't hit both the letter key and shift-lock key at the same time. The movie recounts his adventures, his friendship with an alley cat, and his philosophical musings from an insect perspective. Not surprisingly, it wasn't well received by critics—Vincent Canby of the New York Times called it “rather ordinary.” The public wasn't exactly enthralled, either; when we showed it here at the University of Illinois at an insect fear film festival a few years back, a disgruntled audience began to chant “Die, archy, die!” before we even got to the third reel.

Things have obviously changed a lot in the last 25 years. For one thing, cockroaches are much more conspicuous in films than they' ve ever been. In fact, it's a little disquieting just exactly how rapidly their numbers are growing. From 1971 to 1980, there were really only two theatrical releases featuring cockroaches in pivotal roles: “Bug” (1975), about oversized flesh-eating combustible cockroaches unleashed from the bowels of the earth after an earthquake, and “Damnation Alley” (1977), about a post-apocalyptic world dominated by oversized, flesh-eating, noncombustible cockroaches. In the early 1980s, pickings were slim, the principal entry being “Creepshow” (1982), an anthology film one-third of which featured E. G. Marshall as a wealthy New Yorker beset (and obsessed) with cockroaches. Things picked up in the late eighties, with “The Nest” (1987), “Twilight of the Cockroaches ” (1987),

“Nightmare on Elm Street IV” (1988), “Blue Monkey” (1988), “Deep Space” (1989), and “Meet the Applegates” (1989), all appearing as feature films with cockroaches, or their Hollywood approximations, figuring prominently in the plot. Then, in the nineties, things began to get out of hand. Along with feature films (“Pacific Heights” [1990], “Naked Lunch” [1991], “Joe's Apartment” [1996]) and animated or live-action shorts (“Juke Bar” [1990], “Joe's Apartment” [1992]), cockroaches began showing up with astonishing frequency in music videos—viz., EMF's cockroach-laden “Lies” (1991), Juliana Hatfield's “I See You” (1992), Matthew Sweet's “Time Capsule” (1992), Soundgarden's “Black Hole Sun” (1994), and Nine-Inch-Nails' “Closer” (1994).

As an entomologist, this escalating pattern looks disturbingly familiar to me. Students of introductory ecology recognize an exponential growth curve as characterizing the pattern of population growth of organisms that are not constrained by environmental limits. In fact, if the number of cockroach-related films is plotted against time in five-year increments, the resulting relationship can be described by a quadratic regression with the equation, y = 1981 - 1.58x + 0.41x ². This curve can be used to extrapolate into the future, in order to estimate the number of cockroach films at a future date, given that current growth trends continue. If so, according to these calculations, by the turn of the twenty-second century (2101), we can expect to see more than 300 cockroach films coming out every five years. That works out to about 60 cockroach films a year, or five cockroach films a month, or a little more than a cockroach film every week.

With that many movies being made about cockroaches, I can't imagine there will be time for making any other kind of movie. Hollywood may well be given over entirely to the care and

feeding of cockroaches to meet the demands of producers and directors, not to mention the cockroach-hungry public. There likely will be all-cockroach cable channels for those productions released direct to video. On the positive side, such a situation might mean more employment opportunities for entomologists, but overall even I think it's a dim view of the future. Although it has often been said that cockroaches will someday take over the world, I always thought it would somehow involve a nuclear blast and lethal levels of atomic radiation, not Dolby sound and Technicolor.

I've never really been one for playing games. I'd like to think that this lack of enthusiasm results from an overdeveloped work ethic but, in reality, it is probably a consequence of the fact that, for the duration of an otherwise completely happy childhood, I was never once able to beat my older brother Alan at a game of Monopoly, or any other board game, for that matter. However, after at least a dozen people (including my aforementioned brother) asked me if I had seen the new computer game “Bad Mojo,” I felt a professional obligation to investigate, childhood traumas notwithstanding.

I wasn't a complete stranger to computer-based insect games at the time. In January 1993, while visiting my sister and her family in Connecticut, I watched in awe as Adam Escalante, my then six-year-old nephew, adroitly maneuvered his way through a game called “Battle Bugs,” basically an electronic war game but with hexapod, or occasional octopod, participants who face each other on such battlefields as kitchen counters or picnic tables engaged in campaigns given colorful names like “Dessert Storm. ” Adam was surprised that, as an entomologist, I'd never even heard of the game and was disappointed that a Ph.D. in entomology didn't

really equip me to provide him with helpful tips on how to win. Needless to say, Aunt May's stock went down a few points that day in the Escalante household. But even the shame of having disillusioned my nephew wasn't enough to motivate me to try playing the game myself. Old aversions are very hard to overcome.

There are times, however, when personal preferences must be set aside for the good of the profession and eventually I went to a local CD-ROM discount outlet to see what I could find in the way of insect-related computer games. In comparison with my earlier foray into the world of insect-related games (“Bizzy, Bizzy Entomologists”), a few contrasts immediately came to light. For one thing, computer-based games about insects are a whole lot more expensive to buy than are traditional board or boxed games about insects. In less than an hour, I managed to run up a bill of more than $182 (and this is a discount outlet, remember) for less than one full grocery-store sized plastic bag full of games. These games also cost a whole lot more to play than your basic board games. To play a game of “Cootie,” by Milton Bradley, for example (list price $6.49), you supply a table or a floor; everything else you need comes in the box. To play “Elroy Goes Bugzerk,” from Headbone Interactive, you need a 33 MHz processor, an 8-bit color monitor, and a double speed CD-ROM drive.

Which brings up yet another problem: compatibility. To play Cootie, it doesn't much matter if your table is made of oak or maple, or if your carpet is yellow or beige. After I spent $30 on “Bug” (Sega) and brought it home, I discovered that it was formatted for PC only —which meant that, if I were really intent on playing it, I needed to spend an additional $2200 to purchase a 486 DX4 100 MHz or a Pentium 60 MHz machine with 1 MB video RAM, Soundblaster 16, and Windows 95. Fortunately,

because I possessed a System 7.1 Macintosh with 8 MB RAM, an 8-bit color monitor, and a CD-ROM drive with a 300 KB per second transfer rate at home, I was equipped, at least technologically, to play “Bad Mojo” (list price $54.95, discount price $39.95), which was, indeed, one of the games for sale at United CD-Rom. After a few false starts, which involved crashing my computer twice before I located the set of instructions for installing the software, I attempted to play the game.

At this point, the contrast between computer games and traditional games became even more stark. I really did try to enjoy it, honestly, but everything I've always hated about games that come in boxes with dice and plastic playing pieces seems to be much worse in a computer game. And there are a few new things to hate, to boot (or, I suppose, to boot up). For example, I am exceptionally prone to motion sickness and I discovered that watching images flit across a computer screen is about as effective as a commuter flight from Champaign to Chicago on a prop-jet for inducing nausea, which, needless to say, profoundly tempered my enthusiasm for playing.

