Sunday, November 19, 2006

praying mantis


praying mantis
Originally uploaded by jamesandthebluecat.
This beast was easily three feet long. He went for Fay and Ori, but I leapt out of the jacuzzi in time to intercept his lunging foreclaws. Our battle spilled down the hill and into the abandoned town centre, where I was finally able to beat him to death with (oh the irony) an olive branch.

We will eat well tonight.






THINKING ABOUT IT: I could have tied him to the orange gas cannister, lit it and rolled it into the sea where it would have exploded for maxumum dramatic effect, but you only think of these things afterwards.



PS: praying mantis is fine really, he just wandered back off into the garden.

24 comments:

Anonymous said...

If it's that big, it's usually a she. The males are a lot smaller.

We saw a couple of them in Rhodes.

Shame on you for not remembering that from "My Family and Other Animals"

James Henry said...

I saw a four foot one last night holding a handbag, so clearly this one was a chap.

No-one bests me on Durrellry.

patroclus said...

>>I could have tied him to the orange gas cannister, lit it and rolled it into the sea where it would have exploded for maxumum dramatic effect<<

As I recall, that's pretty much how Eldorado ended, too. Told you.

Fat Roland said...

Nothing like it at all. The Eldorado cannister was yellow.

Anonymous said...

You show that praying mantis who's boss!

Dave said...

Watch it James, they are notoriously predatory (which leads some [but not you, of course] to mistakenly spell them Preying). They'll creep up on you from behind.

Anonymous said...

How I needed you when recently, in Chile, a bug the size of a smallish family hatchback landed on my arm and all I could was beat at it weakly with my hat and squeak "Getitoffmegetitoffmegetitoffme!!" in tones audible only to bats and dolphins. That's the problem with travelling; Foreign Parts are just crawling with revolting Living Things.
That being said I did see an armadillo yesterday in some bushes in Argentina which was probably the more acceptable face of Nature.

Anonymous said...

My, I bet Fay and Ori were so glad you were there to protect them. But not as glad as Rob obviously... where was he while your battle was happening? Hiding under some shrubbery?

Anonymous said...

You could have undone the hosepipe thingy from the gas cannister and lit it and used the whole thing as a flamethrower like Sigourney in Aliens.


word ver= hruffm middle-aged man's radio station

Anonymous said...

those are creepy.
i once saw one in my parents' garden. she (it was huge!) was holding another insect and eating it very slowly, like a sandwich.

gaaaaaahhh, they make my skin crawl.

Anonymous said...

Or, leap out, roll across the floor, slice the canister open with the knife you surely have strapped to one manly thigh, then stroll away, pausing only to toss your lit cigarette/Zippo lighter over your shoulder, and igniting the spilled gas/petrol/whatever, then walk purposefully away in slow motion, COMPLETELY ignoring the massive fireball that erupts behind you.

Obviously that would mean also killing your friends and colleagues, but it's what they would have wanted, had they known they were about to die anyway.

Anonymous said...

Close-up images of insects freak me out because I can all but feel their creepy-crawly-ness on my skin.

And praying mantis are pretty scary as well, imagine EATING your partner while mating. YEOUCH. But I guess if the human race adopted that practice we wouldn't have to deal with adultery and divorce anymore.

Anonymous said...

I had one of the little sods stuck to the back of my jeans for what I was alater told was Half An Hour. Half a Bloody Hour. Had my friends acted the way you did I might still be speaking to them. Though perhaps nervously.

Anonymous said...

For some reason I imagined that whole scenario in my head to be just like the fight between Peter and The Chicken in Family Guy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPqtRoN9q70

But I bet yours was better, eh James?

Tim F said...

A tiny mantis landed on my head once, while I was sitting on an elephant. It was a bit like one of those films that zooms from a kid in a park out to deepest recesses of space, then zooms back into the atoms of the kid's skin cells.

Or something like that.

I didn't kill it.

Bearded Lady said...

it was fay who felled the beast as you well know.

Anonymous said...

Aaaah ha ha! I KNEW you were hiding under the shrubbery WELL before Rob had a chance, James!

Fay...truly is Queen of man and beast.

baggiebird said...

That's really quite horrible. I have the fear of all things crawly and creepy

violet said...

evans, how on earth did that cryptic clue lead you to 'praying mantis'?? [I speak as someone who spent a full hour and a half trying to do the sudoku in today's guardian and got a grand total of two numbers inputted before I scrumpled up the paper and stamped on it while going 'grrrrraaaaaaahhh!']

cello said...

Are you sure you're all in the Balearics and not in Queensland waiting to burst onto the scene in I'm A Celebrity?

James Henry said...

I have a post brewing about how much I loathe I'm A Celebrity and its utter contempt for nature, but currently my hands are shaking too much to write it.

But that's probably what Dean Gaffney said before they put him in that box.

violet said...

I think shaking hands are not Dean Gaffney's sole obstacle to writing, y'know.

(Ooh, get me. Such an easy target as well. I apologise.)

violet said...

Ohhhh, I seeee...

Anonymous said...

i think hes actualy rather cute