Human groomin' & the evolution of bugs

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This weekend at a backyard picnic I saw a multitude of grown ups grooming bugs from one another the way fastidious zoo chimps do and wondered what Darwin would say.

Is man evolving or devolving? Is communal human groomin’ a evolutionary advance or a retreat?

I was raised to not put my hands on another human being without his or her explicit sober permission, this included a girl of scandalous reputation the boys all called “Back Alley Sally.”

She was always up for a good shadowy pawing, bless her heart.

On Saturday, I nearly got as far with a retired postal worker as I used to get with Sally.

And the guy thanked me!

We both had these pepper seed-sized black bugs crawling all over us and as we stood there talking baseball and sipping beers, we spent the entire conversation flicking bugs off one another.

Why were we feeling so grabby?

Blame our latest plague.

They look like deer ticks, those dreadful little blood-suckers that infect us with Lyme Disease, an affliction that leaves victims chronically fatigued.

They are not to be confused with those suffering from Lemon-Lyme Disease, an affliction that leaves victims chronically fatigued sourpusses.

Geez, I must’ve been bitten by an insect that leaves me prone to telling stupid bug jokes.

Here’s another:

Q: How can you tell carpenter bees from look-a-like bees?

A: Carpenter bees are the ones with the tiny tool belts.

Anyway, these new bugs are tick replicas and are becoming as numerous as the obnoxious and ubiquitous stink bugs.

So I began calling them stink ticks.

Of course, I was wrong.

There is no such thing as stink ticks.

At least not yet. Insects keep evolving. Remember, bees used to just sting you. Now, they can kill you.

It’s a very disappointing trajectory. You’d think before they went to killer bees they would have tried their hands at being burglar bees or vandal bees.

It’d be like going outside one night to enjoy some summer magic and having to run for your life when lightning bugs begin shooting actual lightning out of their buggy little butts.

Of course, it’s not always bad. We’ve always had beetles and then one day we all got to enjoy . . . The Beatles!

Turns out these new tick-like annoyances — and that’s all they are — are called billbugs.

They’re, in fact, part of the extended beetle family, and I’ll let you know the instant I detect a way way to pin the blame on Yoko.

I read it online: “The adult tick is very flat, whereas the billbug is round, curved and fat," Allegheny County Health Department Entomologist Bill Todaro said.

I prefer getting my news in printed form, but in this case I’m sorry I didn’t see any video of Todaro. It’s always been an ambition of mine to one day describe an esteemed entomologist as “bug-eyed.”

Todaro says the billbugs are motivated by the some of the same base impulses that used to move my old friend Sally.

“Their purpose is to find the love of their life, to mate, lay eggs, and then die,” Todaro says. “It’s a mass spawning.” 

I read where they’re called billbugs because they have what is described as a long snout.

I looked and couldn’t discern an embarrassing honker.

But what do I know?

I’m the guy who still turns cockroaches over in the hopes of seeing anatomical evidence of why they’re called cockroaches. There’s none.

If roach cocks are too minuscule to be seen with the naked eye they shouldn’t be called cockroaches.

They say every creature great and small has a purpose, but what things like stink bugs and billbugs contribute to the universe is a mystery to me. 

I just hope they don’t get worse.

Deer ticks are bad enough. I’d hate to think we’d have to one day be wary of  another beloved woodlands creature the way we do tick-infested deer.

I like Bugs Bunny, but I don’t think I’d feel the same about bunny bugs.

Related . . .

Stink bug evolution anything but rosy

Even stink bugs need love

A bejesus of a wasp sting

To bee or not too bee

Bigger than Jesus & The Law of Rodell’s Facebook Conundrum

Greg Brady (sorta) endorses my book!

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Not only did I meet Greg Brady on Sunday, I cajoled him into provide a celebrity endorsement.

“‘Use All The Crayons!’is to self-improvement humor books what the ‘Johnny Bravo!’ episode is to ‘The Brady Bunch!’ It’s edgy, funny and fills every page with warmth in the same joyful abundance that let Marcia naturally begin filling out her sweaters in Season 4!”