I was also totally unprepared for the complexity. To find out how to play “Cootie,” you read the instructions (printed in reasonably big letters) on the side of the box, with headings like “Object of the Game,” “Playing Cootie” and “To Win.” Pretty much everything you need to know is there, and there's really no pressing need for a toll-free help line. With “Bad Mojo,” you get a few vague hints in a 14-page illustrated booklet and then you're on your own unless you want to invest in the “Bad Mojo Official Player's Guide” ($19.99), including “all the tips, tricks, and strategies you need to master this hot new game!”

I guess I should explain the concept of “Bad Mojo.” Essentially,

it is a role-playing game based on the character of Dr. Roger Samms, an entomologist (from the College of Chemical Ecology at the California University at Barbary Coast) with experience in pesticide development. As the game begins, he is packing his bags with large wads of cash, in apparent haste, in preparation for leaving for Mexico. After gazing into an antique locket, however, Dr. Samms is, with apologies to Franz Kafka, miraculously transformed into a cockroach. The object of the game is to help Dr. Samms make his way back to his own humanity, by directing him through a decrepit old building along San Francisco 's waterfront and avoiding the thousand natural shocks cockroach flesh is heir to. These shocks include roach motels, called “cockroach corrals” in the game, voracious spiders, an overly playful cat, flypaper, vacuum cleaners, cigarette butts, cans of insecticide, rats, mousetraps, and a range of other such urban delights. It's all very mystical and mysterious; intermittently, floating disembodied heads in liquor bottles appear on screen to provide the player with poetic but cryptic hints as to how to proceed. I must confess, I gave up before my first liquor bottle (on-screen); I just found it all too frustrating.

Perhaps most frustrating was the fact that elements of the game didn 't make sense, entomologically speaking. It's true that the cockroach is rendered anatomically with tremendous accuracy, even down to the level of tarsal segments, and its movements are amazingly realistic—realistic enough to fool Leo, our least intellectually gifted cat, who made playing the game considerably more complicated by periodically launching himself at the screen in an attempt to capture and eat the cockroach image. After all, the game boasts more than 800 two- and three-dimensional scenes and 35 minutes of live-action video. And a list of acknowledg

ments in the game package indicates that at least two entomologists were consulted in the development of the game. All the same, I found scant evidence that the entomological consultants had had much impact on the game. The on-screen cockroach simply did not behave in ways that I, as an entomologist, had long believed that cockroaches should behave. To cite just one frustrating example, according to the rules of “Bad Mojo,” cockroaches cannot cross bodies of water. Had my cockroach ever reached a body of water to cross, I never would have figured out this rule—faced with a cockroach that for hours refused my command to move forward, I probably would have thrown a desk chair at the computer while citing literature that proves without doubt that cockroaches can, in fact, swim.

Fortunately for me and my computer, before my CD-ROM drive transfer rate dropped precipitously from 300 KB per second to zero, my husband heard the disgruntled mumblings and stopped in to see what my problem was. Now, Richard is quite a game player and, I feel compelled to point out, an only child without a Monopoly-hustling older brother, and he kindly volunteered to take over the cockroach for me. He spent about a week, in spare hours, manipulating the cockroach around cigarette butts and broken toilets and, eventually, managed to restore Dr. Samms to human form, long after restoring me to my human form. From time to time he'd call me into the room to show me the various situations he'd maneuvered in and out of, whereupon I'd call some petty biological detail into question; he would then shrug and continue playing and I'd stalk out of the room again, vaguely perturbed but decidedly relieved that I wasn't the one playing the game.

So ultimately it was Richard, a Ph.D. in linguistics, who figured

out the game. Once again, my Ph.D. in entomology failed to provide any special advantage in tackling a game about insects. I asked Richard if he felt that he'd gained any insights into cockroach life, or even entomologists, as a result of his effort, and his answer was noncommital (although he did seem to take special notice of an obnoxious and domineering female department head that I'm assuming is entirely unrelated to the fact that he's married to a female department head). I really am grateful to him, though, and I feel that I ought to express my appreciation in some tangible way. Maybe I can get him a Bad Mojo T-shirt ($18.95), a Bad Mojo baseball cap ($22.95), or a Bad Mojo poster ($17.95). Even better, I can get him a Bad Mojo limited edition designer watch ($59.00), so we'll be able to get an accurate estimate of just how long it's been that we've been having so much fun.

It was while I was reading an obituary several years ago that I realized just how interesting entomologists can be. Dr. Robert Traub, who died December 21, 1996, at Bethesda Naval Medical Center in Maryland, was a world-renowned authority on the systematics of fleas. His obituary, appearing in the New York Times on January 5, 1997, recounted in detail his many professional accomplishments. Although I was reasonably familiar with his work, I was completely unaware that Dr. Traub had over the course of his life acquired some avocational interests along with his professional ones. Among other things, he was evidently an avid collector of blowguns—an avocation, I would venture to guess, unique among entomologists.

This revelation fell hard on the heels of another along the same lines. While in my hotel room in Louisville, Kentucky, reading the program for the 1996 national meeting of the Entomological Society of America, I discovered that Dr. James Slater, winner of the 1996 Founder's Award, is, in addition to being a distinguished Hemiptera systematist, a nationally renowned authority on antique glass and, in fact, is a past president and honorary member of the National Milk Glass Collectors Society. Polite inquiries

around my own department reveal that just about everybody has achieved avocational accolades; among my colleagues here are a navy-blue belt in tae kwan do, a competition-class wind surfer, and a cantor at a local synagogue. And it's not just at the University of Illinois that entomologists distinguish themselves at their avocations. At Cornell University, where I was a graduate student, my major professor, Paul Feeny, was an avid sailor and one-time captain of the Cayuga Lake Cruising Fleet; another member of my thesis committee was a superb pianist and conductor of a small orchestra, and at least one additional member of the entomology faculty was a breeder of prize-winning guinea pigs.

I can't claim to have ever achieved avocational distinction, at least in part because my vocation keeps getting in the way. Because I am chronically unable to keep up with my professional obligations, I have a hard time justifying time off from work and, as a consequence, virtually all of my avocational activities somehow get connected to my profession. I collect stamps, for example, but I only collect stamps with insects on them. Moreover, I organize these stamps taxonomically, rather than by country or date of issue, which means my collection renders most real stamp collectors apoplectic with disapproval. I can't claim to be a definitive authority on films, other than those featuring oversized radiation-mutated arthropods; since, last I checked, Fran çois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard never made any big bug films, my opinions on film are rarely solicited by true cineastes. I'm not even an accomplished consumer; when I go shopping, I buy the paper towels with butterflies printed on them, irrespective of whether they're cheaper, stronger, or quicker picker-uppers.

