Frazz by Jef Mallett for July 08, 2020

You know how you can recognize a happy bike rider?

Yeah. You know it’s by the bugs on her teeth…

In a similar vein, what is the last thing that goes through a bee’s mind when it his your windshields? The stinger.

I like the water effect from the hose and the blue vignette.

Caulfield is having a ‘fraught’ summer of irritations.

I’ve eaten a few bugs while cycling. What is more of an issue, is that they get wedged in your bike helmet. Stinging bugs really get your attention. Not to contradict ol’ Jef (’cause he needed to use mosquitoes for his story), but mosquitoes because of their low body mass, lack the necessary inertia to really be on the menu for cyclists.

I wouldn’t be so flip while talking with someone holding a water hose.

Frazz is a bike nerd?

In addition to all the other functions they carry out in a balanced ecosystem, insects are the bottom of the food chain. And studies from all over the world show that they are rapidly decreasing in number. Where I live, butterflies and moths have almost disappeared. And the birds that eat primarily insects are in steep decline. The few spider webs I find remain empty of prey. Humans have treated insects as enemies for a couple of hundred years, practicing chemical warfare against them. We may win the war, but it will be a pyrrhic victory.

Bottom of the food chain is all the producers. Mosquitoes are parasites, Caulfield, and they bite us for a blood meal so they do “eat” us. (Well, the females do. The males are nectar sippers.)Whatever grade you’re supposed to be in, kid, you should have paid attention rather than being a smug disruption to the rest of the class. You might have learned this if you had, and I know that this kind of thing starts being covered in second or third grade at the latest, at least around here.

I used to go to a lot of science-fiction conventions, and at many of them the masquerade was emceed by a guy dressed up as Dracula, whose opening schtick was always to remind us that we weren’t at the top of the food chain, HE was!

It all depends on where you live. Out here in rural Oregon we are NOT at the top of the food chain. If you go for a walk, you’d better be carrying bear spray or a heavy caliber hand gun.

Is he spraying water or sucking up the panel border?

Your worm is your only emperor for diet. We fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots. Your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service; two dishes to one table, that’s the end. (Hamlet)

Mosquitoes do not eat us.

For certain periods the females need mammalian blood for their eggs otherwise they like sucking nectar just like the males.

In México, certain posh restaurants offer a delicacy called “escamoles”. Its a plate made of mosquito larvae, very tasty indeed and expensive too. Bon appetit and enjoy.

Something seems to be bugging Caulfield.