Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

Back in grammar school, I did not tease girls. It was not my…not my…

Idiom, sir?

Yes, idiom. My idiom consisted of puppy-eyed longing from afar, followed by tragically romantic love notes, sometimes in conjunction with a back-channel whisper campaign extolling my many but unvaryingly abstract virtues. This engendered little more than epic disinterest, which I naturally interpreted as a sudden but inevitable betrayal, bringing on a mournful but grandiose suffering during which I would often carve my cruel beloved’s monogram into the sole of my boot so I could tromp her name into the dust with my every petulant step.

Others boys had other, more direct methods. Sitting in our rank and file desks, the girl who sat in front of such a boy was a constant target. If the girl had long hair and the boy was deft enough, he might tease out a single strand and–quietly, gently–tie that glossy thread around the body of a housefly he’d caught. Released, the fly would buzz up into the air, quickly reaching the limit of the strand. A clever boy could tie two, even three in place before releasing them to zip around her head like fighters around the mothership.

I don’t know if their methods worked better than mine. The desired culmination of this pre-teen proto-courtship ritual was never thoroughly clear to me. My personal goal (a kiss) was never achieved, but the other boys may have achieved theirs, hazy and conflicted though they were likely to be at that age.

What I do know is that at least one of those boys grew up and got a job at the Smithsonian Institution.

I was searching the web for…no, that’s too long a story…I was searching the web and came across one of those train-wreck items that simultaneously repulse and fascinate.

Over at the Smithsonian’s National Air Space Museum blog, I found a post for “insect-powered aircraft” which, on first viewing, made me laugh but then made me wince. Back in the ’70s, Frank Ehling made small model aircraft and glued houseflies to them to act as “live powerplants.”

I mean, seriously, the mental image of a tiny model aircraft flying about the room with two houseflies glued to it like Rolls-Royce engines…it’s a grade-school boy’s dream toy. Even the “single-engine” model (would that be 1HfP?) is one of the coolest toys my inner nine-year-old could imagine.

Reading more, though, my brain quickly went to that “Awww, the poor fly” place, which is a ridiculous place to be. Houseflies live about 2-3 weeks and fill their brief, non-sentient existence screwing each other and putting their eggs into decaying organic matter. Anthropomorphizing a housefly into a terrified, panic-stricken consciousness trying to escape the gigantic bird-like thing following it is just silly. Hard to avoid, but silly.

But thinking of these model aircraft sitting somewhere in the back alleyways of the Smithsonian…well, it really makes me chuckle. I am not surprised, however, to read that “The insect-powered airplanes are not currently on public display.”

No doubt.

k