h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Thought it was time to post a different verse.

Cockroach.( A true story )

The roaches in South India
Are smug and sleek and slow
Unlike our native species
And some other ones I know
(Like the scary ones in Lisbon
Which are skinny, black and frightening.
If you turn on kitchen lights at night
They vanish like greased lightning.)

In the cheap Hotel Trishula
In Tiruvannamalai
I was eating a simple supper
When a cockroach ambled by.
He staggered from the kitchen
And headed for the door,
I could swear his legs were buckling
And his belly touched the floor.

At my table sat a woman
Who was elderly and Dutch
And she talked about her feelings
How she liked to be "in touch"
And "really live like Indians
And travel on the bus,"
No air conditioning for her.
But she really made a fuss
About her food, surprisingly
She didn't like the spices
And always ate in Western style
And whined about the prices.

Her back was to the kitchen
And I watched in rapt attention
As the cockroach wandered past her feet -
(A fact I failed to mention
As I wasn't sure how far her love
Of Indian things extended
And the presence of the cockroach
Might have seen her idyll ended!)

The roaches in South India
Are well-fed, fat and slow.
One lodged in my basin
In the water overflow.
It just sat there and looked at me -
Its antennae finely tapered -
Until I poked it with my toothbrush
And blocked the hole with paper.

Ick!

The cockroaches in Spain are big as toasters AND they fly - my worst nightmare. Woke up one night around 4am to find one of my cats frolicking around on the desk next to my bed. I turned on the light and SUDDENLY this huge cockroach with wings FLEW INTO MY BED!

At which point I also FLEW! Straight out of my bed.

Waited for the cats to locate the horrid beast and with trusty shoe in hand I turned the massive cockroach into an ex-roach. But they are surprisingly hard to kill. Insects from Hell!

shiveringly yours,
az
(ick ick ick)

Hi Az,

What freaked me out about the Lisbon variety was the diabolical turn of speed they displayed. I went down to the basement kitchen in this big house in the old part of Lisbon ( many many moons ago ), late at night, to get a cold drink from the fridge, turned on the light, and thought,"Funny, I thought there were red tiles on the floor." In the fraction of a second it took me to realise that the floor was simply covered with black cockroaches, they vanished, like a flash-flood pouring away into the crevices under the walls!

Mega Yeughck. I never went into the kitchen by night, ever again, and did my best to forget I'd ever seen them.

PS. The reason they're so hard to swat is because they have special air-pressure sense organs in their tail-ends which gives them a head start when the pressure wave of your swatter approaches!!

I remember the first time I was in the USA, I was out visiting friends in St.Pete, Florida, and the first thing I saw as I came into the house was a HUGE cockroach climbing up the wall. It was with the greatest difficulty that I didn't just turn on my heel and leave.

Brill pome though.

What is it about cockroaches that is so repulsive? As a part-time Buddhist, I try not to let loathing for such things take over ( along with roaches, maggots and slugs come high on my loathing list...). But there most be some very deep genetic programming to dislike them. After all, they don't sting or bite, like wasps ( which I find quite undisturbing, despite many a sting ) or ants. They're just repulsive. Period! Why?

Happily (???) the massive Spanish flying cockroaches are basically street roaches. Not the sort you find in your kitchen cupboards or in your bathtub. But they are total ick.

I've sometimes come across one that had apparently been stepped on and squashed - but I keep coming across it for days! It never dies. It just lies there waving its icky legs in the air for days and days until the cleaning woman comes to do the stairs.

Weren't they the only creatures that survived Hiroshima?

I'd heard that az.

I'd say it's probably some sort of racial memory Chaiwallah. They've surely been around at least as long as we have. better fitted for survival too.

Chai,

WHAT is it about cockroaches that is so repulsive? Well, you only just have to look at them. They are just so totally creepy. Is a June bug creepy? No, but is is a huge flying beetle that I also find rather scary. But not creepy. Go figure.


az

It is an interesting question about why they are so feared.
I liked the poem.

Cockroaches are not all that ugly but they are sneeky, which could be part of it and they can live on anything.

As a student, rarely having time to sleep let alone use my apartment for anything else;
I moved in the middle of the night, leaving all furniture like sofas-beds, dressers, anything they could lay eggs in. I'd gotten up in the middle of the night, turned on a light and briefly saw probably 50 of them scurry into hiding in the flash of a light
They work fast and quietly and in the dark.

When you are sleeping they are creeping.

