Too Much To Dream

You should see the Special Athens Georgia grasshoppers. They escaped from the entomology lab on the UGA campus. They are black and red. They grow to about three inches long. They are a genetic anomally so at their mature state, they are too weak to hop their huge fat bodies off the ground, so they just crawl. Birds won't eat them. Nothing eats them. They have no natural predators in this region. They are hideous and they are everywhere, the scourge of gardeners. They die off about October.

Come visit in winter.

D.

That's nothing you should see the ones we get in Florida. A pair of them could lift a Volkswagen Beetle.

I like grasshoppers. They spit tobacco juice the way I once did when I chewed that nasty shit. They can hop prodigiously AND fly. What's not to like about them?

I'm not big on grasshoppers either. I prefer Scotch, or sometimes a gin and tonic.

Thank gods, someone else that hates the creepy little bastards. I'm phobic about the things, including crickets, katydids, walking sticks, praying mantises... all of them can go up in a whoof of flame and I won't shed a tear.
Remember that ancient horror movie where the giant mutant grasshopper attack Chicago (?) only to be lead to their doom into a lake? I must've seen that at an impressionable age, scarring me for life.
It's not the random hopping either. I rarely feel the urge to crush baby kangaroos into a pulp.

I don't mind walking sticks and praying mantises. I don't even particularly dislike the big, brown crickets we have here. It's just those big yellow and orange grasshoppers that give me the creeps. (I don't much care for them in their black-with-red-accents younger stage either, but at least they are small then. And they can't make that raspy noise...)