Categories
Toys and Amusements

Cicada fun to be had on ebay

Ebay has been a good resource for cicada specimens and Asian artifacts over the years, but you’ll also find toys, fishing lures and other whimsical cicada-themed items.

Cicada Lure

Cicada Lure

Cicada Whistles

Categories
Brood XIV Pop Culture

Share Your Brood XIV Cicadas!!!

I originally posted this article last year, but the information is still good.

A lot has changed since I started this site in 1996, including the web — back then websites where static pages with a couple of images and links, and only geeks like myself knew how to make them.

Now there are lots of web sites where YOU can share your cicada photos and video. Now you can write about your cicada discoveries on a blog, read other cicada blogs, or share cool cicada web sites with the world using bookmarking sites like Digg and del.icio.us. The web is now all about you (and the cicadas you find). The power is in your hands: start sharing your cicadas!

Share Your Cicada Photos:

Flickr: Flickr is a web site where you can post and share your digital photos. You can also connect with other photographers and people with similar interests. It’s a fun site. When you post your cicada photos, don’t forget to tag them with tags like “cicada”, “broodxiv“, “Magicicada”, “17year”, “periodical”, etc. Don’t forget to include geographic information in the descriptions.

Panoramio: Panoramio is a photo sharing site like Flickr, but it places your photos in Google Maps, which is really cool.

As of 2008 Flickr lets you upload videos too.

Share Your Cicada Video:

YouTube: You’ve heard of YouTube, haven’t you? It’s a great site where you can upload your videos and share them with the world. Like Flickr, don’t forget to tag your cicada video with cool tags like “17year”, “cicadas”, “broodxiv”, and include geographic information in the description.

Others: MySpace videos, Veoh, Metacafe (has a family filter), Google Video (upload longer videos than with YouTube), Dailymotion, Yahoo Video (has SafeSearch) etc. Again the important thing is to look for a service that will allow to to send links to your videos and embed them in web pages.

Blog Your Cicada Stories:

You have a Blog, don’t you? If you don’t, it’s never too late to start! Blogger, LiveJournal, WordPress, Typepad, and of course MySpace. Best of all, they’re free to use! So why not?

Reading & Searching Blogs:

The homepage of this site is a blog — if you notice, it’s composed of multiple posts about cicadas. Blogs aren’t like other websites, because they’re updated frequently and they’re composed of a series of posts. This series of post is known as a feed, which is available as both an xml file and the webpage you’re reading (too technical, I know…). Blog Search Engines are like regular search engines, but they’re adapted specifically to search blogs.
Blog Readers let you subscribe to blog feeds — subscribe to enough feeds and you can build your own virtual newspaper made up of the stories and news you care about (like cicadas).

Sharing the sites, video and images you find on the web:

Now, you’ve found a cool cicada website — you want to share it, and you want to remember it.

del.icio.us is my favorite bookmarking site. I can bookmark sites at work and then check them out later on my home computer, or at a friend’s house.

Digg is a super-popular forum where you can share and vote on (digg/bury) links. I read it every day.

StumbleUpon is a cool site and toolbar for your web browser. The toolbar will suggest cool sites for you to try. I’ve “stumbled upon” many cool sites using StumbleUpon.

More to explore: Furl, ma.gnolia, Newsvine, reddit, Simpy, Spurl, Yahoo MyWeb, Google bookmarks, Fark

You don’t have to use these resources for just cicadas, but I’d be disappointed if you didn’t use them at all.

Categories
Pop Culture

Cicada Quote from author John Berger

‘Your voice, he interrupted, is also like a cicada, not only a corn-crake. Do you know the legend about cicadas?
They say they are the souls of poets who cannot keep quiet because, when they were alive, they never wrote the poems
they wanted to.’

… from author John Berger.

Categories
Pop Culture

Minuscule’s Cicada do Brazil

Minuscule’s Cicada do Brazil is a cute CG cartoon starring cicadas. Cicada experts will note that the life cycle of cicadas is in no way accurately depicted, but is it "just a cartoon". Thanks to Phoebe for bringing the video to our attention.

[The video was taken down by YouTube.]

More Minuscule TV.

Categories
Pop Culture

Rancho Cicada Retreat

Treat yourself to a retreat at the Rancho Cicada Retreat.

It’s a slow news day. 🙂

Thanks Phoebe.

Categories
Brood XIII Pop Culture Video

Cicadas (and me) on Fuji Network News

A few of you might have noticed the film crew following me around the Cicada Mania festival. They filmed me at the festival, as well as back in Jersey — a once in a life time (or maybe once in 17 years) experience. The news cast aired yesterday in Japan, but you might be able to see it on a show called “Morning Eye” in North America.

Here is the final news story:

Roy Troutman, Gerry Bunker and Joe Green also appear in the video.

Categories
Brood XIII Pop Culture

Clever Cicada Photo Art

Cicada Invasion

Composite photo by Joyce Dinello, La Grange Park, IL. Contact Joyce at joycedinello@sbcglobal.net.

Categories
Brood XIII Pop Culture

Cicada Mobile

It’s the Lake County Forest Preserves Cicada Mobile!

Categories
Arts & Crafts

Indentify this Cicada!

Dana Holmes photographed this cicada at the Pug Party this Saturday in Chicago. I can’t identify the species — can you???

Emma

Emma

Categories
Pop Culture

Cicada Fishing Lures

A few fishing lure manufacturers make cicada shaped lures, leveraging the fact that fish, especially big fish, will eagerly consume cicadas that fall into water. A cicada struggling on the surface of the water is like a dinner bell to hungry perch and bass.

Fishing and cicada enthusiasts should consider buying one of these novelty lures.

cicada fishing lures

Cicada Shaped Fishing Lure

Cicada Shaped Fishing Lure

Cicada Shaped Fishing Lure

Cicada Shaped Fishing Lure