Last summer everybody raised about three seconds of stink over a discovery made by a team of German ornithologists. Apparently since cell phones have hit saturation point in most populated areas, songbirds have been picking up the ringtones blaring out of them and replicating them instead of making their usual calls. It's kind of like the avian equivalent of rap… wait that doesn't make sense, maybe found sound? Anyways, folks were briefly pissed because they thought that this was yet another case of the West forcing its culture down the throat (or up it) of yet another defenseless foreign society, and that traditional bird calls would go the way of Incan flute music and only be found on CDs at the Nature Company.Amidst all the "Poor birds, poor bird culture" griping, what didn't seem to bother anyone was the prospect of living in a world where nature sounded like someone's phone was constantly going off. It's bad enough when some dipshit is cycling through all his tinny five-second Fat Joe tunes on the train, but can you imagine having to put up with that every time you passed a tree? It would be HELL.We hadn't really thought about this since the story broke, then last night we were sitting with some friends in the park and kept hearing that clk-clk-clk-clk-clk-clk-clk sound bicycles make when they're coasting, getting slowly louder and coming from all different directions like we were about to get swarmed by bike kids like that scene in Better Off Dead. Each time it happened, we'd make sure everybody was hearing the same thing and look around for our assailants, but we were the only folks there. Right after the fifth time, it suddenly clicked what we were hearing--fucking crickets. Mind you this wasn't just regular cricket noise that we thought kind of sounded like bikes because we were stoned or scared of the dark or something, we weren't and there were enough of us present to rationally determine that these little fuckers were imitating the exact speed and sound of a Schwinn sailing past.Not being subscribers to American Zoologist, we can't say for sure whether the bird and bug things are connected and represent the first wave of some insidious psy-ops campaign by the animal kingdom, but if so, how bad's it going to be when things like bears and cougars get in on this and start sounding like car horns?