I do have one legitimate outside interest, though. For reasons I'm not certain even I can articulate, I am inordinately fond of the

work of “Weird Al” Yankovic. For those with loftier musical tastes, I can explain that “Weird Al” Yankovic is widely acknowledged as the nation's premier pop music parodist. Over and above his phenomenal mastery of the minutiae of popular culture and his amazing facility with language, he has a wonderfully twisted sense of humor that I find very appealing. I've known about “Weird Al” for years, but I became particularly enthralled when I discovered that Hannah, my then six-year-old daughter, enjoyed listening to his songs on tape in the car to and from school, albeit on an entirely different level, inasmuch as she tends to prefer the rapid patter and funny accents to the parody and pastiche. Thus, “Weird Al” spared me from the risk of driving into a tree to escape from endless repetitions of her previous choice of listening material, the Chipmunks ' version of “Uptown Girl.”

This is not to say that “Weird Al” Yankovic and insects are entirely unrelated. There are, by my count, at least a dozen references to insects in “Weird Al”'s oeuvre. There are passing references to bed bugs in “Dare To Be Stupid,” potato bugs in “Addicted to Spuds,” flies in “That Boy Could Dance” and in “Good Old Days,” mosquitoes in “Jurassic Park,” “some kind of bug” in “Slime Creatures from Outer Space,” termites in “The Home Improvement Song (I'll Repair for You)” and to the Boll Weevil Monument (which really exists in Enterprise, Alabama) and tarantula ranches in “ The Biggest Ball of Twine in Minnesota.” In “One of Those Days,” “Weird Al” recounts the terrible things that happen to him during one particularly excruciating day; these include being followed by “a big swarm of locusts” and being tied to a tree by Nazis and covered with ants. And, in a parody of Camille Saint Saens' “Carnival of the Animals,” he even wrote a poem about cockroaches:

“Some think the Cockroach is a pest

But that's the insect I like best

I love the way they run in fright

When I turn on the kitchen light

And when I squish them on the ground

They make a pleasant crunching sound.”

So it's not as if “Weird Al” Yankovic would likely top any entomologist's list of insect-friendly musicians. As avocations go, I had picked one that allowed for a decent separation of work and play.

In the summer of 1996, though, despite my best intentions, my vocational and avocational interests intersected. I managed to convince Richard, my longsuffering spouse, that, for my 43rd birthday, it would be a splendid idea to drive 3-1/2 hours to Rockford, Illinois, to attend a “Weird Al” Yankovic concert. When I found out that the man himself would be making a personal appearance before the concert at a local music store only a few miles from the hotel where we were staying, I also convinced Richard that it would be a rare treat to wait an hour and a half in line to meet “Weird Al.” Actually, to be completely accurate, I didn 't convince him, exactly; after one glance at the line, he and Hannah took off for parts unknown while I held their places in line for the hour-and-a-half. During the wait, I had time to look over the crowd and note that Rockford's entomologists had not turned out in droves for autographs. Most of the crowd actually seemed to consist of preadolescent boys accompanied by a bemused parent. I was undeterred, however, and patiently waited my turn, “Bad Hair Day” cassette tape (his latest) in hand, ready for signing.

Before I knew it, I was at the head of the line. Actually, it wasn 't quite “before I knew it”—it was, I think, the longest I had stood waiting in a line, for any reason, in my entire adult life. By this time, my spouse and child had rejoined me and we all three faced “Weird Al” Yankovic in person. After he obligingly signed and returned the “Bad Hair Day” cassette, I found myself handing him a copy of my book, Bugs in the System. I brought it with me with the intention of offering it to him as a gift, explaining that I sincerely hoped he might get as much pleasure from my vocation as I did from his. I had rehearsed a little speech to that effect for much of the 90-minute wait. Much to my amazement, though, the speech I had so carefully rehearsed somehow degenerated into a few mumbled and largely incoherent phrases upon delivery.

To be honest, I really can't remember too many details about the exchange. I do recall that “Weird Al” looked a little surprised at being handed a book about insects—at least I think that I recall that he looked surprised. I can't imagine what he thought. For that matter, moments after the book left my hand, I couldn't imagine what I had thought. It's not as if rock stars are renowned for reading books about insects, particularly in the middle of a 90-city tour. After all, even college students whose grades depend on it often don't read books about insects. And it's not as if anything he had ever said or done indicated he had even the slightest interest in insects. What on earth had I been thinking of? What incredible lapse in judgment had just taken place?

That evening, we attended the concert—only the third concert I had ever attended in my life up to that point and the first since 1984, when I was somehow talked into seeing Slim Whitman perform at the Moultrie-Douglas County Fair—and we headed for home the next day. I left Rockford convinced that, by my

actions, I had reinforced every stereotype of the clueless entomologist. I was fairly confident that the book had ended up left behind on some hotel room dresser, if, in fact, it even made it out of the music store, and I devoutly wished that I could have for once in my life left insects out of the issue. Once home, I slipped comfortably back into being profoundly unidimensional. But hobbies are hard to shake; in between entomological pursuits, I continued to listen to “Weird Al” Yankovic.

And, at the December 1996 national meeting of the Entomological Society in Louisville, my avocation managed to get the upper hand again. During the evening session of the last day of the meeting, I ducked out early to run back to my hotel room. That night, the Disney Channel was scheduled to show “‘Weird Al' Yankovic: (There's No) Going Home,” a brand-new hour-long special based on his summer tour. Alone in the hotel room, while my colleagues discussed entomological matters of import, I watched “Weird Al” Yankovic on television, in a program that featured a combination of concert footage and interview segments.

I felt guilty, to be sure, but not guilty enough to turn it off and go back to the meeting. And I'm glad I didn't—I wouldn't be telling you this story if I had. In an interview segment ostensibly filmed on the road in his tour bus,“Weird Al” explained what life on tour was like.

