True Blood pilot pre-review location, and I tell an arcane insect fact

True Blood Pre-pilot review!

Oh, I am such a lame poster!  But for those of my buddies who are excited about True Blood series, Voxy over at Suburban Trash has mysteriously been able to view the pilot, and has a very thoughtful review here.

And she has pictures!  Very intesting--and a fine blog, too. 

Late breaking update: Okay, Marta Acosta at Vampire Wire weighs in on this troubling tidbit: Alan Ball has never been a big fan of vampire mythology, hasn't seen an episode of Buffy, and has never read Anne Rice.  Whaaa?  Read about it here. 

Wasp in my kitchen

A wasp was in my kitchen tonight as I was trying to make dinner and really unnerving me. Further, I have actually never been stung by a bee or wasp, so I could be horribly allergic! Anyway, after watching it warily for 10 minutes, because I don't like to kill them but I have to be in a certain mood to catch and evict them, a duty usually reserved for DH, who was not present, I thought, I wish it would just magically disappear.  

And then it went on a window behind a blind and it disappeared!!  

But then I looked out the window and saw other wasps flying around outside the window, and also, a baby wasp was on the window, and I realized, shit, wasps can get in and out of the kitchen and there is a nest outside of it.  And then I ate dinner.  If it continues to escalate, I know that it will be very easy to fix this wasp's nest hole-in-window frame problem.  In fact, the only tool I will need is a telephone.  One of the great beauties of renting vs. owning. 

Bee and wasp fact taken from a dubious but delightful source

I'm actually not sure if the following is true, because it's taken from the body of amateur entomological literature created in the early 1900's which I was sort of fascinated with at one time. Basically, it was guys who would spend all this time watching the behavior of ants and bees and bugs and write these highly entertaining essays on insect toils and habits and lives and sometimes draw serious philosophical conclusions.  

Actually, it's really delightful stuff, specifically authors like playwright Maurice Maeterlinck, (Life of the Bee is his best work, but Life of the White Ant is kind of interesting, where he makes the case of the superiority of termites to humans) and The Insect World of J. Henri Fabre is one of my personal favorites. 

Anyways, in The Life of the Bee, Maeterlinck talks about how he and his buddy would have these long arguments on whether bees or flies were superior beings.  Maeterlinck's friend, solidly in the fly corner, would point to how, if you trap a fly in an open bottle that is laying on its side, the fly can fly right out, because it follows air currents, but the bee will always try to fly upwards toward the light and never get out.  Maeterlinck took the position that this merely proves that the bee is a more pure and spiritual being. 

So when a bee or wasp is trapped in my place, I always think about that.