Mosquitoes

Today kicks off Audience Participation Week, where I pick the topic and you pick three completely unrelated words that I have to work into the topic.  Cheesy?  Yes.  Gimmicky?  Sure.  Challenging?  So far, you betcha.  Today’s suggestion comes from Snide Remarketer, aka Summit staffer Tim Jones.  You’ve got to go back to the comments at this post to find his suggestions, although they’ll probably be pretty obvious from the weirdness below.

Want to make your own suggestion?  You can do it through noon on Monday.  Later today my independent panel of judges will make the final selection for Tuesday through Friday’s posts.  

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Last Wednesday I had an additional rider on the commute to work.  Sadly, it wasn’t the Bojangles Fairy, who magically shows up every weekday with a chicken fillet biscuit and seasoned fries (somebody should really come up with a Bojangles Fairy), but it was a tiny, non-biscuit-providing mosquito.  I swatted that sucker for 40 minutes, but he dodged me at the last nanosecond every single time.  Final score was Danny: 0, Mosquito: 241.

Mosquitoes are odd little creatures.  They basically have two functions: buzz around a lot and suck the life out of you  (sounds like some church members I’ve known in my life).  Mosquitoes, in my humble yet highly accurate opinion, are the number one argument against evolution, whether it be micro-evolution or macro-evolution (What?  You didn’t know there was more than one kind?).  I mean, if the catch phrase for evolution is “survival of the fittest,” don’t you think at some point those little buggers would’ve gotten the hint and stopped poking their pointy little noses where they don’t belong?  Suck blood = somebody squashes me.  Come on mosquitoes.  Do the math.

Besides, what thrill can mosquitoes possibly get by sucking people’s blood?  Is there some sort of alternate reality thing that I don’t know about, where when you bite someone your world erupts into kaleidoscopic color with Norah Jones music playing in the background and everything suddenly smells like banana bread?  If so, forgive me, mosquito population, because now I’m right there with you.  But if you’re just sucking blood, let’s face it: that’s just weird.

Note to self: ask Noah when you get to heaven why he didn’t swat those rascals.

I don’t know the solution to the mosquito problem.  When the news media wants to scare the pants off of us and there’s not a lot of swine flu or bank closings or J-Lo to talk about, sometimes they’ll show some Louisiana parish where big trucks are spraying mosquito poison off the side of the road.  I think if you look closer you’ll find the words “Mosquito Sugar Treetz” on the side of the truck, because I’ve been to Louisiana and there’s no way those dudes are dying off.  Word is that they’ve introduced legislation to make it the state bird.

Maybe another alternative is a mosquito vasectomy, performed by doctors with soothing voices and incredible manual dexterity.  We could get Bob Barker to become the pitchman, “Have your mosquitoes spayed and neutered.”  I don’t know…just a thought.

While you’re thinking about it, I’m gonna go scratch.  And look for the Bojangles Fairy.