Of course, because Greg Brady is fictional, the endorsement has the same legal binding as if it were attributed to Bugs Bunny, that is if Bugs Bunny had a thing for the adolescent Maureen McCormick.

Barry Williams, in fact, said nothing of the sort. Had I asked him to, he might have.

He was a very good sport and from my observations said yes to every attendee request and, guaranteed, today the Facebook pages of more than 1,000 paunchy Westmoreland County baby boomers are festooned with pictures of Williams, 60, smiling with strangers.

Like! Like! Like!

I’d need extensive plastic surgery to smile as much as Williams did from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday at the 20th annual Westmoreland Home Show at the county fairgrounds. I was there both days to sell books

Selling books with the word “crayon” in the title to homeowners who are there to get bargain basement deals on things like thermal windows and, well, bargain basements, is not for shrinking violets.

I think I saw, by the way, rows of shrinking violet seedlings along Gardener’s Gangway in the 4H building.

My booth was right across from the friendly folks representing a Pittsburgh home remodeling outfit. They were very aggressive without being obnoxious.

If someone said, no thanks, we don’t need new windows, one would ask about doors. If they said the doors were new, they asked about kitchen cabinets. If those were shipshape, they’d ask about bathroom tiles.

If they said the whole house was fine, they’d ask about the garage.

I just once saw them stumped. They asked a woman if she needed new windows/doors/flooring/roofing/insulation/etc.

The woman said no.

The sales rep persisted with her interrogation until the woman informed her that last year the house had burned to the ground and the insurance company had come through with an entirely new domicile with all the modern furnishings. 

“So, no, thank you,” she said. “There’s nothing you can do for us.”

A look of such panicky desperation came across the rep’s face I began preparing a response if she dashed to my booth and asked if I had some gasoline and a book of matches.

That’s what I was up against.

I initially hoped to sell 20 books both days. I sold 8 on Saturday and 18 on Sunday.

But I found the time valuable and made some new friends among the authors and artists and the people who stopped to buy or just chat.

Plus, I seized the promoted opportunity to speak on the very same stage from which Barry Williams addressed maybe 120 raucous fans.

I had 2.

I’m not kidding. And I think they’d just stopped to rest and were too polite to leave when I began my yapping.

Their names are John and Kathy.

Really, I was pleased with how I did. I could have let the situation demoralize me. Instead, I sat on the edge of the stage and ran through a 20-minute jiffy version of my normal presentation. 

Afterwards, they came to my booth and bought four books!

So Barry Williams maybe earned, let’s say $2,000 in merchandise and an appearance fee of triple that amount, but my market penetration dwarfed his.

I just need to find a way to snug the attendance gap.

Having him there did cause a happy stir.

Everyone enjoys a proximity with fame. 

But I couldn’t help but wonder how the man so many people adore for their heirloom memories feels about the nostalgic redundancy that’s been baked into his entire adult life.

It’d be as if you spent your every waking moment having to re-live what happened in the 7th grade.

He never looked buoyant.

He looked obligated.

But the pleasant smile never left his face. If he resents what his life’s become, you’d never know it.

Maybe I’ve been wrong all these years.

I’ve always said Gregory Peck was our greatest actor.

Related  . . .

I’m a disgraceful DIYer — and I don’t care!

Selling crayon books to Steelers  & Bigfoot/UFO fans

My worst book signing ever

Bullies, my ‘stache & insane reaction to my speech

“Use All The Crayons!” A 10-star review

My talk to 200 8th graders a near debacle (at first)

My Saturday speech a surprising sell-out

A real pisser of a national scandal

I predicted via Twitter four days ago that Rick Perry would soon announce he supports and encourages U.S. Marines who wish to urinate on slain and captured foes and anyone they suspect of looking even a little bit French.

Except for the part about the French, I was right on the money. The man who grew up partying at a camp called “Niggerhead,” said on Sunday, shucks, when a man’s gotta go, a man’s gotta go.

“Obviously, 18- and 19-year-old kids make stupid mistakes all too often and that’s what happened here,” he said, adding the most disturbing aspect of the whole episode was -- surprise, surprise -- Obama opposed it.

Inflammatory stupidity is Perry’s knee-jerk reaction to any issue.

