A post in which you really DO hear "crickets."

[captainsblog]

I just posted this as a comment in response to a Friend's reportage of an odd home-based research project. I haven't trotted out this old tale in awhile, but any talk of weird research projects has to include Larry and the Crickets.

That is not the name of a band. Larry was my freshman roommate- a townie (grew up a mile from campus), and a faculty brat (which meant he was getting the education for free). He wasn't exactly a Type-A personality, but he was considering pre-med, so he wound up in all the high-pressure freshman science courses. Second semester, though, some of them opted for an experimental bio course instead of the usual Big Lecture Hall Bio 102 course. The highlight of it was that each had to design and execute their own research project.

Larry decided to study the sex lives of crickets. And so one day, a big box arrived from the Fluckers Cricket Farm. (I just googled it to be sure I wasn't making it up- OK, it's spelled Flukers, but who cares?) He painstakingly color-coded their thoraxes, and then went to mom and dad's for the weekend, as he did every weekend.

Therefore, I got to make the first notation in the laboratory notebook: Crickets chew through cardboard boxes.

By Monday, they were all over the dorm. The guys couldn't care less, but once they got down the two flights of stairs to the girls' floor, panic ensued. Word quickly got out whose crickets were in their shower buckets, and I got to field the complaints and retrieve the carcasses. When Larry returned, he got upset that his research had been interrupted. A year later, he'd dropped out. Somehow the medical profession has survived the tragic loss.

Comments

[thediva-laments.livejournal.com]

Crickets in a cardboard box? That's outstanding. I feel just a little bit smarter now, thank you for sharing.