Book your ticket to happiness with Sun Express Airlines. I said how are you and nice to see you? I'm doing well it's a bit cold in Wyoming, but other than that, everything is going well.

I feel you. As a pasty white British dude at the start of January, I'm well aware of cold temperature issues so maybe you can just

refresh our audience's memory let them know what you do what's your area of

expertise what keeps you busy I I'm a professor of natural sciences and humanities at the

University of Wyoming. My doctorate is in entomology but I'd like to say I

met a morphost about 15 years ago into a joint appointment between the Department of Philosophy and the Department of Creative Writing.

So I've tried to integrate the humanities and the sciences and in

various ways and that keeps me pretty busy these days.

This is Kafka sort of a rock star in your area of academic studies?

Well, yeah, he certainly is in my mind.

I don't know how many of my colleagues in entomology.

They must, how can you not be aware of metamorphosis?

Yeah, so, yeah, he's, he sets the standard for integrating insects into storytelling.

I think the flies are close second, perhaps.

There you go.

Yeah, great.

I mean, so I mean, I suppose I'm going to do my best and I mean, it took about five minutes to talk to you last time

before I started itching, so I'm going to try and avoid that when we talk about in sex, but maybe you can tell us exactly why you've been, you know, writing and focusing on locust for a while.

What is a locust?

Yeah, well, yeah, so I was hired 30 years ago at the University of Wyoming to work on mostly grasshoppers,

rangeland grasshoppers and their relatives,

which are the locusts.

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