When are we ever going to get another Strong Bad Email???

I’m having withdrawals over here!

More on the biology front… this time personal history/experience.

When I was in 8th grade, and Smith Middle School in Arizona, I had a Life Science class. I enjoyed the class. Mr. Ward was my teacher. At this point I was already quite taken with the natural sciences, and biology in particular.

One day we went out to the tall grass that grew by a drainage ditch running near the school and collected grasshopper specimens. Some of them were really big… two or three inches long. Most were about an inch. So, we put them in plastic cages and brought them back to the classroom for observation.

As I was watching mine, it began to scrath its head. I called out to the class (which was not awkward of misbehaving, since everyone was up and around, looking at each others’ grasshoppers) to see what was happening. Only a couple of friends came to look at my curious grasshopper. It’s front legs were literally on the top of its head, scratching. Or, I thought it was scratching. I wouldn’t have guessed what happened next…

Out of the spot where the grasshopper was scratching, a worm of some sort burst out. Turns out the grasshopper was not scratching it’s head, but rubbing it in pain. The worm (I call it a worm, but I think it was probably some sort of larva) was white, and nearly the length and width of the grasshopper. It must have filled nearly all the insides of that grasshopper. The worm crawled out of the grasshopper, wiggled around in a few circles on the bottom of my cage, and, not finding anything interesting, proceeded to crawl back into the grasshopper, through the gaping hole that was left in its head.

My friends and I, of course, were screaming with excitement during these events.

So this morning I was listening to the podcast of This Week in Science. The first half of the show is mostly science news of the week. One of the news stories they covered was about some Chimpanzee teeth that were found.

The theory goes something like this, they said… chimpanzees have settled down in forests, but the ancestor-that-became-man moved out and settles in the plains area. And that difference in environment is what lead to us being evolved.

But, some teeth were found in a plains area. Three teeth that have been determined to be chimp teeth.

Now, aside from all the other wackiness, this discovery supposedly reveals to us that contrary to the common theory, chimps and would-be men both lived in the plains lands. Because three chimp teeth were found there. There’s no other way these three isolated teeth could have gotten there. No. Chimps and pre-man lived together on the plains.

Ah… such good science!

Several issues back… the issue after the dead coyote one, actually… there was a letter to the editor printed about a man whose daughter had a My Little Pony doll named Cotton Candy that she pretended was stuck on a barbed wire fence.

If you didn’t notice, that man is from Lynchburg, VA. He happens to be a friend of mine.