Or would it in this case be a jerk-off reaction?

Growing up in America, I never thought I’d evolve into the role of the nation’s moral conscience, but 9/11 and 10 endless years of war have thrown many more cerebral thinkers off kilter -- and don’t mistake my use of “cerebral thinkers” to conclude I’m referring to the current Texas governor (or the last one).

Now, let’s all pay attention: We’re the good guys. We don’t piss down on the dead. We lift up the living.

We’re the Berlin Airlift, The Peace Corp and The Marshall Plan.

The trade surplus of all that’s good that America’s given the world will never be exhausted. We gave the world the cure for polio, the iPhone and Bugs Bunny.

We’re Benjamin Franklin, Elvis Presley, and Arnold Palmer.

It wasn’t self-evident that all men were created equal until we said it was.

There’s never been a people more devoted to helping the helpless. We’re the nation of good intentions and there is tremendous value in that for people who like to travel around the world, walk into a strange place and say, “Hello! I’m an American!”

It’s the sort of thing we shouldn’t so carelessly piss away.

A friend of mine said, “Strapping bombs to a kid and sending him into a crowd to murder innocents is fine for them to do, but it’s wrong for us to piss on dead terrorists?”

Well, yes, my friend, it is.

We do unto others as we’d have them do unto ourselves.

Notice, it’s not “we doo-doo unto others . . .”

Because there’s this: There are a lot of good men and women in harm’s way who joined the armed forces for the very reasons I mentioned. They want to help good people and kill bad ones.

They believe that stuff about winning hearts and minds. They are guys like Pat Tillman or guys who are inspired by guys like Pat Tillman.

And some of them are going to be captured and some of them are going to be killed.

For God’s sake, why would you do something that would put your buddies in any more jeopardy?

As justification for his pro-urination stance, the idiot Perry cited a picture of General George Patton “doing the same thing in the Rhine River.”

Here’s the obvious difference. Patton never did it on the body of a dead enemy; he did it on a body of water.

Like Patton and Winston Churchill, also cited by Perry for urinating on a German fortification, I’m a worldly man prone to enjoying a ceremonial pee.

I’ve peed in both American oceans, the Gulf of Mexico and leaked in great lakes named Michigan, Erie, Superior and, of course, the one pronounced “Urine.”

I’ve peed off a 7,000-foot Canadian Rocky precipice and once took a squirt from high atop Old Smokey. There’s something about peeing from a proud perch that always thrills men like me.

Maybe someday we’ll mature and give yodeling a shot, but for now that’s just the way we are.

But one perch from which you’ll never catch us tinkling is atop the moral high ground.

We understand what Perry and those four now-disgraced Marines do not: Pissing on anyone pisses off everyone.

That’s enough preaching from me for now.

I gotta go.

And rest assured, it’ll be someplace responsible.

Bugs are buggin' me

I don’t understand how out of all the world’s winged creatures, the magnificent and the mundane, the one that’s attracted to dog poop and picnics is designated “the fly.”

It’s like calling the common carp “the swim.”

Jeff Goldblum was “The Fly” in 1986 and there hasn’t been a fly swatter big enough for him, and that includes his gargantuan ex-wife Geena Davis.

Insects are driving me buggy even as bugs are incapable of driving me insecty.

I drove my buggy up to the far northern reaches of Pennsylvania this weekend and was chewed upon by maybe a million black flies. I had an otherwise splendid time golfing with my cousin’s husband and his buddies in Warren near the New York-Pennsylvania border.

None of the bug sprays worked, but on Saturday night I consumed nearly a fifth of Jack Daniel’s and the next day none of the black flies came within eight feet of me.

Of course, neither did the white golfers.

It’s one of those parts of the country where black flies outnumber black guys by maybe a billion to zero.

I’m sure there are some local racists who are comfortable with that ratio.

Not me. I’ve never had a black guy try and zoom into my nose, my mouth, my ears, my tear ducts or linger near my crotch while I was trying to sink a four-foot putt for par.

And I’m not being politically incorrect. The nasty little buggers are widely known as black flies.

