Sunday, October 22, 2006

Six Flags

When I was in Kentucky earlier this year, from a distance I saw a Six Flags theme park. If I hadn't, I may not have noticed two references to Six Flags in the news recently.
First off, the chain is looking to impose dress and behaviour codes so they can return the parks to families - discouraging anti-social behaviour like people taking their shirts and shoes off, clothes bearing profanities, and rude and offensive behaviour. There was no mention of keeping character actors from doing pretend boinking.
While this may be good for their flagging business, I'm not sure how it fits in with the piece of news - around Friday 13th - where the Six Flags parks at Valencia was offering guests the opportunity to take themselves and three friends to the front of some ride queues if they ate a live cockroach. There was apparently no shortage of takers with four dozen consumed in an hour at one point.
When I first heard of this it was on a podcast and I thought it was that if you caught a cockroach you could jump to the front of the queue. It seemed like an interesting proposition - but curious - did they have a cockroach problem they were hoping to quell?
I can remember having only seen one person eat a live cockroach (no, haven't seen anyone eat a dead one - people don't seem to do they? Even on Fear Factor it's live ones). But back to the coackroach eater. His name was Mark Everingham and it was a big'un. I'm not sure if my revulsion was in any way lessened by his bravado in actually biting the cockroach in half (we heard the shell crack) and chewing thoroughly before swallowing.
The Six Flags park also had a cockroach eating competiton - with prizes available if you ate 13 Madagascar Hissing Cockroaches in 13 minutes.
Of course, I remain curious about from whence came the cockroaches for guest eating - and whether different species of cockroaches have different flavours.

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