Those types of creatures may be more feared or icky.
The "Cockroach that Ate Cincinnati" was a song Dr Demento used to play weekly on his 60-70's radio show

They are hard to kill, very messy and GROSS!

Cockroaches are not all that ugly????

I beg to differ.

Once watched a documentary on cockroaches. It explained that the only time you will see a roach in your home is when the COLONY (yes, the millions of roaches living behind your walls and under your floors) gets so large that they start kicking out the excess. They showed one home where even the fridge was filled with roaches and one woman who called the phone company to fix her phone - when they unscrewed the ear thingy they found it stuffed with dead roaches.

Also, a cockroach can happily live on one strand of hair or one flake of soap for an entire month.

I've never actually had to live with these monsters in my home. But when I lived in Salamanca I had a patio and at night massive roaches would teem out of the sewer drain in the centre of the patio floor. So that even during hot summer nights I didn't dare leave a window open lest they came indoors. But I would put my cat Lua out in the patio during the night and in the morning would sweep up all the dead bodies of the roaches she had killed. Curiously, although Lua quite likes eating flies and moths, she would never ever eat a roach.

*shudder*

az

That is why I moved! Never to return. I knew if I saw that many EVERYTHING was infestedNo way I would go back in there or take anything with me.

Roaches became uglier to me once I learned about their habits.
Sort of like people can do. Any apraisal of their looks can change depending what I feel when think of them.

The most attractive men or women turn ugly quickly, when they behave ugly.
The most unattractive initially, can become a soft & endearing faces if their heart is.

Cockroaches became ugly to me.
Bats became more attractive than at first glance!
Worms are an exception
*rambling*

oh, I've just been watching the bats swooping around outside my balcony - like every evening. I think they're cute.

In the morning it's swifts, in the evening it's bats.

ha! you're not the only one who can ramble!

az

The all-time worst roach story I ever heard was from my father, who was a doctor.

Read no further unless you have a very strong stomach...........

This woman's story was written up in one of my father's medical journals, and he told me about it. So, the woman went to see her doctor complaining of headaches and an itchy scalp. She was very smartly dressed, and had a big beehive hair-do firmly lacquered in place ( this was back in the sixties when big bee-hive hair-does were the thing...). The doctor duly looked into her eyes with an ophthalmoscope, but could see no indications of a tumour, so he asked her about her diet, bowel movements, drinking habits etc.etc., gave her some medication and sent her away.

The headaches got worse, and then she started reporting other strange sensations, muscular twitches, visual distortions etc. So the doctor thought she must have some kind of migraine and suggested that she come into hospital for a more thorough examination.

They decided to do a brain-scan, and that was when they discovered that she had trapped a pregnant female cockroach under her lacquered hair-do, which had eaten into her skull, laid its eggs, and the subsequent colony were living in her brain, munching happily away!

No, she would not have felt any pain, as the brain has no sensory nerve-endings. Apparently they got to her in time, before any fatal infection set in. She had not washed her hair for over a month, just kept spraying on more lacquer.

This is an honest and for true story? Well, I assume it is as you heard it from your father.

I had heard something similar about a woman in Vancouver with a seriously laquered beehive hairdo - she had had a black widow spider (there are tons of these on the west coast of Canada) lay eggs in her her hair and after the critters were born they also ate their way into her head. Could they really eat through bone?

From what I've heard about roaches they would happily exist on hair and even hair lacquer - no need to delve any further.

I always thought the beehive hairdo woman was the stuff of urban myth.

Just wondering . . .

az

ps
where is my whiskey?

"I always thought the beehive hairdo woman was the stuff of urban myth."

They existed!It was thought; the higher it was the better! There was a Pentecostal girl in our school who had a very long hair ,down to the floor. She always wore her hair in a huge one. It gave her headaches and neck aches.

I KNOW the beehive hairdo ladies existed . . . just not so sure how many of them had large insects burrowing into their heads . . .

az

oH
I sure wasn't gonna look for them!
That is back in the days ladies wore those skinny foxes ,heads, feet and all around their necks. *shiver*

Well, actually, dear Abbi, your fashion history is a little mixed there. My Granny wore a silver fox, paws etc, round her neck, with a clasp in its jaws with which it could bite its own tail. Madly fashionable between the Wars. She died in 1959. Beehive hairdoes belong with A-line dresses and what in the UK were called "Dolly-birds" in the late 1960's, post-Beatles.