With Just A Hint Of Mayhem

Is this Ziggy or one of the spiders?

Hello again everyone and thank you for joining me for another of my infrequent posts This one is based around a great recent news story about Mr Bowie who is no stranger to this blog! Anyway he has been granted the honour of having a spider named after him. I guess this is because of the occasional spider references in his work. Notably dear old Ziggy and his Spiders from Mars and also the Glass Spider tour of 1987. Although to be fair the less said about his 80s stuff the better I’ll feel! The discovery of the new species of spider, named Heteropoda davidbowie, was made in Malaysia by a German arachnoligist (now that is what I call a job title!) Peter Jaeger. He says he named the large yellow spider after Bowie to draw attention to the endangered status of many spiders. He is quoted as saying “We are also quickly losing genetic resources that have evolved over more than 300 million years.” Apparently last year the Rameshwaram Parachute Spider was among included on a “red list” of thousands of endangered species which was compiled by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Less than 500 of these spiders are believed to remain in their woodland habitat on the island of Rameshwaram, which is closed to Sri Lanka. The areas they live in are slowly being cleared to increase the number of hotels and tourist facilities on the island

Bowie on the web!

This isn’t the first arachnid to be named after a musician either. In 2008 Jason Bond a biologist at East Carolina University named a newly discovered trapdoor spider Myrmekiaphila neilyoungi. Can you guess who it was named after? It’s Neil Young of course!

So this got me thinking about some spider songs to add to todays post, so here we go and please send me your own suggestions as well

“Boris The Spider” – The Who A great spider clay animation video this one!

“Spiders” – System Of A Down – Now this is one scary mofo of a video

“Spiders (Kidsmoke)” – Wilco -spiders filling out tax returns indeed!

“Glass Spider” – David Bowie – the full works including the stage set from the ’87 tour that seems to have been ripped off by U2 for their current tour

“Spider Pig” – Simpsons – the full choral version which uses images of said Spider Pig in the promo stills from Spiderman 3 – Excellent!

“Spiderman Theme” – Ramones – a great cartoon of both Spidey and the band

Although it only mentions spiders I will also add Bowie’s classic Ziggy Stardust. Incidentally during my time working with some wonderful people at Accenture and Unilever in 2007/ 2008 I had the Ziggy guitar riff as my ring tone. Every time my phone rang when I was working with my good friend Elmus Da Costa Gomez (doesn’t Elmus’ name make everyone else’s name sound dull?) he would break into spontaneous air guitar antics until I answered it. Which was quite amusing at the time, but I guess that you had to be there really!