Tuesday, Jul 15, 2003

W.A.S. Espy Odd Ant, Refreshment

It was a big weekend for the gentleman republicans of We Are Scientists, what with two shows on Saturday night alone and a whole weekend's worth of casual leisure packed into sixty-or-so hours. The shows were so milk-curdlingly, nut-bustingly hot, though, that there's no sense trying to bottle the experience and serve it up here in verbal form.

It is, however, not only sensible but very important that you be told about a couple of things that we discovered on Saturday afternoon while in D.U.M.B.O. for a soundcheck.

The first we located in Peas and Pickles, an AllNite grocer/snackmart with the kind of comprehensive snacking selection that would make a hardened jailor weep. We asked the man who works the register, a well-aged Korean, when P & P closes; he didn't respond, acted as though we had said nothing (nothing!). We asked again when they close, and he responded with maximum terseness: "Never close!" We take this as a moral dictate, and shall henceforth try to obey its absolutist proscription in all things.

But here is what we found squirreled away behind one of a dozen refrigerator doors dedicated to the non-alcoholic beverage trade:

Take a closer look:

"Welchito", can you believe it? Verily, that is a short can of jugo de uva. "Welchito", in Spanish, means "Cat's bladder"; Beverage scientists came up with the name when, during a development session, one among their rank remarked that 222 mL is exactly how many milliliters of feline urine a cat can "stomach" ("bladder"?) before he must relieve himself. The ad campaign in South America features the tagline, "Welchito: How many can you stomach?", which won a lot of awards, naturally.

The other thing we saw we saw on the sidewalk, a block or two from P & P, where we stopped to absorb the lovely river view of Manhattan and some Entenmann's Chocolate Pop'ems.

Look at that beast! That's a big ant! It occurs to us now that we should have done a few shots of him next to a pencil or a Welchito for scale, but, stupidly, we didn't. What's really amazing about this ant, though -- what really caught our eye -- is the ratio of Butt to Rest Of Ant (B/RoA), which is staggeringly high in this ant's case (60/1?). Look at this:

Striking. One pretty neat trick we were able to teach this promising, if gruesomely malformed, ant was the old Ball Up. The cue that we gave him so he'd know it was time to assume Ball Up posture is that we'd set a can of soda atop him, closing him into the shady world below the can-bottom's cold aluminum dome. Once in there, he had the privacy necessary to cobble himself into this posture:

Incredible. Look closer:

Once the jokes about our little friend kissing his own ass subsided, there was a rather solemn silence during which time each of us quietly made peace with the fact that we'd never be half the athlete this little Evel Knievel is.

If we were to sum up the weekend graphically, this is how we'd do it:

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