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Town Fights Cricket Plague With Led Zeppelin
The residents of Tuscarora, Nevada are getting ready to fight the annual invasion of mormon crickets with the power of Rock-N-Roll. Trial and error has shown that the crickets don't think much of Led Zeppelin or the Rolling Stones. The residents circle the town with boomboxes at regular intervals to drive off the millions of crickets. "It is part of our arsenal. You'll wake up and there'll be one sitting on your forehead, looking at you." says Laura Moore, an unemployed college professor and one of the town's 13 residents. The crickets devastate crops, cause slicks on the highway and evidently love rap.
I suppose that ends all speculation that rap isn't cricket, eh, old man?
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
More proof that Jimmy Page was a satanist!
The crickets devastate crops, cause slicks on the highway and evidently love rap.
That's racist.
At first, I thought they were trying to get rid of haughty Englishmen with funny bats!
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
I wonder how they feel about Buddy Holly?
I'll go ahead and hit myself for that one.
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" - Salvor Hardin
Finally another species that hates Led Zeppelin as much as I do.
You'll never have one show up on your head when you fall asleep if you sleep to the sounds of Stairway to Heaven.
FTA: Rock music blaring from boomboxes has proved one of the best defenses against an annual invasion of Mormon crickets.
Yeah, but you get one alone and he'll drink all your beer.
I guess they really must hate "Trampled Underfoot".
120 characters isn't enough to explain it.
I wonder whether pouring coffee on them would be just as effective.
In addition to Rock n Roll, the mormon crickets are repelled by alchohol, caffine, premarital sex, and gay marriage.
Don't they know that Yeni is the weaspon of mass destruction?
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
TFA: "...best defenses against an annual invasion of Mormon crickets"
Mormons and Zeppelin don't mix?
Tuscarorans are preparing once again to get out their extension cords, array their stereos in a quarter-circle and tune them to rock station KHIX
Sounds like another Burning Man festival.
I imagine that it might drive the crickets off in such a way that it actually *kills* them...
The residents of Tuscarora, Nevada...circle the town with boomboxes at regular intervals to drive off the millions of crickets.
If the crickets have got any sense, they'll be Going to California.
Smivs on the intertubes!
Playing copyrighted music out in the open like that?! Better hope the RIAA doesn't get wind of this.
mmmm...forbidden donut
The TFA doesn't say they love rap. What it says is that the 2007 and 2008 crickets had "hipper tastes" (i.e. weren't as deterred by heavy-metal music as the 2006 crickets were). Apparently samzenpus mis-read "hipper" as "hip-hop" and assumed they love rap.
Le Sigh.
I actually read the article for once. I hate to be negative but it was a bit confusing (almost like a meander along a winding road) and had at least one typo (Morman instead of Mormon). Anyway, that's my negativity for the day. :)
...since Buddy Holly died.
Best Slashdot Co
Town Fights Crickets Plagued with Led Zeppelin
Gravity!... It's not just a good idea... It's the Law!
Okay, I know this is going to get me modded down into infinity here, but I'm sorry--those crickets have good taste. Those are the two most overrated bands in rock and roll history. If only their actual talent could have been even a fraction of the size of their egos, maybe you would have had something. But even the Beatles had more actual talent than those two. And I fucking hate the Beatles.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Just put each cricket in a little box with a caterpillar. That will teach them not to screw with your town.
The Mormon's aren't the right choice after all...
Defy God, he sends plagues of locusts.
One would think that after this many years of Old-Testament vengeance wrought upon them that they'd change their tune.
with the Southwest Airlines Rap.
Yours In Communism,
Kilgore Trout
... says Laura Moore, an unemployed college professor and one of the town's 13 residents
If you're unemployed, you're not a college professor. You're a former college professor, or a wannabe college professor. Also, maybe a town of 13 doesn't have a lot of college professor openings?
If the geiger counter does not click, the coffee, she is not thick.
Hints from Helen: diatomaceous earth (from a pool store) and borax scratch open the shell of these bugs and they dry up. Little is needed unless it blows away. D.E. can irritate the nose, but otherwise earth friendly. D.E. is tiny fossils. I guess it can take out other insects, too, but in that town, it doesn't seem that there are any other insects.
Am I the only one that imagined a zeppelin covered in light emitting diodes when they first read the article?
If the crickets are eating your crops, eat the crickets.
If a Led Zeppelin song is broadcasted but there is no one there to hear it, does it make a sound^H^H^H^H^Hvalid claim of copyright violation?
Probably not, because US copyright law defines "publicly" as "at a place open to the public or at any place where a substantial number of persons outside of a normal circle of a family and its social acquaintances is gathered", and a cricket isn't a "person" except perhaps in works of fiction written by Carlo Collodi or George Selden.
