Damn Nature You Scary (Christmas edition)

Time for another installment of “Damn Nature you Scary,” Christmas edition;

The praying mantis, a miniature alien looking, green monster that decapitates her mates immediately after mating. Literally the female bites the head right off. The male, who is behind for the dirty, finishes the job and she quickly grabs him, whips him around face-to-face and starts chomping. Now that in itself is worthy of the title “Damn Nature You Scary” and a bit selfish on the female part but that isn’t the reason for this post. Because of the holidays many people, with cheer in their eyes, have trotted down to the corner or out to the fields with their happy little families to pick out a Christmas tree. They look around for hours to pick out the right one, load on to the car with some string take it home and decorate it. Now imagine you are admiring this holiday beauty one morning with a cup of piping hot coffee in your hand when you notice it, a small white Styrofoam looking ball. You lean in to take a closer look and just as you are reaching in to move a limb out of the way for a better look, it burst open and 1500 tiny, almost translucent, creatures come pouring out and start flying around the house. As you are screaming, back stepping, and dropping that hot coffee all over you, you are fighting the little beasts for your life. After you realize you aren’t going to be devoured by the creatures and calm down you finally get a look at one of these little aliens and see that it’s actually a tiny praying mantis. The white foamy ball was actually a mantis pod, or egg, from the female. Apparently this year was an exceptionally good year for the mantis mating season, so much so that there is warning out now that if you have a real Christmas tree you should check it out and carefully remove the pod, especially if your tree comes from Michigan.

 

So if you are still shopping for that perfect Xmas gift, and the person you are searching for is a Beatles fan or even a classic rock fan or just a fan of music then the gift to get is the album “The Art of McCartney.” A collection of Paul McCartney songs redone by a list of artist such as Billy Joel, Alice Cooper, Def Leppard, and even Willie Nelson pays tribute. Most of the songs are well done but just like every album there is a few that could have been done by another artist.