Bites

Headline of the day, from a Wisconsin State Journal story: Mosquitoes want your blood. Gee, do ya think?

Everybody I know has been complaining for a week about how bad the mosquitoes are this year. Apparently, they are not just wimpy whiners:

“We know there are an abundance of nuisance mosquitoes. We're getting a lot of calls,” said health department spokesman John Silcox.

The recent heavy rains were an ideal environment for breeding of nuisance biters - the ones that cause a lot of welts and itching but no disease.

Me, I don't seem to notice them so much. I suspect it's  from spending a tour in Southeast Asia, where mosquitoes were a constant swarming cloud one had to always walk through. No domestic flying pests can ever measure up. Sigh, just another one of the war wounds I've brought back to inflict on my friends and neighbors and the people I pick fights with in bars. (You really have to read that. It is appalling and astonishing in its anti-war, wide-eyed innocence.)

Bees are something else. There is something about me that attracts them. There can be 100 of us standing around, and a bee will ignore the other 99 and come right for me. Any day now, I expect them to come right into the office looking for me: "Can Leo come out and play?" I hate bees. Don't you ever let one follow you into a bar where I'm drinking, or I'll show you what I learned in 'Nam, you ------- --------.