2 The Daily Collegian Friday, July 29,1997 Beetle glut bugs Japanese dealers By ERIC TALMADGE Associated Press Writer TOKYO Collector Shoji Terao ka probably wouldn’t even have bothered to look three years ago. But now, the object of his dreams was almost within reach a big, black beetle that once would have sold for $3,000. “I’ve always wanted one of those,” he said while he contem plated the bug, marked down to a mere $BOO at a ritzy department store. “Words just can’t describe it.” Possibly no other country in the world is as crazy about beetles as Japan, where the bugs of summer long have held a special place in the hearts of children and poets alike. But as the beetle season hits its peak this month, a gloom is hang ing over dealers who once invested in larvae the way some people might trade shares of stock, and doled out tens of thousands of dol lars for a sufficiently buff and bulky adult specimen. Providing medicine worries teachers By ROBERT GREENE AP Education Writer WASHINGTON, D.C. When a mother told teacher Joel J. Knox to “considerably” increase the medication he administered to control her 9-year-old son’s seizures, Knox wanted to verify the dosage with the boy’s doc tor. But the physician couldn’t be reached, and the mother was adamant, so the Merced, Calif., special education teacher fol lowed her instructions. The boy suffered an overdose and had to be hospitalized. Across the country, teachers like Knox say they are frustrat ed by growing obligations to provide medical care for chil dren with conditions ranging from asthma and attention deficit problems to more seri ous disorders such as cerebral palsy and spina bifida. At the same time, not every school has a nurse. The number of fulltime nurses ranges from 30,000 to 40,000 for about 85,000 Sand trap A greenhead fly trap sits in the sand, at a distance from the in an attempt to rid the beach, and its sunbathers, of the blood beachgoers in Brigantine, N.J., yesterday. The resort is setting traps thirsty variety of flies. Overdue Continued from Page 1. seriously and asked (Goffberg) to pay it for me because I thought it would be a gesture he might appreciate and the debt should be paid,” Bourgerie said. “But I also thought he would enjoy getting a laugh out of it,” he said. Bourgerie said he could see how people could think he did it for a joke because it was such a small amount of money and happened so many years ago. However, he did it primarily to wipe off the old debt, he said. “I sent the fine to Goffberg to liven up our correspondence, but in all seriousness, I wanted him to pay it,” Bourgerie said. Bourgerie, now a resident of Bora Bora, in French Polynesia, graduated from the Universi ty in 1942 and was a member of the track and cross country teams while he was a student. He ran on the cross country team with one of his best friends, Goffberg. Both men were members of the 1941 team "Prices have hit rock bottom." pet salesman at Tokyu department store in Tokyo Japan, it seems, is experiencing an unprecedented bug glut. The market is in a panic. Breeders are going belly up. “Prices have hit rock bottom,” lamented Kiyoaki Tsuno, head of the gardening and pet division at the Tokyu department store in Tokyo. While his shelves once carried bugs that went for thousands of dollars, this year the $BOO stag bee tle that caught Teraoka’s fancy was his priciest specimen. Especially attractive to bug con noisseurs are two kinds of beetle Japanese varieties of the stag and atlas that can grow to nearly 3 inches in length and bear impres sive “horns” that resemble orna ments on the helmets of samurai warriors public school buildings, accord ing to estimates. That means that teachers, aides, administrators and even school secretaries often feed children through tubes, help them urinate with catheters of make sure that “traches” breathing tubes in throats are clear. “When we asked staff persons to perform anything, we made sure we had a health-trained person to train them,” she said. But that provided little com fort to Ann Thiemann, a high school teacher who was told to be prepared to clean the trache of a 9th grader if he became so choked he couldn’t do it himself. Thiemann refused. Her class room had no phone or button to call for. help in an emergency, nor equipment for suctioning. “What do you do with a child who is choking to death who has a permanent trache in a class of 30 kids?” she said. Two of five teachers assigned to the 9th grade eventually agreed to the training. that finished second in the 1941 NCAA champi onships, Goffberg said. Today’s students thought the story was cute, but said Bourgerie did not have to bother to pay his old fine off. “If the library was concerned about the unpaid fine, they would have come after him a long time ago,” said Dan Hindman (graduate agricultural engineering). “But if paying this off helps him feel better, then it was a good thing.” Visiting student Adam DeMezza, a junior at Tufts University, said he was surprised to find out library employees did not accept Bourg erie’s money. “It’s a funny story, but it is unnecessary of him to think that if he didn’t pay the fine he wouldn’t be going out ‘clean,’ ” DeMezza said. “I’m sure he paid enough in tuition in his day that he didn’t have to worry about paying the University off for this,” he said. Goffberg said he and Bourgerie’s friendship dates all the way back to the time when the two Kiyoaki Tsuno Japan’s beetlemania isn’t