Cockroach
Papers
A Compendium of
History and Lore
Richard Schweid
(Four Walls Eight Windows)
We received this communication from the editor of Four Walls Eight Windows shortly after reviewing one of their titles.
To: RALPH
From: Kathryn Belden
Thank you for the review of THE COCKROACH PAPERS. We certainly appreciate it.
Unfortunately, one of the images you selected is not one that you have the right to use. Please remove the image of a cockroach crawling into someone's ear.
Thank you.
Sincerely,
Kathryn Belden
Editor
Four Walls Eight Windows
kbelden@mail.fourwallseightwindows.com
We have deleted the offending picture [see below] and are now running our earlier review in full --- with the caveat that, despite the fun style of some of their books, Four Walls Eight Windows certainly seems to be manned by a bunch of grouches.
Roaches have been around a lot longer than you and I and our ancestors have, and will probably be around long after we are a tasty meal for them. When you go in a dark room and turn on the light, they don't run and hide because of the light (they have very poor vision) --- but because any movement in a room stirs the cilia on their antennæ. Their blood is clear, and it's not that gooey white stuff that comes out when you squash one (and go "ugh"); that, instead, is part of their operating system. Roaches are so fast that if one were as large as you, you'd be running the 100 meter at over 200 miles an hour. The Greeks called them blats --- a fine word. "Cockroach" comes to us from the Spanish, caca-roche, "caca" referring to what they eat. On the other hand, people on the Island of Formosa
were reported, in 1924, to have a recipe that called for removing the head and entrails, putting salt in the body cavity, and frying it.
It's possible that our current epidemic of asthma is caused by cockroaches, because the ratio of slum housing infestation by the German cockroach, Blattella germanica, is shown to be directly proportional to the incidence of breathing problems among the young. A new gel --- "Siege" from American Cyanamid or "MaxForce" from Clorox --- is revolutionizing the fight against these beesties: it is relatively non-toxic, and the live bugs feed off the corpses of those who have died consuming the gel. Of course, the New York Housing Authority refuses to change over from the old FICAM spray which can cause allergic reaction in children, a spray that mostly makes the roaches go on vacation to a neighbor's apartment until the exterminators go back home. Boric acid works just fine, but people don't trust it because it takes almost two weeks to dry out the carapaces of the little bastards.
The Cockroach Papers is chock-a-block full of all sorts of ghoulish information like this. It is also mixed with tales of Schweid's personal journeys, here and there, with and without roaches. He has researched his subject well, and while he didn't make these miserable pests more loveable, at least he is making them more interesting. Like when he tells us that the greatest infestation was not in some slum somewhere, but in suburban Atlanta --- an estimated 75,000 of the them in a single-family dwelling, which seemed to move about on its own. A cockroach specialist, Austin Frishman, said, however, he had seen worse:
Cockroaches are omnivorous and ubiquitous, so they can get very very bad in lots of places. In restaurants, I've seen it rain cockroaches for twenty minutes after we've treated. I've seen it like that in apartments. I've seen private homes so bad that the roaches were outside in the shrubbery and trees because there was no room inside --- way, way over a million.
Ay, máma! A million cucarachas!
Meanwhile, one of my friends writes,
This afternoon, I took my son to see a new scifi/horror flick called Mimic. The movie's basic premise is that the New York subway tunnels are inhabited by six-foot cockroaches which walk upright and mimic humans. Well of course, everybody in New York has been aware of that for years. When are the movies going to come up with something we didn't already know?