Cockroaches

A new breed of flying cockroach has settled in Florida and may be moving north. I can't say I'll be happy to see them, although I suppose they'll amuse the cat. When the flying cockroaches arrive, and I have a feeling they'll be landing any day now, I'll just have to learn to live with them, as I have learned to live with their non-airborne relatives. Cockroaches are one of the tests of urban life. Can you face up to them? Are you tough enough to deal with them? Will it be you, or them?

Chester County's most notorious landlord could be headed back to jail because of new citations for cockroaches in his apartments. The county health department cited Amrit Lal last week for allowing "extensive infestation" in his Scarlett Manor apartment complex in Kennett Square and failing to get a pest control service to deal with it. Lal owns $3.88 million in Chester County properties, much of it in low- income housing. He has been cited more than 152 times in the last seven years for incidents relating to the squalid condition of his apartments.

This guy sings to cockroaches. He blows a welcoming horn at the entrance of Outside-In, the children's nature museum at the Academy of Natural Sciences on the Parkway. He takes requests. "What do you want to hear?" he asks a boy about 9 years old who walks in with his mother. " 'Beat It,' " the kid says. "Michael Jackson?" the man asks. He proceeds to play his version of the Gloved One's hit song on a conch shell. You wonder if the guy's all there. He looks normal enough.

Greta Garbage and Baggy Grable, the two trashy ladies sauntering up Walnut Street behind the three singing cockroaches, were discussing art, fashion, the Earth and trash bags. From time to time, people would make remarks. "What are you supposed to be?" "Look at these people, will you. " "This town gets wackier every day. " Greta and Baggy, whose real names, respectively, are Lisa Stockebrand and Liz Dorbad, were on their way Monday to Rittenhouse Square with the singing cockroaches and two dozen other oddly attired people.

Fisher's Restaurant, a North Philadelphia landmark whose employees loyally served - and whose customers loyally came - has closed for good after 65 years. Fisher's was known for its Bavarian castle decor and a cavernous interior of 10,000 square feet, as well as its seafood, moderate prices and longtime customers and staff. They served up fried oysters and lobster stew, homemade pies and puddings. Nothing fancy, just good, plain food - fish, steak, chops and vegetables. And cheap parking - just 10 cents for 90 minutes in the lot next door.

If you've ever seen a cockroach or a "water bug" in your house, you're not going to like this story: Roaches are hazardous to your health. You already know that they're a nuisance that neither bug bombs nor house cats can vanquish. But you probably don't know that cockroaches are a potent irritant to allergy sufferers, affecting more people even than ragweed. Or that cockroaches can carry the bacteria that cause leprosy, diarrhea, typhoid, plague, and food poisoning; the virus that causes polio; and even a nasty assortment of worm eggs - hookworm, roundworm, pinworm, tapeworm and whipworm.

A judge has closed Fisher's Restaurant for health code violations, sparking a debate between a lawyer and city inspectors over whether two cockroaches or two kinds of cockroaches were found at the landmark North Philadelphia establishment. Common Pleas Judge Nicholas M. D'Alessandro's order yesterday against Fisher's, on Broad Street near Venango, came after city Health Department inspectors said they had found two kinds of cockroaches at the restaurant. But lawyer Bayard Graf contended that restaurant owner Miles Fisher was the victim of a "personality conflict" with inspectors and that the restaurant was closed because they had found "only two cockroaches.

Carole Bohr firmly believes the Stanley Cup will come back to Philadelphia. So much so, she's waged her bet in cement. After midnight on Sunday, prowlers made off with a copy of the ultimate hockey trophy that she and her 12-year-old grandson Billy built on Hulmeville Road, so the grandmother made another one. And she filled it with concrete. Bohr, who is a guard at Bucks County Prison, characterized the cup thieves as cockroaches. "Cockroaches sneak around when it's dark," she said.

Theresa Palistini's reaction was one of dismay as she surveyed her father's kitchen last week. The cupboards were empty. Dishes, some spotted with cockroach droppings, were stacked on the table. All food, including breakfast cereal, sugar and salt, had been put in the refrigerator. The reason was apparent - dead cockroaches under the kitchen radiator. As Palistini tells it, the cockroaches have driven her 80-year-old father from the Conshohocken rowhouse on West First Avenue that he has owned since 1942, forcing him on Oct. 2 to move in with her and her husband.

Too bad the Heaven's Gate cultists killed themselves before the arrival of "The Fifth Element," because they appear to be the target audience. Only someone preparing to rendezvous with a spaceship hidden behind the Hale-Bopp comet could fully appreciate the weird plot of "The Fifth Element," a movie about giant armored cockroaches who save the universe from evil by placing four magic stones in a Egyptian temple, next to a chosen savior - a...