“Nothing makes you long for the comfort of home and family more than traveling across the country in a bus with a big smelly rock band, ” he confided to his off-screen interviewer. “Sometimes, life on the road can get a little tiresome and one way that we like to break up the monotony is by stopping at various points of interest along the way to pick up a few souvenirs. For instance,

just yesterday I was in a cute little place called “Bugs ‘n' Stuff” just outside of Rockford, Illinois.” While I had been attentive throughout, when I heard “Bugs” and “Rockford” in the same sentence, I was transfixed. He continued,“That's where I picked up this little beauty. They call it a scorpion farm, ” he said as he displayed a terrarium filled with sand and few cacti, with a lid clearly set askew on the top. “You see, the clear glass container allows you to easily study the daily routine of the vicious poisonous red scorpion.” Noticing the conspicuous absence of any visible scorpions, he fumbled with the lid awkwardly, placed it down out of camera range, and muttered, “Let's just move on,” whereupon he proudly displayed his extensive collection of hotel soaps. As he was reminiscing about a particular soap bar from Saint Louis, his discourse was interrupted by the agonized screams of Jon “Bermuda” Schwartz, his drummer, who came running from the back of the bus covered with very plastic-looking red scorpions.

I was stunned—not so much by the joke, which was admittedly not one of his better ones, but by the subject matter. I didn't know how to interpret what I'd heard. I was sure, having spent the better part of two days in Rockford, that there wasn't a real place called “Bugs n' Stuff” in Rockford. “Weird Al” Yankovic played in 90 cities last summer and he picked Rockford as the site of “Bugs ‘n Stuff”—it just couldn't be a coincidence! Could it be, I wondered, that I inspired a gag on national television? With fingers shaking, I phoned my husband long distance, certain he would be as excited as I was about this amazing turn of events. To my surprise and disappointment, not only did he not share my excitement, he tried his best to convince me that it really was a coincidence, and not a very remarkable one at that, and that I probably had been working

too hard and needed to get more rest, preferably at that very moment.

I don't know, though—I still think it just couldn't have been a coincidence. Why Rockford? Why a scorpion farm? After all, it could have been a snake shack or a piranha palace or almost anything else. Admittedly, scorpions aren't insects, but they are arthropods—and what are the odds that a reference to bugs in Rockford could be a coincidence? I just can't understand why Richard doesn't see it that way. I think it must be that he secretly does believe me but is tired of being subjected to “Weird Al” all the time, or maybe it's that he's afraid we'll have to spend another weekend in Rockford if “Weird Al” goes back on tour. I don't think he really appreciates just how lucky he is, though. After all, as avocations go,“Weird Al” Yankovic is fairly innocuous. It's not like I have a hobby that's dangerous or expensive or anything. After all, what if he and I had a disagreement about my outside interests and I had a blow-gun collection to resort to?

There are, on occasion, some benefits to waking up early on Sunday mornings to watch television with a child. Had I not been watching Sunday morning children's television programming one morning in 1998, I probably wouldn't have seen the latest public service announcement from the Partnership for a Drug-Free America (PDFA). This very worthwhile organization is dedicated to reducing drug abuse, particularly among children and teenagers, by disseminating information about the dangers of drug use, on television as well as through other media. Actually, I didn't exactly see the announcement in its entirety that morning. I couldn't watch the entire commercial because my daughter Hannah, who was in possession of the remote control at the time, decided she wasn't in the mood for public service announcements and, over my strident protests, changed the channel in mid-spot. What I did manage to see went by rather quickly, and I saw enough to realize that the spot featured a large, purple animated insect and a tag line to the effect of “I'd rather eat a big ol' bug than ever take a stupid drug.”

Having an abiding interest in insect images in popular culture, I thus felt compelled to contact the PDFA directly and this

organization was kind enough to send me not only the entire text of the aforementioned ad but also a full-color video along with a lot of other information. Evidently, this ad was part of a new campaign, undertaken with the help of a 195 million dollar grant from the federal government, to run anti-drug advertising in the paid media for the first time in the history of the PDFA. Included in this effort were new and innovative advertisements on television. The spot I'd seen, titled “Big Ol' Bug,” features an animated little boy and an animated insect and the text runs as follows:

(MUSIC UP)

SONG:“I'd rather eat a big ol' bug/than ever take a stupid drug

Drugs aren't cool, they can mess you up at school

Drugs are a pain, they can hurt your body and your brain

A big ol' bug with an ugly mug/is better than any stupid drug

They make you sad and your parents mad

Drugs are dumb, they make you clumsy slow and numb

I'd rather eat a big ol' bug/BUG: Don't do drugs!

REFRAIN: ...Than ever take a stupid drug!”

The bug, typical of most animated insects, was unrecognizable as to taxon and was vaguely reminiscent of Tex Avery's classic cockroach characters in Raid commercials of the sixties (complete with eyes with pupils and teeth in need of bridgework). Now, I'm totally supportive of the basic message of the PDFA ad. I'm so averse to the use of mind-altering substances that I don't even consume products containing alcohol; beer, wine, and hard liquor have always tasted like laboratory solvent to me, anyway. But I found this spot a little unsettling, for several reasons. For one thing, the little boy in the ad appeared to be willing to eat his bug

sandwich with the crusts remaining on the slices of bread—a prospect that is probably more horrible to some children (like my daughter) than the notion of eating an insect per se.

More importantly, I was a little confused by the particular message presented by this spot. I take it that eating a bug is supposed to be a terrible thing, pleasant to contemplate only in comparison to an experience even more terrible, such as taking drugs. Bug-eating, then, is presumably to be regarded as aberrant behavior, with dire consequences. The problem I have with this logic is that bug-eating is an almost universal phenomenon; the U.S. and Europe are curiously alone in their aversion to edible insects. Perusal of some six years of back issues of the Food Insects Newsletter as well as correspondence with its founder provides evidence of such behavior in more than 45 countries (including Angola, Australia, Botswana, Brazil, Burma, Cameroon, Chile, China, Colombia, Congo, Egypt, Gabon, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Iran, Ivory Coast, Japan, Kenya, Korea, Laos, Madagascar, Malaysia, Mexico, Morocco, Nigeria, North Africa, Papua New Guinea, Peru, Philippines, Polynesia, Sao Tome and Principe, Senegal, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, Thailand, Tunisia, Turkey, Uganda,Vietnam, Zaire, and Zimbabwe).

Although, admittedly the list is not as long as that of countries in which Coca-Cola is sold in cans (93, according to the Coke Can Collectors web page), it's still impressive. Impressive, too, is the fact that there are places in the world, like Angola, Congo, and Laos, where insects are consumed but Coke in cans is unavailable. I guess that means not everything goes better with Coke, after all. According to experts, approximately 500 species of insects in more than 260 genera and 70 families have graced a dinner plate somewhere in the world.

