Mantis

I knew there was something that I forgot to mention in my 1970's post from last week. Something that I wanted to run by y'all.

Source: Wikipedia

Does anyone remember hearing that it was illegal to kill a praying mantis? Maybe when you were a kid?
Or is it a regional thing? I know that it was something that I heard many times when I was a wee child. "Don't you ever kill a praying mantis! The cops will find you and throw you in jail!" The crime was accompanied by a fine anywhere from $50 to $1,000 or so. It's something that everyone I have ever asked also "knew" about.

But here's the thing. There is no law against killing them. There has never been a law against killing them. I don't know how that rumor started. Maybe it's because they are an attractive and beneficial insect. Some organic farmers use them as a form of pest control, but they will eat pests along with other beneficial insects as well so I don't know how well that works. But, regardless of their use, they aren't a pest. They don't destroy crops. And they are kinda noble looking.

So maybe farmers told their kids a long time ago that it was illegal to kill a praying mantis. Or maybe it was a religious thing. Some cultures revere the praying mantis. Whatever it was, the insecticide rumor was passed down from generation to generation. I remember hearing about it vividly. I even remember a friend of mine from the neighborhood capturing one and telling him that he better release him because the cops were gonna put him in jail if it died. I think I scared that dude straight because he let it go.

Is this something you heard about when you were a kid? Or is it just a regional Northeast thing? Inquiring minds and all. 

Memory Fail

I generally have a pretty good memory for the important things. And for the not-so-important things. As in anything to do with the movies. The other night on our radio show, my co-host was shocked when he asked me who was the other actor to play Shoeless Joe Jackson in a film besides Ray Liotta. I replied that it was D.B. Sweeney without a moment's hesitation.  That kind of shit, I'm good at.

But sometimes my memory fails me in craptastic ways.

Two recent examples of my that happened just yesterday.

First, I was watching TV late at night and the film Resident Evil: Afterlife (don't judge me!) was just about to start on one of the movie channels.  I looked at the brief plot description on the screen, did a mental inventory and decided that I hadn't seen it yet.  And for the first five minutes of the film, I was happy as a pig in shit. A pig in shit watching an awful movie, but I was in the mood for an awful movie.  So there.

Then the prelude ended and our hero was flying a WWII era Russian fighter plane up to Alaska to meet her friends and I was like "Wait a minute here...".  Yup, I had seen this shit.  And I remember it was awful.  Everything came flooding back at once.  The brief scene in Alaska.  The prison in LA. The huge axe-wielding mutant zombie. The finale on the ship.

But that first 5 minutes?  Nope...none of that was familiar at all.  And (since it came out in 2010) I had, most likely, watched this film less than a year ago! Maybe I was watching it while I was futzing around on the Internet late at night while drinking bourbon or something, but I don't remember that first 5 minutes at all.  So weird.

Then I sat down to right a post about something I found on Youtube! a while back.  I have a sticky note application on my laptop, and one of them is for blog post ideas.  I had jotted this one down a long time ago.  Maybe as long as a year ago.  But I suddenly got jazzed to write about it.  So I did.

About a third of the way through the post, I started getting this deja-vu feeling.  Did I write about this already? Nah...I would have deleted it off my sticky note. But these words do feel pretty familiar.  Hmm...lemme check.  And, sure enough, I had written about it before.  A little over a year ago.  Ur-dur!

So you get this post about that failed process instead. 

"You're a handsome devil.  What's your name?" - Mary Blank