Seriously, though, this is why they should play from a radio station broadcast -- then the royalties were already paid.
The royalties to ASCAP and BMI were already paid, but not for performance in an establishment "open to the public". Such royalties are the responsibility of the owner of the establishment "open to the public" unless the performance qualifies under 17 USC 110(5), which was enacted as a rider to the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act.
Used to be Americans could cause the extinction of the American Locust.
Now they can't take out crickets?
... Discuss." ;)
They're not called Mormon Crickets because they're considered adherents to the faith, they're called Mormon Crickets because they're one of the fine local features the Mormons found waiting for them when they settled in Utah the mid 1800s. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle_of_the_Gulls .
Mormon Crickets are also not only not Mormons, they're not crickets either. They're shieldbacked katydids.
They're also cannibals.
And polygamists.
Tweet, tweet.
Just don't use ZZ Top's Velcro Fly or the town could turn out like Lud.
HOWZAT!!!
Do the crickets like the Beatles?
this is the same way I used to fight my neighbors when I was 18!!!! that should be called INGCUERVO'S strategy
Not that shocking -- they normally listen to the beetles.
If you open yourself to the foo, You and foo become one.
Exactly. Natural selection will create a slippery slope. The Stones give way to Journey, who gives way to Poison, who gives way to Creed, who gives way to Fred Durst a capella. With that kind of sonic radiation, only the cockroaches are cheering.
Jokes about Bron-Yr-Aur Stomp and Trampled Under Foot aside, I'd be interested to know which music actually seemed to deter the onslaught.
I like listening to Led Zeppelin songs, but they actually took a lot of their material from other artists (without giving proper credit) -
http://therecord.blogs.com/blogovich/2007/09/led-zeppelin-as.html
Mormon Crickets are also not only not Mormons, they're not crickets either. They're shieldbacked katydids.
"... shieldbacked katydids?" Please do not use these abstruse metric or imperial system units. What are they in Texan talk: Varmints or Critters?
They're also cannibals.
Great house pets. No need to buy pet food, they just "feed themselves."
And polygamists.
Well, that sounds interestings. Send some over. I hope they will be more entertaining than the Presbyterian Toads.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
They're also ... polygamists.
So they at least used to be Mormon?
Wait till the RIAA gets wind of this!
I remember I was deployed to Panama for Operation Just Cause as an forward air observer and Manuel Noregia fled to the Vatican's Embassy (Apostolic Nunciature) and the US set some boom boxes around the embassy and they played rock music all day and night. We were camped about mile from the embassy and we can still hear the music clearly from that distance so I know much louder it was at the embassy. Nevertheless, Manual Noregia gave up afterwards.
I lived through a cricket plague as a kid on a farm in rurral CA (different species). One morning I looked out the window and the lawn was black... and moving. They came into the house through every crack and crevice. The road was carpeted with them to the point that the school threatened to stop sending the bus. They showed up en mass a couple of other years but never again that bad.
A side note: I guess that LZ and the Stones now qualify as Weapons Grade Music.
Did anybody else first picture a flashing colorful dirigible?
Cheers.
In the modern revision/interpretation of Mor[m]on prescription to KVJAV1611 Holy Bible, it says that the darky-skinned boogies are neutral because they bear *that* mark of Cain by being (1)Black and (2) lower intelligence and thus (3)incapable of producing the intellectually-spirited children of the the more pleasing races.
They'll put you and all your demons inside with it, and burn it all to the sweet savour the LORD can appreciate.
That's not a town, that's a house.
Can't they use Iron Butterfly?
NEITHER crystalline (the pool store kind) nor amorphous (raw) silica in DE causes cancer. They CAN cause silicosis if inhaled though.
Silicosis is NOT a cancer - but it is quite nasty and there is no cure as the damage to the lungs is permanent.
It can't metastasize like a cancer though - but you can't fight it with chemo either.
BOTH kinds of DE will do just fine against the bugs as they work by absorbing moisture and causing dehydration.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
9 months ago I wrote a storymash chapter based around the concept of a sound machine which encouraged swarming behavior if crickets... and other living things. Run with it! (or run away!)
We come from the land of the ice and snow, From the midnight sun where the hot springs blow. The hammer of the gods will drive our ships to new lands, To fight the horde, singing and crying: Valhalla, I am coming! Yeah, fight them hordes Jimmy
Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
That's right. No self-respecting rock-n-roller would ever play cricket. I can only imagine that extends to current cricket players, too. Once they hear the sweet sounds of Black Dog or Misty Mountain Hop, the sport is sure to suffer.
Nothing to see here. Move along.
... an episode of South Park (Night of the living homeless). Maybe they should try playing "California Love" and see where the darn critters go?
http://www.southparkstudios.com/clips/104429/