Of course, I feel a little hypocritical criticizing the PDFA for their ad copy, because the truth of the matter is that I am not among the multitudinous ranks of insect-eaters. I've been a vegetarian for more than 23 years, during which time I haven't knowingly eaten anything that moves on its own volition. Normally, being a vegetarian hasn't been a career impediment, but I find that I have a major credibility problem when I give lectures on entomophagy. In the general education entomology course I teach for nonscientists (“Insects and People”), not only is there the lecture, but there's also a laboratory exercise that involves preparing and consuming dishes from around the world that contain insects. Students are quick to notice that I am not a participant in these festivities. And I can't always rely on the teaching assistant to set the example. I thought I was in luck the year that Gwen Fondufe, from Cameroon, was my TA; she had grown up eating stir-fried termites on a regular basis. It turned out, though, that cultural aversions to food are complex; although termites weren't a problem for her, she categorically refused to eat fried waxworms, which she thought were totally repulsive. It's not unreasonable, I guess, given that caterpillars and termites are in entirely different taxonomic orders. Most consumers of mammals who happily eat cows and other even-toed ungulates (order Artiodactyla) might look askance at eating, say, naked mole rats (order Rodentia) or sucker-footed bats (order Chiroptera). Thus, I've been forced on occasion to recruit my longsuffering and incredibly tolerant spouse, Richard, to the effort, bringing him to the class to demonstrate to students that, while I might not consume insects myself, I am willing to give them to a person I hold near and dear. Every year, though, some smart aleck expresses some doubt as to the depth of my affection for this wonderful man.

On an intellectual level, I'm completely familiar with the arguments in favor of entomophagy—insects are, after all, a complete source of high quality protein, they're rich in vitamins and minerals, and they come in an almost infinite variety of flavors. For those with deeply felt religious convictions, there's even the consolation of knowing that some of them are certified kosher according to the Old Testament, although I can't quite see smoked locusts ever replacing lox on a bagel. Even etymological arguments are persuasive; as V. M. Holt, a nineteenth-century gastronome, so aptly observed, crickets are especially appropriate as food in “that their very name, Gryllus, is in itself an invitation to cook them.” But, at the same time, I can emphathize with the insect-averse, including the writers of “Big Ol' Bug.”

I wonder, though, if they realize that pushing entomophagy might not exactly be appropriate for their cause. There is no shortage of insects that, if eaten, can hurt your body and your brain, make you sad and your parents mad, and make you clumsy, slow, and numb. One case in point—an AP wire service story from September 11, 1993 reported that

Even the lowly ant isn't safe from Persian Gulf teen-agers in search of exotic new ‘highs.' Adolescents in the free-wheeling port of Dubai are smoking the tiny insects or sniffing the fumes they emit when crushed, the English language Gulf News reported. Hameed el-Khafeef of the Dubai police forensic lab was quoted Friday as saying a number of youths were arrested for intoxication after getting high on ants. The practice has become so popular that a small packet of ‘Samaseem'—Gulf Arabic for ants—sells for up to $135 in the emirate of Abu Dhabi. . . . The Persian Gulf has been a lucrative market for illicit drugs since the oil boom of the 1970s. But the daily quoted Dubai police as saying youngsters are trying alternative substances either because they can't afford the usual narcotics,

heroin and hashish, or they believe they won't be prosecuted for getting high on ants.

I expect far fewer people here in the U.S. saw this wire service story than saw a PDFA advertisement, and even if news of the psychotropic effects of ants becomes disseminated widely I doubt that bugs will become the new street drug of choice. All the same, it does put a new slant on the idea of an anty-drug campaign.

Throughout the United States and elsewhere in the world, festivals are a means for building community pride and potentially for filling local coffers with tourist dollars. A lot of festivals focus on food —among other things, food-related festivals lend themselves well to eating-related activities, always popular pastimes when people gather. Here in Illinois, not unexpectedly, there are quite a few corn-related festivals. There's a Corn Boil in Sugar Grove, Sweetcorn Festivals in Hoopeston, Mendota, and Urbana, and a Popcorn Festival in Casey. Agricultural diversity within the state, though, is higher than most people might imagine, as evidenced by herb festivals in Decatur and Momence, strawberry festivals in Newton, Elmwood, and Kankakee, a peach festival in Cobden, a gooseberry festival in Watseka, and an International Horseradish Festival in Collinsville. Prepared foods also get their day in the sun, even though the wisdom of leaving them there for any length of time might be questionable. There's an Apple Dumpling festival in Atwood, a Cheese Festival in Arthur, a BagelFest in Mattoon, and, in neighboring Indiana, there's a Pierogi Festival in Whiting and a Hot Dog Festival in Frankfort.

Despite the many opportunities available to me, festival-wise, I'd

never actually succeeded in attending a festival until 1997. A few years earlier, I went to Collinsville, Illinois, where my mother-in-law lived, and missed the Horseradish Festival by a week, although I did just happen to catch a glimpse of the city's 20-foot-tall inflatable horseradish sitting on the back of a flatbed truck. I'm still kicking myself for missing out on the 1996 Mattoon Bagelfest, where I could have seen the world's record for largest blueberry bagel get shattered before a crowd of thousands. Missing these activities is perhaps excusable, in light of my busy schedule, but there's one festival that I just could never forgive myself for missing. I'm extremely fortunate to live within an hour's drive of one of the nation's few insect-related festivals. Paris, Illinois, is the home of the oldest (if not the only) honey bee festival in the United States.

Now, festivals celebrating insects are few and far between. First of all, there's the food thing—most insect species won't entice hungry out-of-towners into paying a visit and taking a taste. Secondly, most insects aren't quite as user-friendly as fruit, vegetables, or pastries. But such festivals do indeed exist. There are at least two festivals, for example, celebrating woolly bear caterpillars (larvae, in the family Arctiidae). The Woolly Worm festival in Beattyvillle (Lee County), Kentucky, began in 1987 and features, among other things, a Woolly Worm Princess Pageant. But Banner Elk, North Carolina, can boast of hosting the nation's oldest woolly worm festival, which has been held on the third weekend in October every year dating back to 1977 and which features the classic “running of the worms,” an intense competition lasting several days (and over 40 heats) to identify the fleetest woolly worm in town.

And noxious pests, perversely enough, have their share of

festivals. Marshall, Texas, hosts an annual fire ant festival and every summer there's a mosquito festival (technically a Mosquito Awareness festival) in Crowley, Arkansas, located in the northeast corner of the state. The Crowley festival features a a World Champion Mosquito Calling Contest as well as a mosquito cookoff, with such dishes as the 1997 third prize-winner, Moosejavian Screamin' Hot Mosquito Wings. Tourists heading for the Cache Valley in Utah will be disappointed to learn that the Randolph City “Mosquito Daze” was discontinued in 1995, after a 5-year run, apparently after exhausting the local population's tolerance for mosquito-related activities (although the nearby town of Providence continues to host Sauerkraut Days in September). For the world travelers, every September since 1982 there has been a Festival of the Phylloxera, in Sant Sadurni D'Anoia, Spain, honoring (or at least recalling) the plant parasite that decimated the local vineyards a hundred years ago. To commemorate the infestation, kids dress up as grapevines and then parade through town, accompanied by masked adults portraying phylloxera and waving sparklers. The highlight of the parade is a bright yellow wheeled papier-mâché plant-sucking bug the size of a small car that periodically spits fire at parade-watchers. This region of Spain is well known for its wineries (the Freixenet winery, among others, is right in town) and evidently much consumption of the local products accompanies the festivities and no doubt plays a pivotal role in convincing adults to dress up and pretend to be plant lice.