As far as I know there are no African-American flies, nor white or Caucasian flies, for that matter. It seems odd because there are Spanish flies and they’ve made colorful contributions to history and sex, two of my favorite topics.

In ancient China, crafty warlords mixed Spanish flies with arsenic, wolfsbane (a mountain herb) and human excrement to make the world’s first stink bombs. Why you’d have to mix anything with human excrement to make it smell worse seems to indicate the military-industrial complex were padding defense budgets about 2,000 years before Halliburton.

I certainly wouldn’t want some Chinese warlord to lob one through my car window, but the historical anecdote makes me nostalgic for the pre-nuclear days when wars were fought with what can best be described as weapons of ass destruction.

And on the other usage extreme, Spanish fly is regarded as the world’s oldest aphrodisiac.

Augustus Caesar’s wife, Livia, was said to have slipped Spanish fly into guests’ food hoping to inspire a randy indiscretion she could use for later blackmail.

Marquis de Sade was convicted of using Spanish fly to incite an orgy with prostitutes -- and that sentence features four elements for any really swell party. He was sentenced to death for poisoning and sodomy, but was later freed by what must have been some 18th century version of the Casey Anthony jury.

I knew a nervous freshman in college who was obsessed with trying to obtain Spanish fly for the same reasons as de Sade. He’d convinced himself giving doses of the extract to young women would make their clothes fly off.

When he became frustrated in his pharmacological pursuit, I suggested he try poems and peach schnapps.

I heard he got married and had five kids.

Either way, he never bugged me again.

This is the time of year when I can’t wait for summer to end. The heat’s oppressive, tempers are short, and the only thing more burned out than my lawn is my enthusiasm for doing anything outdoors.

Every time I step outside the skeeters, wasps and flies descend and I commence to spittin’, sweatin’, swearin’ ‘n’ swattin’.

The neighbors must think I’m some kind of sadist as they see me slapping myself to annihilate the bugs that are bugging me.

If anybody ever hits me as hard as I hit myself I’ll start researching internet stink bomb recipes.

You might think from all this I uniformly hate all bugs. Not true. Bugs make the demanding cut in my list of three favorite Americans (Ben Franklin, Mark Twain and Bugs Bunny).

Well, that’s enough talk about insects for now.

I’m busy as a bee and I gotta fly.

Happy National Nude Recreation Week!

A game of 8 ball played between two naked men is still called 8 ball.

That’s just one of the things I learned during the month it took me to exhaustively research my just-posted msnbc.com story heralding National Nude Recreation Week.

It’s an evergreen kind of story I’m going to relentlessly pitch each and every year until I find a publication that’ll agree to headline it, “Hams Across America!”

I found talking to nudists over the phone is a lot like talking to fundamentalist Christians in that both are reluctant to admit any of their members might enjoy sex.

It’s an understandable reaction from starchy fundamentalists. They’ve been taught ever since Adam sex means trouble. It might explain their ardor for immaculate conception.

A deity waving a magic wand -- Bibidi! Bobidi! Boo! -- just seems so much tidier than the nuts and bolts of biological sex -- and I’m not speaking metaphorically when I’m referring to hardware. Many popular genital piercings historically involve actual bolts.

As for nuts, well, maybe I’m speaking a bit metaphorically.

The nudists went out of their way to differentiate themselves from swingers and swappers and, really, anyone that enjoyed sex.

Rules at a typical nudist resort are explicit: They don’t want anyone’s magic wands waving around.

Rules stipulate if a naked man finds himself becoming aroused he needs to cover himself with a towel, lay down on his stomach or depart the premises.

The only thing today’s nudists are interested in raising is awareness.

Almost every nudist I interviewed asked me if I were one of them. I had to say, sorry, no. I don’t share their beliefs, their values, and I wouldn’t begin to speculate on what kind of secret handshakes nudists exchange.

It was a lie.

You see, I do consider myself a nudist.

Well, let’s say I’m a situational nudist.

I’m naked whenever I think I can get away with it.

I guess in that way I’m like Bugs Bunny. He’d start out every episode naked and perfectly at peace. But as the world came crashing in on him, he’d don costumes like opera gowns or doctor’s scrubs depending on what bone-headed choices Elmer Fudd made at the time.

