So, humans make horror films and think they're really scary

Well, have a look at this.



via Radiolab.

A cockroach cautionary

My boyfriend's house in Brooklyn has become a place of refuge for cockroaches on the verge of extinction, trying to evade the inevitable hand of evolution. While he was over here in Europe for the past month and a half, the roaches back in Brooklyn had no food or water around and most of the regular troupe fled, but a few have stuck around. The not-so-smart ones. They hang around, not really knowing what to do with themselves, not knowing the RULES of engagement between humans and cockroaches, the rules that other cockroaches happily seem to know innately, like

When the light goes on: scram, or there will be blood.
Keep it discreet.
Run fast.
Find a good hiding spot, and when it's discovered, flee.
Never go into areas of the house that don't contain food. It serves no purpose and raises alarm.
Never try to make friends with a human.

Last night he discovered a cockroach walking across his foot. I've never heard of a roach behaving like this. These are clearly either the ones who might not survive an atomic blast, or else they're the future. I think the ones hanging out in his house are trying to make friends, wondering why we can't all get along, trying to push the boundaries of integration in areas outside of the stereotypical kitchen option previously so favoured by cockroaches.

It can't last.

A heartwarming cockroach story

A human and an interesting cockroach met, a couple of days ago, in Brooklyn, New York. The human was female and a notorious cockroach-hater; the cockroach was a fella who could actually make himself look squashed, in order to save his own life.

This cockroach could sense human attention on him, much in the same way that humans can sense attention from other humans. However, this particular cockroach had evolved a new way to make human attention go away, and in this way he demonstrated a quality quite unlike humans, who are doing very well at successfully evolving new ways of drawing attention to themselves, even when the attention concerned is likely to bring them to freshly heightened states of squashedness.

But this time, the human called the cockroach's bluff. She examined him closely, saw that he was not actually squashed but faking, and promptly made his faking true. However, in the second or two just before the pretence became real, there was a flicker of human to cockroach to human consciousness, during which the roach realised that the game was up, and the human realised yet again, that roaches are far smarter than they look.

And, as is often the case when a human squashes a roach with her bare fingers, the roach didn't die all at once, but slowly, his hairy left leg waving a little bit at the end, and there was, in fact, in the human female, a moment of genuine affection.

My favourite things

"Not so much dead as a prisoner", is the report from the kitchen. He's trapped a fully grown cockroach under the can of Trader Joe's fairtrade French roast. I hear a crash.

"He's dead now, right?"
"Yeah, I think so. I'm agin 'em but I can't get as upset as you do about 'em" he says, in his old timey way.

We've got roaches. I'm having the full new york experience this time. I spent a half hour killing them with my bare hands last night. I found where they live.

Up until then, there was just the occasional one or two crawling across the kitchen butcher block, they sent out their babies as scouts ahead of them, to retrieve information and food discreetly, using the cute factor for their reconaissance missions. But last night I found the hive. The boiler room. They lie in the door jamb, keeping warm, and alert for slim pickings from the kitchen table. The sight of them brought out the murder in me. Hands flew and bits of cardboard and roaches got squashed. Then I got the hoover out. Hoovered another twenty of them. Had to put gaffer tape over the nozzle so they wouldn't crawl out. There had been a band rehearsal downstairs and the drummer suggested I hoover up some raid after them, that's roach killer to you and a very good idea to me.

The hoover sits in the middle of the room, containing live roaches.