Paris is not the only host of a honey bee festival. Latecomers in Hahira, Georgia, conduct a honey bee festival every year, too—but Paris' festival is by far the older of the two. The festival owes its origin to the lobbying efforts of resident Carl Killion, Sr., the state superintendent of apiary inspection who worked long and hard to

convince the U. S. government to issue a postage stamp honoring Apis mellifera, the western honey bee. When, in October 1980, the stamp was issued, the first-day cover ceremony took place in Paris, in recognition of Killion's untiring efforts. Every year since then, the citizens of Paris have commemorated the event with a honey bee festival. I 'd managed to miss the festival for 16 consecutive years but resolutely decided to attend in 1997. For one thing, attending had become a matter of professional pride, but another factor was the news that 1997 was to be the last year that the festival would be run by the Chamber of Commerce, which had just relinquished responsibility for the festival to the Kiwanis Club. Rumor had it that the nature of the festival might change with the change of hands. So, on September 26, a bright and seasonably pleasant day, I went to the festival, accompanied by my amazingly accommodating spouse and my easily bribed 6-year-old daughter, neither of whom would likely have otherwise chosen a honey bee festival as their choice of activity for the day.

At first glance, the honey bee festival, once we arrived, didn't look much different from any other kind of festival here in central Illinois. To eat, there were the same curly fries and elephant ears and lemon shake-ups that show up at all of the local county fairs. Ostrich burgers were exotic but not exactly thematic fare. A major attraction, dominating the south side of the square, was the “Little German in Paris” tent, run by the Kiwanis and featuring German karaoke, sauerkraut, and bratwurst (and fueling the rumors that, left to their own devices, the Kiwanis might indeed be pursuing new and different themes for the festival). Within a few blocks there were arrays of arts and crafts, a flea market, and carnival rides.

Closer inspection, however, revealed the thematic content. Our

first hint should have been the lawn geese lining the street into town; in front of almost every house on the main drag was a plastic goose sporting a black and yellow outfit and a pair of antennae on its head. We realized this was not a strange form of vandalism when we spotted lawn geese bee costumes among the arts and craft items being vended on the main square. Also for sale were beeswax sculptures and a variety of honey products. Down the street, the Historical Society had dutifully set up a beekeeping display, somewhat incongruously situated next to a nineteenth century surgical suite, complete with a variety of alarming shiny metal instruments that looked well-designed for inflicting pain. The local post office rightly got into the spirit, too, and was selling commemorative coffee mugs, Frisbees, and hats, although, oddly enough, not stamps and stationery, which were for sale on the main square from a little truck. A car show later that day featured competition in a division strictly for Super Bees, a type of muscle car built back in the sixties and early seventies. These muscle cars are not to be confused with the shiny yellow convertible roadster we saw parked on the east side of the square, from which projected an enormous black and yellow bee some ten feet up in the air.

Although my time in Paris was short, I did the Paris Chamber of Commerce proud—I managed to come home with a Honey Bee festival t-shirt ($15), two Honey Bee Festival hats ($20), a badge from the 1985 honey bee festival ($1.50), and some commemorative stationery ($1.25). I also picked up a free newspaper, a special section produced by the Paris Beacon-News staff, detailing all events and activities associated with the 17th Annual Paris Honeybee Festival. It was only when I was back home, reading through the special section at my leisure, that I realized another important function of festivals—they are a vital

public outlet for bad puns. In the case of the Paris festival, among the advertisements in the section was an exhortation from the Citizens National Bank of Paris to “Have A Beeautiful Paris Honeybee and Fall Festival.” Wood-N-Things advised visitors to “buzz in” to the shop (as did Miss Amelia's Victorian Gift Shoppe, and a notions store called Paragraphs) and the Paris Goodwill promoted a “Honey Bee of a Sale.”

I guess some labored jokes are a small price to pay for three days of good will toward an insect species. The puns were all in good taste, even if they were a bit on the strained side. I don't even want to think about the kinds of puns people might have come up with in Frankfort, Indiana, to promote their Hot Dog Festival.

It has not been my experience that there's a natural affinity between insects and sports. If anything, there would seem to be a fundamental incompatibility, given the ability of insects to bring athletic events to a screeching, unscheduled halt. The Chicago White Sox, for example, blamed their 14-7 loss to the Cleveland Indians in Municipal Stadium in Cleveland on August 24, 1982, on infield flies of the entomological kind. Apparently, storms off Lake Erie blew huge numbers of mosquitoes into the stadium during the game, occasioning multiple delays to allow players to spray themselves with repellent. White Sox relief pitcher Jim Kern had particular difficulties and told a reporter, “I felt like I was doing a (bleeping) Off commercial. . . . I couldn't concentrate. They were flying up my nose, in my ears, and I must have swallowed a dozen of them. I got my usual Cleveland greeting, 10,000 (bleeping) flies.”

Presumably, these mosquitoes were tormenting players on both sides, and not just the visitors; implied in Kern's comments is the notion that home team Cleveland pitchers are as accustomed to swallowing flies as fielding them. How responsible the flies were for the loss is hard to say. The White Sox had lost seven of the

eight games directly preceding their loss in Cleveland and it seems unlikely that insects were at fault in all cases. The point is, though, that baseball players are, by virtue of experience, uniquely entitled to resent insects. After all, baseball games are generally played outdoors—where insects flourish—during the summer—when insects are at their peak. Although football is played outdoors, games generally occur late enough in the year that most self-respecting insects are passing in diapause, enjoying an extended time-out. Basketball is played in indoor arenas during the winter, as is ice hockey—which presents an even greater challenge to insects by virtue of freezing temperatures. Although winter stoneflies, snowfleas, and grylloblattids might be able to cope with the freezing temperatures, the odds are low that they'd be hanging around an ice arena during a game in numbers large enough to provide distraction, particularly to hockey fans.

