Bugs

Today I took my garbage bags out of the garbage cans and double bagged them to take to the garbage depot on Lotus Island! It's a good service and the cost is 4 dollars a large bag! When I emptied my cans, one of them had a collection of 6 black beetles about one and one half centimeters long. Since I go to the depot every week the beetles are obviously newcomers. They are clearly adults. There was a time when I was knowledgeable about entomology. I spent my third year in Science at the University of Manitoba studying invertebrate zoology as a prerequisite to admission to Medical School. I aced the course! The professor was R.K. Rankin-Hay. If you pronounce it with feeling, and drag the phase out, it makes a euphonious couplet! He knew his stuff even if he did have a poetic name. I loved entomology as it was one of those courses where the harder you worked the more surely you absorbed. I was like a blotter that year. Since we still called our bald prairie home "The Bread Basket of the World" , there was a large Agricultural Faculty at Manitoba providing degrees and also diplomas to many farm boys we called Aggie Dips! They had an insect museum in the Aggie building that was to die for and those of us trying to get into medicine haunted the rooms, learning about the Class, Insecta, probably the most important part of the invertebrate world and certainly the most complex. Most of the invertebrates as far as I could tell were only interested in eating and procreating. This was of some interest to imaginative 19 year olds. Most of the invertebrates were simple but the insects, their habits were legion! The Aggies concentrated on the sections of Insecta that were significant in agriculture but those of us who were in Science Faculties could study the panorama of insects whose ubiquitous dwelling places and complex habits were of compelling interest. Still, complex aside, the ornamentation is ultimately geared toward eating and procreating. It gets down to this, doesn't it? I just dumped out my six beetles on the ground since I don't identify with them now.