isolat ed among hard-core collectors. Grade-school children commonly raise the smaller atlas beetles as homework projects during the summer vacation, which for most kids began this month. The total numbers of pet beetles in Japan is uncertain, though their popularity is undisputed. No Japan ese pet store is really complete without a bug corner, and most carry a wide range of beetle sup plies including cages, log chunks for the bugs to nest in and even nutritionally enriched bug jelly and bug juice. Such affection for insects is nothing novel. In ancient times, aristocrats sung the praises of bugs and held competitions to see who could best JOIDES mission finds secrets in sediment By MALCOLM RITTER AP Science Writer OFF THE NEW JERSEY COAST Jerry Dickens hasn’t shaved in about a week. In his white T-shirt, shorts and sandals, the 32-year-old chemist is plowing through another long day in a windowless chemistry lab below deck on the research ship called the JOIDES Resolution. “You’re expected to work 12 hours,” Dickens says over the hum of his instruments and the machinery of the ship, which is rocking gently about 110 miles east of Atlantic City. “If you get excited by something, you spend 23 hours a day in here.” And indeed, he is hooked. He’s been analyzing water trapped in the sediment pulled up from about 2,000 feet below, and he’s baffled by what he and his colleagues have found. Their observations about a puzzling pat tern in the waste left by bacteria are part of a wealth of data that 27 scientists spend hours cramming into the shipboard computers. At three sites off New Jersey during its month-long expedition at sea, the Resolution drilled into the seafloor and pulled out columns of mud and sand, searching for clues about the ancient rising and falling of sea level. It was the fifth voyage this year for the 471- foot JOIDES Resolution, a converted oil drilling ship that has sailed for science since 1985. JOIDES (pronounced JOY-DEEZ) stands for the Joint Oceanographic Institutions for Deep Earth Sampling, the international group repre senting the partners in the drilling program. The partners come from 20 countries, although the National Science Foundation supplies about identify their calls. An often-quot ed work by Basho, generally regarded as the ultimate master of haiku poetry, celebrated the entrancing cry of the cicada. “Of course, we are repulsed by some kinds of bugs just like every one else,” Tsuno said. “But in some we see a kind of refined elegance as well.” In recent years, that elegance had been worth a lot of money. Tsuno said that unlike the more common atlas beetles, stag beetles longer than 3 inches can easily fetch $5OO or more. The average atlas beetle costs only about $lO. Along with size, collectors look for beetles with no scars, all their legs intact and an exoskeleton that has the sheen of a well-polished car. A healthy stag beetle, for example, can live in captivity for two or more years. Improved breeding techniques have made it easier for average collectors to get larvae and grow large beetles themselves, causing prices to plummet. met as freshmen at the University. Goffberg, who is originally from Philadel phia, said he became instant friends with Red Bank, New Jersey native Bourgerie when they came to the University in 1938, but lost contact with him for a number of years. Goffberg started to keep in touch with Bourg erie again when he was living in England in the 19505, he said. “I read about Bourgerie in a travel magazine which said he was the manager of the biggest hotel on the island of Bali in the Pacific Islands,” Goffberg said, adding that after Bourgerie retired, he moved to Bora Bora. He said this library fine has helped strength en his friendship with Bourgerie, although he hasn’t seen him for more than 50 years. “Everybody who hears this thinks it’s a fan tastic story, and I wanted to tell it to get Bourg erie some press before he dies because he’s very lonely in Bora Bora now since the only family left out there is his kids,” Goffberg explained. "It's our one and only shot to get this sort of data." 60 percent of the program budget. The ship can reach down more than five miles to drill around the clock and recover columns of sediment that reveal geological his tory. No other scientific vessel can get continuous cores of sediment stretching so deep into the ocean floor, says James Austin Jr., a senior research scientist at the Institute for Geo physics at the University of Texas at Austin. “We create encylopedias of the ocean,” he says, sweeping his hand past three bookshelves jammed with data from the ship’s voyages. Some of those findings are extraordinary. In February, for example, scientists announced they’d found confirmation in the seafloor off the Florida coast that a huge aster oid slammed into Earth 65 million years ago, a catastrophe blamed for killing off the dinosaurs. The ship takes on a new scientific crew, usu ally about two dozen researchers, for each trip. They work in labs and offices spread over seven stories, connected by a maze of narrow hallways and stairways. “They’re not being bothered by telephones, secretaries, students, all the things that disturb you back on land,” says Nicholas Christie-Blick of Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty AP Photo Possibly no other country in the world is as crazy about beetles as Japan, but the country’s bug market is in distress. The bug pictured above sells