You'd think, then, that familiarity would breed contempt for insects in professional baseball—but, oddly enough, baseball outdoes all other forms of sport in adopting insects as mascots. Admittedly, it's not major league baseball where these mascots show up. The last major league baseball team named for an arthropod may well have been the 1899 Cleveland Spiders, a team perhaps most distinguished by its remarkable but unenviable season record of 20-134. The team apparently earned the name by virtue of a league executive's remark that the players “look skinny and spindly, just like spiders.” The season opened with a 10 to 1 defeat at the hands of their sister team in St. Louis; by June, according to the Spalding Offical Baseball Guide for 1900, the team had become the permanent “occupant of the last ditch,” 32 games out of first place. Attendance by dispirited fans at home games by

the end of the season was so poor that the Spiders were forced to play their last 34 games away (and lost 33 of them).

This dismal example of the consequences of assuming an arthropod identity, though, has done little among the various and sundry minor leagues to discourage the practice at present. The taxonomic diversity of arthropod mascots is actually fairly remarkable. Of 14 teams in the Single A Southeast Division, for example, three are named for insects: the Augusta (Georgia) Greenjackets, the Piedmont (North Carolina) Boll Weevils, and the Savannah (Georgia) Sand Gnats. That number rises to four if all classes of Arthropoda are considered and the Hickory (North Carolina) Crawdads are included. In the Midwest, there are the Burlington (Iowa) Bees. The AAA Pacific Coast League boasts the Salt Lake City Buzz, and in the Southwest there are the Lubbock (Texas) Crickets and the Scottsdale (Arizona) Scorpions.

It's a little difficult to understand why baseball teams opt for an arthropod image. Maybe they see insects as implacable foes, sure to strike fear in the hearts of enemies. Thus, vicious, stinging bees could keep company with Bulls (Durham, North Carolina), Bears (Yakima, Washington), Cobras (Kissimmee, Florida), Timber Rattlers (Wisconsin), Snappers (Beloit, Wisconsin), Sharks (Honolulu, Hawaii), Warthogs (Winston-Salem, North Carolina), and possibly Prairie Dogs (Abeline, Texas) (hey, they can give you a nasty bite, which could get infected and cause big problems!). Or maybe baseball teams consider insects as one of those unstoppable forces of nature that characterize baseball seasons in different parts of the country, like Avalanche (Salem, Oregon), Thunder (Trenton, New Jersey), Cane Fires (Oahu, Hawaii), Quakes (Rancho Cucamonga, California), and Tourists (Asheville, North Carolina). Or maybe there really is a genuine regional fondness for what would

elsewhere be objects of indifference at best. It's difficult otherwise to come up with an explanation for the Lansing (Michigan) Lugnuts or the Cedar Rapids (Iowa) Kernels.

For whatever reason they're selected, you'd think arthropods exist in sufficient abundance to provide expansion teams with identities well into the next century. Such, however, doesn't seem to be the case; there's apparently a shortage of arthropods adjudged suitable for mascot service. On April 3, 1998, Georgia Tech University sued the Salt Lake City Buzz, a Minnesota Twins farm team, over the use of the word ‘Buzz' and image of what is described as a yellow jacket. According to Mark Smith, executive assistant to the president of the University, the proliferation of Buzzes is confusing to baseball fans and Georgia Tech, which filed for a trademark in 1988, is entitled to exclusive rights: “Buzz is essentially synonymous with Georgia Tech and we need to preserve our image.”

This suit did not, of course, sit well with the Salt Lake City Buzz, which immediately filed a countersuit. Owner Joe Buzas, who, by virtue of name alone is entitled to an opinion on the subject, was quick to point out that Salt Lake City had been using the name “Buzz” for three years before Georgia Tech even became aware of the team's existence. That awareness arose when a representative of Georgia Tech spied a Salt Lake City Buzz baseball hat at a trade show in Atlanta. Buzas pointed out that, if in three years Georgia Tech officials failed to become confused, then the potential for confusing alumni in the future was probably minimal. Moreover, according to Buzas, the mascot of the Salt Lake City Team isn't even “Buzz”—it's “Buzzy.” Nobody in this discussion, by the way, seems to have noticed that Buzz actually is the name of

the mascot of the Burlington (Iowa) Bees, who have escaped litigation up to this point.

In response to these arguments, Georgia Tech officials, unmollified and undaunted, pointed out that the mascots are “remarkably similar. ” I happen to own both Buzz and Georgia Tech baseball caps and can authoritatively say that I don't see the similarity. They resemble each other in the sense that both mascots possess wings, stingers, and antennae, but, then, these features are shared by almost every aculeate hymenopteran and can't really be the source of concern, or else the guys that make Bumblebee brand tuna have grounds for a lawsuit, too. As for colors, which aren't quite as true to nature as is the overall body plan, the Georgia Tech Yellowjacket is definitely navy, alternating with yellow stripes, while the Salt Lake City Buzz bee is more of a cerulean and unadorned by stripes. Moreover, the Georgia Tech Yellowjacket has clenched fists (tarsi?) and an angry grimace (not unlike Buzz, the Burlington, Iowa, Bee), while the Salt Lake City Buzz looks fairly serene and lacks any visible appendages. And the Georgia Tech yellowjacket is the only one of the two wearing gloves.

From what little I know of the law I would think that, if the gloves don't fit, the court is going to have to acquit. As an entomologist, it seems to me that there are about as many differences between these two symbols as there are between a real yellowjacket and a real bee —although, based on my experience with my daughter's first grade teacher, it may be that, to the general public, there are no discernible differences between a real yellowjacket and a real bee. The Salt Lake Tribune (April 16, 1998) in fact refers to the Yellow Jacket mascot as a “bee” rather than a yellowjacket.

Joe Buzas summarized the crux of the problem best: “What does a bee do? It buzzes. You can't own something that an insect does. . . . We are known all over the country as the Buzz. They are the Yellow Jackets. They are not the Buzz. . . .” (Salt Lake Tribune, April 16, 1998). Georgia Tech is proceeding in Federal Court in Georgia, while Salt Lake City has appealed to the U. S. District Court in Denver to get the case moved to Utah. By all accounts, this case will drag on for months.

I could say something like, “Only in America could there be a lawsuit over who owns what a bee does,” but I'd only be partly right. It could happen in England and in other English-speaking countries, too, but it couldn't happen in too many other places, because bees don't even buzz everywhere. In Germany, summen is what bees do; it's zumbar in Spain, zimzum in Israel, anebbebe in Ethiopia, wengweng in China, bun in Japan, brommen in Holland (but only bumble bees, not honey bees), bourdonner in France, and brzecza in Poland. In India, there's a veritable beehive of Babel; in Hindi, it's bhinbhinaanaa, in Marathi ghunjan karne and in Kashmiri giigii karun. Any one of these terms would be a great name for a baseball team, although rousing cheers might be difficult to inspire if no one in the stands could pronounce it properly and it might be hard to print diacritical marks on a baseball cap. I guess if there's a lesson here, it's that buzzwords really do matter to people, a sentiment I've maintained all along.

