HERE COME THE "...PEDES"

Many years ago I began keeping what I labeled as a "funny book" file. It had nothing to do with comics, but into it I put anything I found that made me laugh or chuckle. Most of the time it was a newspaper article: an engagement announcement that had a typo under the picture of a lovely young lady that gave her name as "Turdy" Smith. (Trudy was what they were going after, I'm sure.) Another time it was an exceptionally funny cartoon that wouldn't even be appropriate to post here but over which I still laugh when I see it.

Today's blog is based on a "Letters to the Editor" column from some past magazine I subscribed to. There originally was an article entitled "20,000 Legs Under the Sea" and the column I cut out were rebuttals to the author's Centipede Crotch Count. I saved it not so much because it was interesting (although it was) but because I was just astonished at how much time and effort people would put into such a subject.

Here are two of the more interesting responses:

1. “…a 100-legged centipede would have 98 crotches rather than 100. As every centipede knows, it takes two legs, branches or what-have-you coming off a trunk to form the angular area sometimes called a crotch. I therefore submit that a 100-legged centipede would have 49 crotches.”

2. “It may seem unbelievable but a 100-legged worm has more crotches than it has legs – 148…A centipede has 49 crotches on each side (defining a crotch as the space between any pair of legs), but a leg on one side of the centipede is also adjacent to a leg on the opposite side. Since there arer presumably 50 legs on each side, an additional 50 crotches must be added to the original 98, for a total of 148. The fallacy (in all published estimates so far) has been in thinking of single pairs of legs. In multi-legged animals each leg has many adjacent legs, all with crotches.”

What got me started this week of even thinking about centipedes was a picture in a newspaper of a millipede that was HUGE! I guess I surmised that a millipede would be smaller than a centipede, needing to be smaller, of course, -- I guess just because I thought a milli-anything would be smaller than a centi-anything. So much for my thought and reasoning process.

Anyway, in looking for photos to grace this blog, I discovered that the size of either is dependent upon the species. And although I have always had an interest in reptiles and lizards and other such things that most people aren't crazy about, in seeing pictures of what a centipede or a millipede CAN look like if you see the right kind I decided they needed to be put at the very bottom of my "like" list. I would pick up a snake or a tarantula, but never would I hold a huge millipede. It causes me to make a face just thinking about it.

As far as I am concerned, the number of crotches is about the only thing of interest concerning the "...pedes."