The Generation X Cicadas Are Coming! The Generation X Cicadas Are Coming!

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

Well, Moi, you know those big nasty water bugs that live on the sidewalks in the summer? The ones that sort of scatter in front of you as you walk down the street? These are like that, only bigger, they don’t scatter, they’re on the trees and the bushes and the grass, and they don’t scatter. Also they fly. If your head is in the way of the mate they hear singing behind you, they’ll fly right at you.

And they fuck. They make all kinds of noise so that they can fuck. So soon, you don’t see one bug, you see groups of two copulating bugs. {I am becoming ill as I write this. Me no likey big nasty copulating noisy bugs}

And then they die. So then there are crunchy dead bug corpses all over the place. Meantime, still more are hatching, making mating calls, flying at your hair, copulating, and dying.

When you go outside at the height of the ‘season’, the noise they make kind of crawls over your skin and inside your head. At least, that was how I felt. My dad had a horror of roaches, he passed it down to me, and then when I was living away from home for the first time I found myself in the mutant roach bordello. It was their world, I just lived in it.

22

Don’t eat 'em once their wings have dried and they’re flying around though. My understanding is to really enjoy your feast you need to get the young’uns that have just crawled up the tree and grab 'em once they’ve emerged from the exoskeleton (scroll down for a particularly lovely shot of emergence) and crawled out. They’re probably still all plump and juicy at that stage. :smiley:

Where to find them? Once they start coming out, you’ll be able to tell where the heavily infested areas are. Go there and find the oldest trees where you’ll probably see lots of abandoned shells. Then you want to hang out a bit and wait for the cicadas to emerge. Bring a jar, fill it up with as many as you can and rush home with your catch.

May I recommend Cicada Shanghai with a lovely white wine?

23

By the way, I keep seeing this thread title and getting a mental image of a bunch of “Generation X cicadas” sitting around in coffee shops wearing vintage flannel, reading Douglas Coupland, and showing off their Lollapalooza mosh-pit scars.

Is that just me?

24

Around here, that word is pronounced “chick-uh-dees”, but they’re more commonly referred to as “locusts.”

I don’t know why in the world it got that pronunciation, but I remember as a child seeing that word spelled out in books and having no idea to what it referred, because I had only ever heard the bugs called “chick-uh-dees.”

Around here, they’re looked forward to eagerly by the older folks. They always discuss the last “Big Locust” at exhaustive length, and gleefully predict that the “signs” point to a swarm on par with a Biblical plauge. Just what these “signs” are, I cannot say. (I imagine it’s something along the lines of “signs” like predicting the severity of the coming winter by the size of the black stripe on “wooly worms.”)

25

I despise large, ugly bugs. I have ever since I was a kid. Even tho I am in my late 30s, I still scream like a little girl with a skinned knee whenever I see one of those big ass roaches… especially in my house (FTR, I live in Texas. “Big ass” means “BIG F’IN ASS”).

Told you that story to tell you this one:

When I was a kid, every summer I went to visit my cousins in middle-of-nowhere Maryland. Rural, lots of wide open spaces with lots of trees. Big difference from NYC, where I lived at the time. I always looked forward to these vacations every summer because I liked my aunt and I liked my cousins.

One year I was 9, maybe 10, and made my pilgrimmage. The youngest of my cousins (S.) had made a collection of cicada shells. He put them in a coffee jar and just, well, had them sitting on his dresser in his room. Yes, I was fully aware of the fact that they were just shells and not all that different from a shedded snake skin, but they were large, they were ugly, and they came from a bug. They pretty much induced terror in me.

I made the very big mistake of telling S. this. He and his older brother H. then made it their mission in life to chase me around the house with the shells, chase me around the yard with the shells, surreptitiously put the shells on my shoulder… pretty much doing anything they could to torment me mercilessly with the shells. Left them on my pillow… I mean anything.

One day, H. came to me and said, “OK. We know you hate the shells, so we won’t bother you with them anymore. Instead, we’ll use what came out of the shells!” and waved an alive and kicking cicada in front of my face that he was holding by the wings. I have already made a mention of my aversion to large, ugly bugs, right? Yeah, the reaction was about what you’d expect. Screaming, running, locking myself in my room, etc.