I'm often invited to give public lectures on entomological topics and, always anxious to do my part for science literacy, I rarely refuse such invitations. One such invitation came from the University of Illinois Alumni Foundation, to speak to a group of alumni attending a picnic at a park not far from campus. For my services, the Foundation was prepared to offer me reimbursement for my expenses and all the potato salad I could eat; times being what they were, I jumped at the offer. I found myself seated at the end of a long table surrounded by total strangers with nothing apparent in common other than having attended classes at the University of Illinois at some point during the last century. When the man seated next to me discovered that I was the evening's featured speaker, he got very excited, exclaimed, “Then you must know all about this!”, plunged his hands under the table, and began wrestling with his belt. Much to my enormous relief, all he did was to produce a tubular device that resembled a small flashlight and show it off to me triumphantly. Seeing my blank stare, he proceeded to inform me, with not a little disappointment evident in his voice, that it was an electronic mosquito repeller.

My entomological credentials obviously rendered suspect at this point, he diplomatically asked me to pass the pickle relish.

Up until that moment, I had never seen an electronic mosquito repeller. In fact, I thought that the principle on which these devices operate, namely that mosquitoes are repelled by certain types of sound, was long ago discredited. Thus, I was amazed to find that a quick search of mail order catalogues at home (of which we invariably have a huge supply) turned up dozens of these devices for sale. They run the gamut from sublime to ridiculous. The Cadillac of electronic mosquito repellers must surely be the Moltron III, the “Swiss-proven bug shield ” advertised by the Sharper Image catalogue. According to the catalogue, “The Moltron bug shield protects you by electronically recreating the sound of a male mosquito, which pregnant females hate.” The Moltron III (Moltrons I and II must have never left the drawing board) lists for $19.95 and is the only one of these devices with an adjustable dial, instructions in three languages (English, Spanish, and French), and a disclaimer (“since there are at least 67 known species in the U.S. alone, some are bound to fall outside the fixed range”). The manufacturers modestly “hope you find your Moltron III to be effective as most people do,” an ambiguous wish at best. Among other things, it's mostly inseminated females with as yet undeveloped eggs that actively seek out blood meals—pregnant ones are busy seeking out places to lay their eggs and don't as a rule crave blood meals or pickles or any other unusual food items. It's a pretty safe bet that virgins aren't quite so repelled by the sound of male mosquitoes, be it live or on tape, or else there wouldn't be so many mosquitoes around to repel.

“Bye! Bye! Mosquitos” operates on the same principle as does

the Moltron III, but does so on a greatly reduced budget—at $4.98, it's more like the Yugo of electronic mosquito repellers. This one is from China (as opposed to “Swiss-proven”) and the instructions are in only one language, which bears a passing resemblance to English:

Mosquitos frequently infect you place in Summer, especially at night. They are extremely irritating as they disturbed our sleep and the mosst annoying of all is the difficulty in getting rid of the itch & soreness. After, ordinary mosquito-increase or “Electrified Mosquito Killer” are used. However the odour is unbearable and the abuse of some of them may become dangerous. In order to do away with the above nuisance, a brand new production called “Electronic Mosquito Repeller ” Has now een produced. According to the research of insect ecology, most of biting mosquitos are female ones in spawning period. A Spawning female mosquito is very disgusted at the approaching of male mosquito. Therefore, the trequency of Repel-It is made to imitate the sound signal of male mosquitos to repell female mosquitos away.

This one doesn't even come with the AA battery it requires for operation.

“Bye! Bye! Mosquito” is available through the Harriet Carter catalogue, a veritable treasure trove of electronic mosquito repellers. In one catalogue, sandwiched in among the scented toilet tissue spindles, invisible tummy trimmers, cordless electric safety trimmers (“neatly removes unsightly nose, ear, and brow hair!”) and “Cat-cans” (“Train your cat to use a toilet!”) are the ultrasonic necklace mosquito repeller ($6.98), the clip-on “Bye! Bye! Mosquito,” and the “Mosquito Chaser” ($7.98), a boxlike device with a “nylon cord to hang the unit from a convenient location.” Whereas the clip-on is from China, the necklace and the box come from Taiwan. The manufacturers of the necklace

state cryptically that the device “chases mosquitos away by transmitting a barely audible sound wave that mosquitos hate.” Interestingly, the instructions do warn that while “the sonic frequencies generated by this unit are harmless to humans and pets . . . discontinue using the unit near persons who are overly sensitive to sound.” Evidently, it's not just mosquitoes who are repelled by these things. As for “barely audible,” I suppose everything is relative but I can see somebody who is borderline psychotic being driven right over the edge after an hour or two of having one of these hanging around his neck. By the way, the Mosquito Chaser doesn't have an “off” switch.

There's at least one other product on the market for skeptics who don't believe that spawning mosquitoes can't stand to hear their mates whine—the Love Bug ($12.95, Hand-in-Hand catalogue) “repels mosquitoes by electronically duplicating the wingbeat of the dragonfly—the mosquito's mortal enemy!” The ad shows this device clipped to a baby's stroller and states that it “actually keeps mosquitoes away within a 20 to 30 foot radius with the same degree of effectiveness as the best lotions and sprays. ” I suppose they must mean they're as effective as the best suntan lotions and oven cleaner sprays, since the manufacturers don't specify which dragonfly is the one species of dragonfly whose wingbeats are electronically duplicated and it seems unlikely that all species of mosquitoes in all 50 states (and possibly Guam and Puerto Rico) will recognize the wingbeats of the one dragonfly species chosen to represent the entire order Odonata.

The manufacturers of these devices—you can just imagine them, consulting with Swiss scientists and Chinese researchers in insect ecology—seem to possess information that is not available in the refereed scientific literature. The only references I could

find about the efficacy of electronic mosquito repellents suggested strongly that there isn't any. If these devices aren't merely unscrupulous and potentially dangerous consumer rip-offs, then we Americans have some major catching up to do. If indeed mosquitoes can be repelled by ecologically significant sounds, the possibilities for designing new electronic repellents are virtually endless. Tests should begin immediately with devices that simulate,

say, the sound of a hand slapping and crushing an engorged female. Or the sound of an aerosal can of mosquito repellent being discharged, a control technique that doesn't even hurt the ozone layer. Or maybe a device that plays the soundtrack from the film, “The Birds,” or one that repeatedly announces that the ban on domestic DDT use has been lifted. The federal government may even be in a position to facilitate such research. After all, they probably still have those rock and roll tapes they used in Panama to drive Manuel Noriega out of the Papal Nuncio's residence—who knows, maybe they'll work just as well on female mosquitoes?