We Can Dance If We Want To

Day 296: "We can dance if we want to / We can leave your friends behind / 'Cause your friends don't dance and if they don't dance / Well, they're no friends of mine." That was what I thought when I saw this grasshopper waving at me from the sidewalk. The words, of course, are from "The Safety Dance," a Men Without Hats pop song my younger readers probably won't recognize. The lyrics are an excursion into the surreal, not quite nonsense but definitely not unintelligible, promising levels of hidden meaning which invite the listener to theorize from their own perspective. Me, I just think they're silly. That brings us 'round to my motto for life: The world needs more silly. Go dance with a grasshopper. It'll do you a world of good.
 

Thanks to the entomologists at BugGuide.net, I now know that this is a Crackling Forest Grasshopper, Trimerotropis verruculata suffusa.