Everybody has phobias. I’m OK with heights, the dark, spiders (yes, even big ones… spiders aren’t bugs in my book), public speaking, tight spaces, and snakes. Let me see a big ugly bug and I turn into a basket case.

I told you that story to tell you this one:

Next month, I will be going home to LI for a week to attend a wedding. Next month. In the middle of swarm time. Mom has quite a few trees around her house. Quite a few big trees. Which will probably be the playground of a lot of big, ugly cicadas.

Ugh.

26

Nah, CreaseMunky, you should be fine. Check the Brood X map out and you’ll see LI doesn’t even have a poorly established record for this brood. It’s Brood XIV you want to watch out for, and they won’t be around until 2008. You still have a couple years to enjoy that feeling of impending cicada doom.

Lissa, where I come from a chickadee is a little black, white, and brown birdie.

27

Well, looks like brood X doesn’t live here…but that’s fine with me. We have cidadas every summer…love to hear 'em, it means summer to me!

28

My area is scheduled for an invasion from Brood X. I’m not looking forward to it at all. I tend to stay inside, having a morbid dread of bugs getting entangled in my hair.

Around here the name is pronounced “Suh-Kay- duhs.” I had a 1998 T-shirt that said “See ya later, cicada” that I thought was pretty cute.

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Seems I’ve seen that recipe before…

30

shrug

Our local nomenclature has rarely had much to do with logic. All sodas are called “Coke”, “dinner” is the noontime meal, and the hills are referred to as “mountains.”

31

Upstate SC.

No, it didn’t take me a week to remember. :slight_smile:

32

I am not looking forward to this. I was living in Cleveland a few years back when we had a major hatching. I have two gross memories from that summer.

One was going to see Elton John at an outdoor venue. The cicada were so thick in the air, I did not want to get out of the car. They were everywhere. I think we stayed at the concert for about 30 ir 40 minutes. I just couldn’t do it. Driving out, I drove over a bunch of them. The sound of them under the car. Yuck, yuck yuck.

I used to leave my patio door open so the dog could go in and out as he pleased. We were on the third floor, it was a small patio, but the dog loved to lay out there. I came home one night and there was a cicada at the screen door. I closed the screen on the cicada and cut it in half. It’s dead, I thought, and I went to bed. When I got up in the morning, the head and upper body of the cicada was in the middle of the living room floor. Apparently, it was not as dead as I thought.

It is not fair that I live through the 17 year cycles every 8 - 10 years. My next move will be strictly determined by the non-presence of cicada. Alaska, maybe?

33

OK, guys, I have to ask - just how far north do these things go? I ask as I’m going to be in Toronto, and Albany NY, this May. Just reading about the buggers is freaking me out…

34

You’re safe, Angua - the brood will barely reach New York City, if they even succeed in getting that far north.

On other subjects, how’s your brother recovering? Any progress on his court case?

35

Phew breathes a huge sigh of relief :slight_smile:

He’s a lot better now. Thanks for asking. He’s back at school, and due to sit his exams soon, and the kid responsible was given a non-custodial sentence of community service, ordered to pay some compensation (can’t remember how much), and ordered to attend anger management classes.

36

Slightly off topic: Jeff, did you go to WVU? I did, graduated in 1998 :wink:

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How the hell do they know 17 years is up? They must have zero metabolism? What in the world do they live on for that long? Why do I have to live in an area where Gen X Cicadas flourish? Why did Oltenzero put a :frowning: when he reported that some of these broods have become extinct?

38

Because it makes me sad. Duh.

I like cicadas, all they do for 17 years is eat, then they come out for four weeks and f*ck like dogs in the street, then they die. Translated into human terms, that would be roughly 68 years of non-stop feeding followed by four months of non-stop orgy, followed by a quick yet rather peaceful death. (Barring any giant kittens that would bat us around as we lay on the back porch awaiting the end.) I could live with that.

39

AKA, The Ron Jeremy Story.

40

Crap on a stick. I live smack in the middle of a RED zone on the map. Then again, if the bugs aren’t poisonsous, I think I’ll be fine. I’m originally a westerner y’know. We’re tough.

::trying to look burly::