Luck be a ladybug tonight

BuzzwordS
Luck be a ladybug tonight
May Berenbaum
68
tion options at one in the morning in central
Illinois were severely limited, so I usually
ended up driving to an all-night gas station
convenience store. Once there, however,
my goal-directed personality demanded
that I buy something. I didn’t want to spend
large amounts of money, which reduced the
already limited possibilities, and I didn’t
want to buy a candy bar because, with the
frequency of our daughter’s sleepless nights
in those days, I risked developing diabetes or
obesity. So, looking at what was available at
convenience stores for a dollar, I decided that
buying a scratcher would fit the bill. I rarely
won any money, but I did achieve peace of
mind—not a bad return on a $1 investment.
My daughter’s off at college now, but I still
occasionally buy scratchers. I can’t resist the
temptation, for example, to buy any ticket
that’s arthropod-themed. As gambling habits go, it’s not very costly because arthropodthemed tickets just aren’t that common. In
fact, it’s surprising how uncommon they are,
given that many insects have historically had
a reputation for being lucky. Ladybugs, for
example, have long been regarded as good
luck symbols (Kritsky and Cherry 2000).
Crickets, by contrast, are a mixed bag. According to Kritsky and Cherry (2000), in
Western tradition, crickets are lucky in the
house but not outside the chimney, in which
case they’re bad luck. Similarly, they’re
lucky in Brazil except for the black ones,
which “portend illness,” and they’re good
luck in Barbados if they’re loud but bad
luck if they’re quiet (http://en.wikipedia.
org/wiki/Cricket_(insect)). Ambivalence
notwithstanding, one would think that insects traditionally regarded cross-culturally
as “lucky” would be prominent on lottery
tickets, along with other widely recognized
lucky talismans, such as horseshoes or fourleaf clovers. Evidently, state lottery commissions aren’t deeply immersed in arthropod
semiotics or iconography.
Either Illinois is more entomologically
enlightened than other states or I just spend
more time in Illinois gas stations and convenience stores, but an informal survey reveals
that the state leads the nation in arthropodrelated lottery tickets. Consistent with traditional symbology, the “Good luck! Illinois
Lottery Game 731” included ladybugs along
with wishbones, the number seven, pennies,
and rabbit feet in a scratch-off game in which
the objective was to get three matching
symbols. Along the same lines, the “Barrel of
Bugs Illinois Lottery Game 662” featured five
ladybug-like insects that could be scratched
off to reveal different prizes (with three like
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M
ost statisticians will tell you that
a ratio of one in ten million is not
significantly different from zero in
ten million. Statistically, then, a person who
buys a ticket for the Illinois Lotto has no better chance of winning the first-prize jackpot
than a person who doesn’t buy a ticket. On
average, the odds of winning are one in
ten million (or, to be precise, 10,179,260)
(http://www.illinoislottery.com/en-us/
lotto.html). The odds of winning the Mega
Millions game (i.e., matching 5 white balls
and the gold “Mega Ball”) are even longer,
at one in 175,711,536. To put these odds in
perspective, USA Today (rather unhelpfully)
reports that you’re nine times more likely to
“die from a TV falling on your head” than you
are to buy the winning ticket (http://tinyurl.
com/7xbj9vt). However, statistics notwithstanding, the reality is that it’s very, very hard
to win the lottery if you don’t buy a ticket.
As a risk-averse person, I really don’t
like recreational gambling. Frankly, I’ve lost
enough money in vending machines that I
consider buying a candy bar a risk-fraught
enterprise. But every now and then I’ll buy
an instant win ticket (called scratchers in
some states)—the kind where you scratch
away a thin coating on a paper ticket to see
if you match numbers or symbols to win a
prize. I started buying these over 20 years
ago, not with a hope or expectation of winning a fortune, but to help my then-infant
daughter get to sleep. Whenever she was up
in the middle of the night crying, putting her
in her car seat and driving around for a while
usually lulled her to sleep. My husband
was happy to drive aimlessly around on the
county roads near where we live, but I’m so
goal-oriented that I was uncomfortable driving without a definite destination. Destina-
American Entomologist  •  Volume 58, Number 2
were no games or slot machines with arthropod themes. There was one slot machine
called “Black Widow,” but no spiders were
in evidence anywhere—the black widows
were entirely metaphorical, and the symbols
included a bar, shoes, and spades (http://
tinyurl.com/cmhbhlz).
