Pocket.buddha vs The Cricket

Why is it that cool animals, like rhinos or armadillos, have a greater likelihood of becoming extinct than stupid annoying animals that nobody likes?

Like crickets. . . especially the one that has escaped from the Frog's tank and is singing to taunt me from an unknown location.

I have, in the last 3 hours of cricket hunting, named him Stan.

I am sure that Stan was highly enjoying the sight of me stalking around the living room wielding my Logic text book, hyper aware of every movement, looking for the tell-tale scurry of his little cricket feet, ready to strike.

Knuckle-toes sleeps like the dead, and is not only un-effected by Stan's fiendish plan to drive me to the brink of insanity, but is also unaffected to the crashing and swearing of my hunting expedition. For some reason this fact drives me ever closer to going completely nutters.

Having decided that the crafty little bastard had undoubtedly beat me in the hide-and-go-seek round of our game, I decided to move on to the out smarting round, as surely my place in the evolutionary scale of things would give me an edge.

By that, of coarse, I am referring to the fact that I have the interweb.

At first the information found on the all mighty world wide web was decidedly useless. After all, knowing that the chirping sound or "cricket song" is made by the male crickets: "rubbing their forewings against each other." does not exactly help me in figuring out how to make it stop. Nor does knowing that a trained ear could deduce the species, sex, and current action of the cricket by the rate, pitch, and key of the sound. In fact, the idea that some scientist or another intentionally subjected themselves to this torment under the illusion that this information would be useful only infuriated me further.

But finally, after reading through the data available for a half hour or so, I stumbled across the information that cold crickets. . . while not necessarily dead crickets . . . are quiet crickets.

"ha-ha!" I called to Stan, "If your species spent less time singing, and more time inventing stuff you too may have the appropriate amount of sweaters to deal with . . . THIS!" at which point I turned the heat all the way down.

apparently, crickets have some sort of insect equivalent of 'whistle while you work' and have developed some kind of cricket sweater, because now, not only am I still listening to Stan's forewings rubbing together, but now I am cold while I am doing it.

Not to mention exhausted.