for $BOO. Jerry Dickens researcher Council Continued from Page 1. there are future chances of placing diverters in their neighborhoods. Tetzlaff said although borough committees have discussed plans to install diverters in other down town areas, CPA needs to remind borough voters that the Borough Council said the College Heights diverters were a special exception and the council currently has no plans to install more diverters in the future. Although many CPA members, including Tetzlaff, are residents of Ferguson Township and are there fore not permitted to vote in the borough, they plan to affect the State College Borough Council elections this fall. “I think we will be (involved in the election),” Tetzlaff said. “That is an issue we will explore in detail soon.” The group, which held its public meeting at the Sleep Inn of State College, 111 Village Dr., did not allow the media to be in attendance while determining its charter. For the time being CPA will focus exclusively on the traffic diverters. However, they left open the possibility to address other issues in the future. CPA’s charter states that the group exists “for the purpose of speaking with a common voice on Budget Continued from Page 1. “Hope scholarship” of $1,500 tax credits for the first two years of college. Also included were tax breaks for later college years, spe cial savings incentives for educa tion and other reductions. After years of trying, Republi cans finally won a rate reduction in capital gains taxes, which are paid on profits from sale of real estate and other investments. The top rate would go from 28 to 20 percent, middle-income rates from 15 to 10 percent. There would be further reduc tions for property held at least five years. In a break for most homeowners, there would be no capital gains tax on home sales in which the profit was below $500,000 similar to a Clinton proposal. The GOP surrendered, however, in its effort to exempt from tax any capital gains increase due solely to inflation. Earth Observatory, who was co-chief scientist with Austin for the expedition on sea-level changes. “What you can accomplish in a month ... is phenomenal,” Christie-Blick says. “It’s our one and only shot to get this sort of data,” says Dickens, a researcher at both the University of Michigan and James Cook Uni versity in Townsville, Australia. “You want to be very sure you’ve done a good job,” he added. “Once we leave the ship, that’s it. Other scientists will have to put their faith in what we’ve done out here.” On this voyage, the ship delivered a slender, 30-foot-long column of sediment every half hour to two hours. The samples were encased in a flexible plas tic cylinder and cut into shorter chunks for eas ier handling. Each chunk was then split lengthwise, so half the sample could be sent to an archive and the other half used to look for microscopic fossils, chemical traits and other clues to the history of the ocean floor. Laid out on a table one day during the trip, these half-cylinders looked like rain gutters clogged with dark, moist, olive-green mud. In one segment, the texture changed abruptly from creamy smooth to brick-like rough. That marks a time when erosion from the land sud denly picked up, washing the coarser sediments into the ocean. Altogether, the ship recovered about 1,000 yards of mud and sand columns on this trip, revealing geological history from up to 35 mil lion years ago. There’s plenty for scientists to ponder in the next two years or so. the question of traffic diverters which interfere with access to and through the Borough of State Col lege as well as other issues as may affect the community.” The group created a structure which allows all dues-paying mem bers to form an executive commit tee. They also elected Tetzlaff as president, Zachariah Marshall and A 1 Segall as vice presidents, Eloise Gilliland treasurer and King McCubbin as scribe. Although all one has to do to become a voting member is pay a five dollar annual fee, Tetzlaff said there is no chance that pro-diverter residents will join the group and try to reverse the group’s stance on the diverter issue. “We don’t want to limit our mem bership like some of the neighbor hood associations do,” Tetzlaff said. “I don’t feel that there would be enough pro-diverter people to come in and actually take over the group.” Currently the group has about 50 devoted members, Tetzlaff said. About 20 were in attendance last night. However, as time goes on and CPA receives more publicity, he said he expects that number to drastically increase. “There’s the potential to be over 1,000,” he said. Clinton said that would cut feder al revenues too deeply in the future Republicans won an increase in the estate-tax exemption from the current $600,000 to $1 million over 10 years $1.3 million starting next year for small businesses and family farms. And a host of new Individual Retirement Accounts for spouses, students and first-time homebuy ers were included. These would be limited, however, to people earning $150,000 annually, and each indi vidual could invest no more than $2,000 annually in all IRAs com bined. To help pay for all this, bargain ers agreed that the cigarette tax would rise by a dime in 2000 and an additional nickel in 2002. Most of the approximately $l4O billion in five-year savings came from Medicare, whose growth would be trimmed by $ll5 billion, or about 12 percent. AP Photo
Significant historical Pennsylvania newspapers