I’m not sure what exactly a chigger is – I think its one step up the evolutionary ladder from a tick. Was thinking, it would be interesting to make a stew, putting in mosquitoes, ticks, chiggers, and other supposedly non-digestibles. What made me think of this was this – I keep a cup of water by my bedside. I drink a lot of water during the night because I don’t do this during the day. One night I ingested a fly. It was crunchy. I would not do this on a whim, but it did get me to thinking about making a stew with insects.

I recently heard that the cicadas about ready to spring forth from the ground, ground that they have inhabited for umpteen years. As a child I used to find them where we lived, on the shores of Lake Ontario. They were usually attached to trees. They left their exoskeletons behind, light brown shells of their former selves.

Now I hear that they are going to hatch and fly around, not just a few but millions of them. And cicada etymologists know exactly where, when, and how many are going to emerge.

I often think about the big three: floods, plagues, and pestilence. There have been many floods, most recently there was one in Houston, Texas. And plagues, well there was Covid. Now pestilence, in the form of Cicadas. They are going to eat crops. I may have missed that part on the radio. Whoa – makes one wonder, are these the end times coming up?

If you look at the book of New York Times front pages (and we do have one of these at the hotel) there have been a lot of end times things going on for the past 50 years. I think that there is no more happening then than now. What’s tripping us up is the speed and accuracy in which news is presented to us.

Journalists can get to hot spots in a matter of hours, this compared to previously slower modes of travel, e.g. ship transportation. And they can send back photos and stories in minutes. I remember working as a reporter and waiting for wire stories to come in. And photos took just as long. There were then no cell phones, meaning no instant story or photos.

The news broadcasts used to be at 6 and 11 p.m. Now there is around the clock news.

This immediacy is, of course, contributing to our sense that we are doomed.

We are now so linked with one another that we cannot see it any other way.

If suddenly there was no computer related connection, everyone would panic. I suppose too that I’d feel like something was amiss in my life. But I’d get over this quicker than most since I have not fully bought into it.

Big Brother – it would be interesting to now read 1984, which in 1974 was futuristic.

The hum of cicadas, I suppose where they emerge, it is deafening.

Next: 130. 5/11/24: Spring, Sprang, Sprung