Thursday, June 20, 2013

swarm behavior(s):

1. a murmuration of starlings over the River Shannon in Ireland

  Murmuration from Islands & Rivers on Vimeo.

2. the cicadas currently emerging across North America
Return of the Cicadas from motionkicker on Vimeo.
 

To hear David Rothenberg play his clarinet with a cicada “sex orchestra,” you should definitely listen to this radiolab from last month!

And, contrary to what the EastCoastlibrulmedia would have you believe, there’s a brood singing out here in central Utah, too. Last weekend we collected ~50, sautéed them with olive oil, shallots, basil, and had them in tacos.
 

 

There are other recipes all over internets. If you’re curious, you might start here.

If you’re curiouser, check out Chapul bars! and this little article by David Madsen in Natural History.


3. the totally redonkulous media coverage of this season’s cicada emergence

ex: 26,000 google hits for “cicadapocolypse,” 12,000 for “cicadapocalypse,” and 6,000 for “cicadageddon.”

(I refuse to even search “cicadagate” or “cicadapalooza.”)

In the zombie-epic-superhero-media-saturated wake of “snowzilla,” “snowpocalypse,” “obamacare,” “beghazigate,” “snowbamapocalypse,” and so on, it seems we have run clear out of material for silly, overdramatized portmanteaus.


4. and public assembly, evidently

“When Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan called the protesters in the streets of Istanbul plunderers (çapulcu in Turkish) on June 2, he contributed a new verb to the English language.… And the new English verb was born: to chapul.”

“When a defiant Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan described the protestors as ‘Capulcu’ (pronounced ‘CHA-pul-dju’ and roughly translated to ‘riffraff’), instead of taking it as an insult, the protestors embraced their newfound labels with pride. Overnight, the word morphed from an insult to a compliment. … The root of the Turkish noun (Capul) was then converted into a verb by adding the English suffix ‘ng,’ creating a neologism (Capulling) that now means ‘standing up for your rights.’”

“What began as a local protest to save a park in Istanbul has turned into a national resistance against the government’s authoritarian rule.”
Washington Post

1 comment:

  1. We got hosed. I've seen MAYBE five this whole summer.

    ReplyDelete