flies-a-poppin'

This video shows flies getting zapped by bug zappers, in slow motion.



I'd like to see a video of a bug zapper at night.

Thirty-some years ago, my folks had a bug zapper. At that time we lived in a low, wet area with swampy woods just outside the yard. There was a slow-moving creek in the woods that fed a pond. In other words, we lived in a mosquito's paradise. Much of the county was likewise wet and buggy. In the end, my dad deduced correctly that the UV light was bringing in more mosquitoes and other insects than we would already have had (which was more than plenty, thank you very much).

Many times, in many places, I have heard people complain about how bad the mosquitoes are wherever we may be, and of course they tout how large their mosquitoes are, but a few years in Gananda, NY gives you perspective. I've never experienced such dense swarms of such large mosquitoes anywhere else that I've lived. I know that they are worse in Canada. Cold-climate skeeters have a short season to work with so they have to be big and bad.

Fortunately we did not have black flies in Gananda because there was no water around that moved quickly enough to support their larval and pupal stages. I've been fortunate, so far in my life, in that I have never lived where black flies were noticeably present.

In other news, I fixed and renamed the link for NOAA's space weather website on the sidebar to the right of this page.

Radio reception at my house, and even in my car, has been exceptionally poor for the last few days. So much so that I just shut the radio off and listen to podcasts. About a half-hour ago I remembered that I had a space weather link and fired up my web browser. There was no link saved in my browser but I knew that I had put a link to it on the Council of Lemurs sidebar.

Alas, a 404 error was the response to my click, though it was a custom one with an explanation that the website had been rejiggered (sorry about the technobabble). I found the correct link using Google and fixed the sidebar.