You know how one thing leads to another? Well, that’s just happened to us. For realz.
This post was meant to be about the all-female rock group Flying Ipis, because they performed at a hip event recently.
If you need a translation, it means Flying Cockroach.
Then again, if you need a translation, maybe this story isn’t for you, because as we were doing research for our story, we came across more interesting pieces of information about the insect instead.
Almost all of it was in the vernacular.
From the Tagalog Answers.com, we learned that aside from “ipis” the other local name for cockroach is the poetic-sounding “bangkukang.”
Ipis can mean several things to many countries.
In other parts of the world, we discovered that it’s spelled IPIS. There’s the International Peace Information Service n Africa, the research center called Institute for Political and International Studies n Iran, the Intelligent Product Information Search, a price comparison service, in Korea.
In the aviation industry, IPIS means Instrument Pilot Instructor School, for those wanting to fly like, well, like an ipis.
Things got really interesting when we learned that about three months ago, one million cockroaches escaped from a cockroach farm in the Chinese province of Jiangsu.
We’re assured that the Chinese government sent “experts” to control the situation, but we imagine a horde of cockroaches, escaping the exterminators, flying across oceans to reach our shores.
An Alfred Hitchcock movie, only this time starring disgusting insects.
We turned to Barbs Galicia for tips on how to handle the eventual invasion. Her article “10 Ways to Kill a Flying Ipis” is a couple of years old, but still worth a read.
Her most valuable advice?
“You’ll know the cockroach is dead when yucky liquid oozes out of its butt area.”
