Grab a Shoe, Preferrably Someone Else's: Scary Ew Bugs

I've been wanted to do another edition of this for a while now. I have a very special bug, close to my heart (thankfully, not literally) that I've been wanting to feature. You would not believe the difficulty I've had in getting the picture. It's just on the computer in my studio, yet getting it off has become a project.



Instead, I give you the Scary Ew Bug. For the longest time we didn't know the actual name of this nasty thing, so my dear friends dubbed them Scary Ew Bugs. Picture this: a younger me, arriving to visit my best friends during a college break. Winter, I think. I arrive on a bus, late at night, and it's around 3 am by the time we get to their apartment in a beautiful old home. I go into the bathroom to get into my jammies, and at some point, the nastiest, grossest bug I had ever seen (up until then) goes running under the pile of clothes I had on the floor. You can imagine the jumping and screaming that went on, as I ran to get Bev. (Steph, I think you were already sleeping. Smart girl.) Bev nodded wisely, and told me it was very likely a Scary Ew Bug I had just seen.



Thanks to this site, (which also is where I got the photo) we now know that they're not actually called Scary Ew Bugs, but rather Scutigera coleoptrata, or house centipede. They'll always be Scary Ew Bugs to me.