Posts Tagged ‘mosquito’
“The best blood will at some time get into a fool or a mosquito”*…
Woman dressed as a mosquito at the Russian Mosquito Festival
Nine year old Irina Ilyukhina earned the title of “tastiest girl” last month at the Russian Mosquito Festival, an annual event held in Berezniki, a town in the Ural Mountains. She and other contestants stood in shorts and vests for 20 minutes in a bug-infested wood; Irina’s winning total was 43 bites.
In 2013, the winner collected more than 100 mosquito bites; but unusually hot and dry weather in Berezniki diminished the insect population this year. Most years, attendees can participate in a mosquito hunt that rewards whomever can collect the most bugs in a glass jar; this year’s festival had to forgo the event.
More at “9-year-old wins ‘tastiest girl’ competition at annual Russian Mosquito Festival.” C.f. also, The Great Texas Mosquito Festival, held annually in Clute, Texas. (One notes that, Russia has confirmed just five cases of travel-related Zika in recent months, Texas has reported 125, and the United States as a whole, over 2,500.)
* Benito Mussolini
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As we slather on the DEET, we might spare a thought for Fredrick Kenneth Hare, CC OOnt FRSC; he died on this date in 2002. One of Canada’s leading climatologists and environmentalists, he led both academic and political efforts to measure and stem the rise of atmospheric carbon dioxide, to mitigate climate change, and to prevent drought.
“If you think you are too small to make a difference, try sleeping with a mosquito”*…
Deep into the Dog Days of Summer, readers are likely struggling to beat the heat… and thinking defensively about those predatory pests-of-the-season, mosquitoes (or as Bill Gate’s calls the species, “the deadliest animal in the world“). The little-bitty buzzers just keep on coming… And perhaps most frustratingly, they seem to bother some of us much more than others.
Smithsonian runs down the surprisingly long list of reasons in “Why Do Mosquitoes Bite Some People More Than Others?” (Spoiler alert: while 85% of them are genetic, beer makes one a more attractive morsel to the little bloodsuckers.) Happily, there is a prospect of some relief.
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As we splash on the DEET, we might recall that it was on this date in 1254 that the first known court case involving chess and violence was heard in Essex, England. It dealt with a chess player who stabbed his opponent to death after losing. But while this was the of relatively few such incidents to make it into the criminal justice system, chess violence was apparently pretty wide-spread– common enough to move French King Louis IX to ban chess. And indeed, such violence continues to this day.
“The King is dead”
Well, it’s true that they both react poorly to showers…
Randall Munroe (xkcd) riffs on the same chatbot-to-chatbot conversation featured here some days ago…
As we celebrate our essential humanity, we might recall that it was on this date in 1900 that Jesse Lazear, a then-34-year-old physician working in Cuba to understand the transmission of yellow fever, experimented on himself, allowing himself to be bitten by infected mosquitoes. His death two weeks later confirmed that mosquitoes are in fact the carriers of the disease.
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