This is not to say that there are no slot
machines that feature arthropods. In fact,
in 1964, Bally introduced a machine called
“Money Honey,” which had the distinction
of being the first electromechanical slot
machine, with revolutionary electric hoppers that could accommodate larger payouts
(http://tinyurl.com/7se7xge). It’s unclear
to me whether the symbols decorating the
machine are supposed to be cartoon-like
female bees or just cartoon-like female humans, but the fact that the machine utilized
a “fruit reel” of lemons, oranges, blueberries, and watermelons (“Jet Age Perfection
of Fruit Reel Amusement,” http://tinyurl.
com/7u7m857) is at least suggestive of a
connection to pollination.
In the (mystifying) world of online casinos, however, there is far less ambiguity
about arthropods. The online slot machine
game “Honey Bee” (http://tinyurl.com/
bncjrtt) features a bee “waiting to land on a
sunflower…If you look on top right corner of
your reel’s window, you will notice that Mr.
Bee is laying in wait to land on a sunflower.
Once this happens, you will be rewarded
with a free games and multiplier for a chance
to win bigger cash.” The reels feature watermelons, blueberries, strawberries, cherries,
oranges, lemons, and sunflowers, with the
sunflowers yielding the largest prize. Given
the gender confusion with regard to the bee
and the grammatical confusion with regard
to the verb “to lie,” accuracy in online casino
entomology or etymology would not seem
to be a good bet.
Good grammar was also not of concern
to the developers of the online slot machine “Honey to the Bees” (http://tinyurl.
com/8xtzesl): “the game about laborious
life of the bee. It is 5 reel with 20 winning
lines slot machine. Besides this game is famous for its possibility to win top jackpot
of 5,000 coins hitting 4 symbols across
winning line. The graphics is very cheerful
and bobbish. The music of the game is also
full of positive happy sounds, especially
when the wild symbol is hit. There are next
symbols in the game: Worker Honey Bee,
Queen Bee, Sunflower, Honey Pot, Beehive,
Ladybird and other classic card symbols.”
At least the creators of “Honey to the Bee”
made an effort to incorporate some aspects
of bee biology into the game. Insect biology
seems to have been a lower priority for the
designers of the “Happy Bugs” slot game
(http://tinyurl.com/6ru9gka), which “has a
humorous theme with insects that are happy
due to the fact that they’re drinking beer.”
As with lottery tickets, puns seem to be a
main motivation behind a few of the online
insect-themed slot games, including, among
others, “Cashapillar”: “Platinum Play Online
Casino presents its monster creepy-crawly
of a video slot, Cashapillar. With a hundred
pay-lines fit to fill a centipede with envy,
this massive video slot has Wild, Scatter,
Free-spins, Multiplier and Gamble options,
ever so cleverly displayed as a garden party
of insects” (http://tinyurl.com/7qz5wff).
Along the same lines is “Swat Team” (themed
around “Insect Assassins with winning payline symbols such as Swatted Insects, SWAT
Team, Insect assassins, Triple, Double and
Single Bullet Bars. The Game comes with
a nightime [sic] insect background sound”
(http://tinyurl.com/bm7vy86). Puns also
come into play in the “L’il Lady” slot game
(http://tinyurl.com/6n89yx7), themed
around ladybugs searching for elusive
“love bugs,” as well as the Travel Bug slot
game (http://tinyurl.com/8ycdrh8), which
features, aside from ladybugs, “suitcasedbearing mosquitos and bizarre smiling
terrorist bugs – really: The caterpillar doffs
a beret, sports a Pancho Villa-looking moustache, and totes an AK-47.”