An old line goes that if a nuclear calamity occurs, only the cockroaches will survive. Make that cockroaches and Philadelphians with the right political connections. Two more news stories from over the weekend reinforce the notion that in Philadelphia, it's not how well you do what you do, it's who you know and what they owe you politically. Take Mayor Street and the building trades unions, which are among his strongest political supporters. It's a good thing Mayor Street talked to his union friends last year about chilling it with the labor disputes at the Pennsylvania Convention Center.

Halloween is upon us, so it's now time for us to get officially scared. Of course, there are other, more scary times of the year. April 15. When Mayor Rendell takes his annual summer dip, shirtless, into a city swimming pool. When the Eagles take the field each week. But none of them has candy corn, and at no other time of the year are there 20 - count' em 20 - really scary things for you to do or see on a given weekend. Some of what follows falls into the Halloween tradition of haunted houses, hayrides and dungeons.

"Mimic" is about cockroaches so big and nasty that when they turn on the lights, we run away. The roaches live, of course, in New York, in abandoned subway tunnels where homeless people and unsupervised children have suddenly begun to disappear. A beautiful, brainy entomologist named Susan Tyler (Mira Sorvino) thinks she knows why. A few years earlier, a desperate city turned to her when an infection carried by cockroaches caused an deadly epidemic. Using untested DNA engineering, she created a new species of cockroach - dubbed the Judas Breed - designed to mate with the city's indigenous roaches, rendering them infertile and quickly extinct.

Carole Bohr firmly believes the Stanley Cup will come back to Philadelphia. So much so, she's waged her bet in cement. After midnight on Sunday, prowlers made off with a copy of the ultimate hockey trophy that she and her 12-year-old grandson Billy built on Hulmeville Road, so the grandmother made another one. And she filled it with concrete. Bohr, who is a guard at Bucks County Prison, characterized the cup thieves as cockroaches. "Cockroaches sneak around when it's dark," she said.

Too bad the Heaven's Gate cultists killed themselves before the arrival of "The Fifth Element," because they appear to be the target audience. Only someone preparing to rendezvous with a spaceship hidden behind the Hale-Bopp comet could fully appreciate the weird plot of "The Fifth Element," a movie about giant armored cockroaches who save the universe from evil by placing four magic stones in a Egyptian temple, next to a chosen savior - a...

TOURIST BUG-EARED OVER HOSTILE HOSTEL EXPERIENCE Sydney's infamous cockroaches are sure to figure in at least one backpacker's nightmares. Early yesterday, emergency medical workers reached into a 19-year-old Swedish tourist's ear with a pair of tweezers and pulled out a 1 1/2-inch-long cockroach. "It was moving nearly all the time, that was the scary thing," said Magnus Carlstedt, 19. "When he moved I could hear everything. " Carlstedt, who had been staying at the Jolly Swagman Youth Hostel, bought some earplugs soon after the removal of the roach and proceeded to check out. No dummy, he. ONE OF CHINA'S RICHEST MEN IS UP THERE AMONG THE STARS Li Xiaohua, one of China's richest men, has joined William Shakespeare, Sir Isaac Newton and George Washington in the heavens - Chinese astronomers have named an asteroid after him. The Purple Mountain Observatory in the eastern city of Nanjing said Tuesday that it had recommended naming the body, known as Number 3556, as "Li Xiaohua asteroid" in recognition of Li's contribution to education, science and technology.

It may look like a rowhouse, but Phyllis Tiggle actually lives in a roach motel. Roaches crawl in - but they don't crawl out. Tiggle, a nine-year resident of South Philly's Passyunk Homes - run by the city's Public Housing Authority - has tried everything: over-the-counter bombs, commercial sprays, treatments by PHA-contracted exterminators. After each episode, the vermin have basically said, "Yeah, right," and continued to do the roach rhumba through her kitchen, up in the bathroom, in and out of household appliances (including the heater, TV and VCR)

There are those who believe that when mankind finally destroys itself and virtually all life on its planet, the only creature who might survive will be the humble cockroach, who has existed through the millennia noshing on whatever's around. In Philadelphia, the cockroaches will have to fight the lawyers. The cockroaches would not be favored. Take the titanic struggle to see who has been the bigger liar and cheat in the 2nd state Senatorial District race last November. Some might wonder how this thing keeps dragging on, why actions and motions fly in every court this side of Wimbledon, why legal representation, however inept, remains determined and uncompromising.

Daria Fink, sales director at the Franklin Institute, came to work one day and saw cockroaches all over the floor. Aaargh! She recalls it took a couple of seconds to realize they were plastic. Someone had spilled a package of one of the products the institute stocks in its "bug shop. " Like most museums, the Franklin Institute counts on income earned by selling products related to its exhibits in a museum store. Typically, the institute sells scientific gadgets, books on astronomy and such.