Answer: Midges!These things are annoying. They're messing up photographs and you might get one in your eye, mouth, or nose, but they don't bite, and they don't last long. It's just crazy time for midges.
"Midge" is a word that goes back to early Old English, where it was spelled "mygg." It just meant this tiny insect. By the 1700s, it was sometimes used, chiefly in Scotland, to refer to "A small or insignificant person, esp. a small child."
So "midge" already meant something small, yet the word "midget" came into being by adding the ending "-et" and that ending means small. I guess when something is small, something draws you toward repetition — often in the much more exaggerated style called "reduplication." You know what I mean? Teeny tiny, teeny weeny, itty bitty. I'm thinking it's because of the way we talk to babies: We're babbling and we're talking about the baby and the baby is small.
Midge is also a name. I think of Midge, the friend of Barbie, and Midge, the secondary female character in the movie "Vertigo."
Who wants to be a Midge?
No, you don't need 2 dolls. You don't need an extra doll — a homely one, with freckles — to be a friend to the beautiful doll you already have. You be Barbie's friend. No one wanted Midge. Obviously undesirable. She's just making me feel bad about my freckles.
We don't need no stinking midges!
IN THE COMMENTS: minnesota farm guy said, "I would be willing to bet that these are Mayflies. They are much too big to be midges which make fruit flies look big."
I'm saying midges because that's what Grok told me after I uploaded that photo. I enjoyed writing this post about midges — the insect, the word, the doll, the "Vertigo" character, so I don't want to be wrong. As some have noted, it's hard to judge the size of these insects from the photograph, of course, and I was there seeing them in "person." So here are 2 more photographs — one I took of them resting on my leg and the other Meade took of the ones in my hair:
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55 comments:
Photo is deceiving. They look like dragonflies!! How big is a midge??
More importantly, how do we get from Midge something tiny or small to Smidge? A tiny or small movement. ie: can you move that a smidge? Smidge? Smudge? English is grand ain't it?
" you might get one in your eye, mouth, or nose"
Penetration!
A midge is slightly smaller volume than a mosquito hawk, but a bit beefier in the body. Also, they don't tend to be killed by pesticides as easy as flies. They don't live long, but they live in mass, as is in where there is one there is hundreds more.
We live near a lake too, and a couple of years ago, the midge swarm made outdoor living miserable. We have a mosquito repellant system for the house, so normally we don't have many insects around the house. With midges, you couldn't open the front door without be greeted by dozens.
When I started watching the Vertigo clip on my small screen, I thought the blonde was sewing a sock at first. I thought to myself “What a darned nice looking woman.”
We have them in our Madison backyard at the moment.
Just wait for the mayflies. A few years ago in PA, they were so obnoxious that they died en masse on a bridge over the Susquehanna, causing hazardous driving conditions. I also remember huge swarms at a rest area on I-90 near Portage, in Columbia County. They lived short lives and the dead ended up in piles near the entry doors.
A blonde named “Midge”, perhaps?
There is one bug that swarms on the shores of Lake Erie for a day, and on the Canadian side they call them "American soldiers" and on the American side they are called "Canadian soldiers" in honor of both armies brief visits to the other's homeland during the War of 1812.
"We live near a lake too, and a couple of years ago, the midge swarm made outdoor living miserable."
Two years ago, at our northern Wisconsin lake house, we had a week where you had to swim through these things when you went outside at night. It was of biblical plague proportions.
The Sconnie word for a smidge is a “skosh”.
Midges are good food for birds, like Canadian Geese.
Poor Midge. She must not have sold well, this is the first time I've heard of her.
And I loved that clip of Vertigo. First of all the causual 50s drinking. Stewart just pours himself a tall one in the middle of the day. And the beautiful Barbara bel Geddes has to put on glasses and be a sorta nerdy artist so as not to compete with Barbie - I mean Kim Novak.
Also, I appreciated the set design of her apartment. Whoever did it, put a lot of effort into it.