I’m like that. I’ve slept naked since college and still wake up everyday in the buff. I can’t recall now what motivated the choice. I wish I could say it involved dusk-to-dawn passions, but I don’t think that was it.

More than likely it involved the over-consumption of Ouzo, a powerful Greek liquor that imparted the unusual side effect of me scattering my clothes all over Athens, Ohio.

But nudity seemed to suit me or, more accurately, it seemed to birthday suit me.

I was soon naked in my dorm room, in the halls, in the laundry room and once on a dare through the length of the packed dining hall at Ohio University’s South Green in just 1 minute and 12 seconds breaking a record that had stood for 3 years.

And I was rarely near a body of water when my naked body wasn’t frolicking in the water. I loved to skinny dip.

Times change. Now the only time I’m naked is in the dark with my wife.

The main reasons I’m rarely ever naked anymore is, of course, my daughters.

Children are where I draw the line regarding nudity -- and I draw it thick in broad strokes from my hips to just above the knees.

Yet nudism still has its appeal. It sounds contradictory, but having to wear pants bums me out.

This was never more apparent than last month when we enjoyed three days at a private residence on the banks of the Chesapeake.

The magnificent house and pool were a nudist paradise, at least for the girls who enjoyed their first skinny dip. And I now have pictures that’ll refute anyone who dares call my wife a prude.

And there I was, a veteran nudist unable to shuck my preposterous baggy swimsuit.

I wondered in frustration if I’ll ever get to enjoy a real skinny dip again.

Of course, according to the obesity charts prepared by the Centers for Disease Control, the point may be moot.

I’d have to drop about 20 pounds to even qualify as a skinny dipper.

Dining on dinos to end world hunger

I was at a professional dinner recently seated with three women, all avid travelers, who were sharing stories about the most exotic meals they’d ever consumed.

That meant my role was to sit there biting on my spoon with sufficient force to ensure that neither food nor stupid observations would spill from my mouth.

Of course, I couldn’t help myself. I made about four offbeat observations that left the ladies looking at me the way cows look at passing trains.

I’m fascinated by global eating habits. What on this continent is revered as delicacy is over on that one reviled as repugnant. People cuddle dogs over here while over there they think nothing of tossing them in the wok with rice, carrots and bok choy.

I judge not.

I understand we’re running out of food and believe we’ll all need to alter our diets to meet rising demands. Who knows? Maybe one day we’ll be getting our roughage from things like tree bark.

I have to imagine that would clean out the system more effectively than iceberg lettuce.

It might even become a delicacy. Fancy restaurants might serve things like dogwood salad -- and wouldn’t that bark have some bite!

One woman said a language misunderstanding once tricked her into eating squid. This was repulsive to her, she said, because she was a great admirer of the squid.

I told her I admired Benjamin Franklin, Mark Twain and Bugs Bunny.

She said squid is more intelligent than dolphin. She saw a documentary that showed a squid reach way around and with one of its eight arms and give an unsuspecting shrimp a distracting tap on the opposite shrimpy shoulder.

I told her I’d seen Moe pull a similar trick on Curly. I asked if she thought that’s where the squid had seen it. Now, that would have been evidence of true intelligence.

She ignored me.

“When the shrimp looked the other way, the squid seized it and ate it!”

She was confusing intelligence with treachery. There are multi-million dollar international bounties on the heads of notorious outlaws who use similar tactics.

One woman startled the table when she said she’d once eaten cat brains.

“That’s disgusting!” said the squid lover. “How could anyone do that to a cat?”

“Bullshit,” I blurted out. “Cats don’t have brains.”

Turns out we’d misheard her. She’d said calf brains.

The women asked about the texture, how it tasted and if the flavor’d been enhanced with French sea salt.

I asked if it cost more to dine on a smart calf brain than that of a dunce.

She pretended she didn’t hear me, but I thought it was a good question. Certainly, if given a choice, I’d pay more to eat the brain of Stephen Hawking over, say, Ashton Kutcher purely for health reasons.

No nutritionalist would advocate consuming something that’s been dead for so long.

I thought it was a great question and evidence that my brain should be worth more than hers.