There is one kind of slot machine bug,
though, that even entomologists would be
well advised to avoid. Early in the history
of mechanical slot machines, a widespread
practice arose of installing inconspicuous
metal devices, dime-sized or smaller, in the
inner workings of the slot machine that effectively prevent the reels from ever landing
on the jackpot symbols and thereby reduce
the odds of hitting the jackpot to zero. These
devices were known in the business as
“bugs,” probably because of their small size
and their ability to interfere with the proper
functioning of a machine. Don Creekmore,
a blogger for Nation’s Attic, a company
devoted to buying and selling vintage slot
machines, reported that, during the Golden
Age of slot machines (from around 1931
to 1942), “bugs” were advertised openly
for sale in gambling supply brochures,
albeit under the less suspicion-provoking
name “Percentage Devices” (http://tinyurl.
(Buzzwords continued on page 123)
69
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amounts winning that amount). In two other games, puns (rather than symbolism) are
the motivation behind including arthropods
in games of chance. The “ANTe-UP Illinois
Lottery Game 564” depicted ants gathered
around a card table; players could win up
to $1,000 if the card revealed by scratching
is higher than the dealer’s card. Along the
same punnish lines, the “BEE Lucky Illinois
Lottery Game 239” featured a smiling bee
and a nest dangling from a branch (which
incontrovertibly belonged to an unseen
hornet and not to the happy bee). Winners
had to match their numbers to the numbers
concealed underneath honeypot icons to
win a prize, and revealing a bee icon resulted in an automatic win (http://tinyurl.
com/7xuk2ha).
Outside Illinois, arthropod-related lottery tickets are fewer and farther between
(http://tinyurl.com/795gcy4). Maine did
have a “Lucky Bug” dollar scratcher featuring ladybugs that concealed various prizes
(as well as a horseshoe icon to double the
amount). Maine, by the way, may be unique
in featuring a crustacean in a scratcher
game (Game 938, “Lucky Lobster Loot,”
from November 2011). Both Louisiana and
Montana have had $1 “Bee Lucky” games.
In Louisiana, the ticket featured nine bees
in the scratch-off section, with a smiling
bee wearing sunglasses and sneakers sitting in a honey pot against a honeycomb
background. Scratching off a bee to reveal
a hive resulted in doubling the prize (http://
tinyurl.com/7sl6879). In Montana, by contrast, bees alternated with flowers, cash
symbols, and a “prize pot.” New Jersey’s
Game #01015 featured a firefly on a $50
ticket, for no obvious reason that I could
discern (except perhaps for the fact that
“firefly” is doubly alliterative with “fifty”).
Oddest of all, Oregon’s “Jungle Jim Scratchit” (Game #0929) featured not an insect
but an entomologist, complete with pith
helmet, monocle and net (http://tinyurl.
com/c2a3vza). The game involves scratching off Jim’s image along with the image of a
box trap labeled “Jim’s Catch,” in the hope of
matching three like symbols. The symbols
included a gorilla, a hippo, a Chihuahua, and
a unicorn, leading to speculation as to what
kinds of jungles were frequented by the
designers of the game.
All of this leads me to wonder why the
Entomological Society of America keeps
holding its annual meetings in casino hotels
in Reno, Nevada. At least at the Atlantis
Casino, home of the meeting in 2011, there
Buzzwords continued, from page 69
com/722wryf). Interestingly, during that
era, slot machines were most prevalent not
in casinos, which were even then tightly regulated and heavily scrutinized with respect
to payout percentages, but rather in places
where men tended to congregate—such as
clubs, bars, and gas stations.
Fortunately, the days of unregulated
gambling are long past. With my daughter
off at college, and with vintage slot machines costing several thousand dollars, gas
station-related bug collecting for me will be
restricted to checking under the lights in the
parking lot and maybe buying the occasional
insect-related scratcher.
References Cited
Creekmore, D. 2012. Bugs in my antique
slot machine. http://antiqueslotmachine.
blogspot.com/2012/01/bugs-in-my-antique-slot-machine.html.
Kritsky, G. and R. Cherry. 2000. Insect Mythology. Writer’s Club Press.
May Berenbaum is a professor and head of the Department of Entomology,
University of Illinois, 320
Morrill Hall, 505 South
Goodwin Avenue, Urbana,
IL 61801. Currently, she is
studying the chemical aspects of interaction between herbivorous insects
and their hosts.
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