Palmetto bugs, what we called water bugs when I was a kid. They're those large, brown cockroaches with the spiky legs that can fly and move at blinding speed. What's strange is that when I was a child, we had lots of them in our South Bronx apartment and while they were creepy, I wasn't scared of them. I'd stomp them like any other bug.
We moved out of that place when I was 11 and into a building in the projects and I did not see another one for a good 15-20 years. Got up one night to pee and saw one on the shower curtain, so I grabbed a broom, knocked it to the floor, and tried to kill it but it scurried away. Meh, finished up and went back to bed, at which point I realized that I had a serious knot in my stomach; I felt physically ill. And any time I see one, that is the feeling I get. Not so much if I see a picture, although I can tell I get a bit anxious.
It is, as far as I know, the only irrational fear I have.
We moved out of that place when I was 11 and into a building in the projects and I did not see another one for a good 15-20 years. Got up one night to pee and saw one on the shower curtain, so I grabbed a broom, knocked it to the floor, and tried to kill it but it scurried away. Meh, finished up and went back to bed, at which point I realized that I had a serious knot in my stomach; I felt physically ill. And any time I see one, that is the feeling I get. Not so much if I see a picture, although I can tell I get a bit anxious.
It is, as far as I know, the only irrational fear I have.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