As I mentioned, I was struggling to keep quiet, but the topic was so energizing it was hopeless, especially when talk turned to how to feed a world with exploding population.

That’s when I threw one of my big pet theories on the table. And I mean really big.

“World hunger will be eliminated,” I said, “in 20 years when scientists learn to farm dinosaurs.”

A typical sauropod, the largest animal ever to roam the earth, weighed up to 70 tons and on a football field could have its tail tip at midfield and its nose be breaching the goal line (dingbat on-field refs would still need to go to the replay booth to confirm its snout broke the plain).

Imagine the immensity.

Just one sauropod could feed a family of four for 123 years, provided the family had a freezer the size of your typical Chuck E. Cheese.

I chose the sauropod over the T-Rex for dietary reasons. Sauropods ate exclusively plants and other heart-healthy offerings while T-Rex ate things like, well, sauropods.

Of course, their diets were certainly better than ours, assuming things like Hershey bars and Big Macs were unavailable 140 million years ago.

Sadly, my grand theory was met by looks of stunned silence. It was clear they were intellectually incapable of grasping the genius of my idea.

Must not have eaten enough brain food.

Fresh air about cash for clunkers

I’m enchanted by “cash-for-clunkers” because I’m hopeful the program will fulfill an offbeat prediction I heard years ago in a progressive publication.

The magazine quoted experts who said the way to solve air pollution problems was to take all the cars from the 1950s and simultaneously empty the air from all their tires.

This would release the sweet, wholesome air of the Howdy Duty era and allow it to crowd out the pollution. The ozone hole would magically close, asthmatic coughing would be eliminated as the more pure air circulated, and network TV censors would find themselves out of work as people began to say things like, “Gee, Beaver . . .” instead of “Holy @*&#!” when stuck in traffic.

The magazine was the great Weekly World News.

Feel free to dispute the wisdom of “experts” who would allow themselves to be quoted on pages next to stories headlined,
“Baby Born with False Teeth!”

How that lively magazine went out of business while weekly snoozers like Newsweek and Time remain solvent still mystifies.

But the story points out something even today’s bona fide experts are overlooking, and that is that good things can sometimes come from unexpected places.

I tried to make this point the other day with a cranky WWII veteran from The Greatest Generation.

He told me the country is in the midst of a historic collapse. He cited the exploding deficits, the trade wars and the legitimacy of a president who may not even be a real American.

Want to take a wild guess where he gets his news?

There was a time not long ago when I would reflexively bow to the opinion of any man who’d bled on the beaches of places like Normandy.

No more. I’m no longer a young whippersnapper. I’ve been alert and informed for more than 40 years now.

Sure, for many of those years I’ve been tipsy from various heady inebriates, but the parking lot at the VFW near my home’s always full, too, so it’s a fair fight.

And he may have toted a M-1 in Europe, but he’s not going to outgun me in any political argument about current events.

“Now, hold on, friend,” I said. “Are you telling me this isn’t the greatest country in the world? Are you saying we can’t, when challenged, roll up our sleeves and solve any problem?

“Because I refuse to believe that. We are the most exuberant and energetic people the world has ever known. We have for more than 200 years been an enormous force for good and liberty.

“Solving an economic problem is nothing. Remember just 25 years ago when Reagan exploded the deficits there were stories that your generation was ruining the future for my generation? Well, that never happened. Bill Clinton balanced the budget, vanquished nutty Ross Perot in the process and wound up leaving George W. Bush an enormous surplus.

“This is the county that produced Ben Franklin, Mark Twain, and Bugs Bunny. We are capable of greatness when summoned. So I’ll not stand here and allow you or anyone else to bad mouth the United States of America.”

It was roughly the same speech Otter gave to Dean Vernon Wormer in “Animal House” when the Omegas were trying to have the Deltas thrown off campus.

We are in the midst of historic times. I believe there is innovation about to be unleashed that will render many of the old arguments obsolete. Our brightest minds have at their finger tips problem solving computers that would make Albert Einstein snap his stubby little pencils in envy.

Prepare to be amazed by some of the startling improvements that are going to appear out of thin air.

Not to mention old tires.