Woah, now.  Sorry.  I didn't mean to scare you.  This may look like one of those bad, bad grasshoppers that scared all the little kids in Disney's It's a Bug's Life but, nope, this is the face of a cicada.  Cute, isn't he (or she)?

It's mid-November here in North Carolina and, amazingly enough, I have the window open this evening, and these cicadas are making a constant sound, one that is such a part of the landscape (or is that soundscape?) that we don't even think about them any longer.  So, I'm just sitting here wondering what cicadas look like and what good are they, so I googled "cicada" and would you believe it I landed right smack on a blog of cicada advocates -- Cicada Maniacs, that is.  There are frequently asked questions, like How Can I Tell a Male From a Female? or Do Cicadas Pee and, If So, Why? and even Is It Safe for My Kids to Eat Cicadas?  I worry about some people.  Don't go too deep here.  They did dispossess me of one notion:  katydids are most emphatically not cicadas.  (No, they are not June bugs, either.)  What's the big deal?  Well, consider how you feel when someone (usually from north of the Mason-Dixon line) asks if you are from "Carolina," as if North and South Carolina are quite the same.  We know better.  Well, cicadas and katydids know better too.

I promise not to get too legal on you here, but given the existence of the cicada lobby, I could not help but think of Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas's famous dissenting opinion in the 1972 decision of Sierra Club v. Morton, where Justice Douglas argued (against the majority) that the Sierra Club should have standing to sue, even though it suffered no injury, because the inanimate objects which were at issue -- trees, rivers, wildlife -- had standing.  Well, if trees, why not cicadas?

I'm making fun of all this, but really, tonight I'm just enjoying the sound of these katydids. . . I mean, cicadas (old habits die hard).  I just don't want to look at them.  And I don't want to know if they pee.

Good night, good neighbors.