As for insects, they're supposed to be small, so given how prominent they are the photo there must have been a lot of them. But better them then mosquitos.
Everybody’s gotta eat.
---- Midge, the secondary female character in the movie "Vertigo."
Well, yes, but also the measure of how far Jimmy Stewart has fallen off the turnip truck for the Kim Novak zombie part. And the contrast to Kim that is one of the movie's strengths but also its greatest weakness. Barbara Bel Geddes makes you wonder what man would prefer Kim to the much warmer and likeable Bel Geddes. With that great voice, too.
…on the Montana Madison the trout are frenzied for a midge hatch. Hell but Heaven for a fisher man…
Large scale protein delivery — with perfect, natural timing!
Midge - Marvelous Mrs. Mazel. Great show, for the most part.
Tiny pretty thing.
Midge - lead singing of Ultravox. Delightful vocalist - 80's new wave genre.
Only reason Midge Ure became Midge Ure was due to the fact that his name was Jim and there were too many Jims in the band. They took his name JIM flipped it backwards by phonetics. Mij.
tits.
The following article was too important for me to skip. I've marveled at how Islamic regimes are often given to socialism. This provides a credible explanation.
The Marx-Jihad Fusion: More Dangerous Together Than Either Parent (Townhall)
"Western strategists have long comforted themselves with a simple metric: communism collapses under the weight of its own materialism, and jihadism stalls whenever its medieval absolutism collides with modern reality. What happens, though, when the most potent elements of both creeds are welded together—when Marx’s forensic map of oppression is engine-mounted to a transcendent, Heaven-certified mission? We are witnessing that experiment in real time, and its emergence threatens not merely policy planners in Brussels or Washington but the cultural operating system of the entire West.
At first glance, Karl Marx and the Qur’an make uneasy bedfellows. Marx dismissed religion as an opiate; Islamic law is anchored in revelation so explicit that even the commas matter. Yet the 20th century left two intellectual heirlooms on history’s junkyard that radical clerics have scavenged with relish. The first is a toolbox of economic and cultural critique—class exploitation, commodity fetishism, imperial plunder, and ideological hegemony—ready-made concepts for diagnosing why so many Muslim-majority societies remain poor, corrupt, and geopolitically humiliated. The second is the moral vacuum at the heart of materialist utopias. Communism promised bread and equality but could never explain why people should bother living once those rations were distributed. Islamism supplies that missing “why” in thunderous, poetic Arabic.
Abu Qatada al-Filistini, sometimes dubbed “Osama bin Laden’s spiritual lawyer,” is the poster child of this hybrid vigor. His book-review series, “A Thousand Books Before Death,” devotes as much space to Capital and Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks as it does to medieval tafsir. When he praises Wael Hallaq’s The Impossible State—a Columbia University critique of the modern nation-state as a colonial pollutant—Qatada’s point is clear: Marxist and post-colonial theorists have already mapped the prison; Islam merely furnishes the key to escape. In his retelling, the proletariat is the global ummah, surplus value is extracted through petrodollar regimes, and cultural hegemony is enforced by government-licensed imams who trade Qur’anic thunder for bureaucratic pensions. But unlike Marx, Qatada does not wait for history’s impersonal dialectic to ripen; he calls for armed jihad to install “God’s law” and cleanse the world of capitalist idolatry."
Continued, following...
Continued:
"The danger is not academic. This fusion ideology detonates the chief Western rebuttal to Marxism—that human beings yearn for transcendence and therefore will not fight, sacrifice, or innovate for bread alone. Give the revolutionary struggle an eternal horizon, promise martyrs a direct route to Paradise, and suddenly the infirmity that doomed the Soviet experiment becomes a jetpack. It is no accident that Islamic State propaganda combined drone-shot footage of oil pipelines (imperialist theft!) with sermons on the caliphate’s divine mandate, drawing from a 90,000-item online archive known as the “Caliphate Cache.” Nor is it random that Boko Haram kidnapped 276 schoolgirls under the hashtag “Western education is sin,” while simultaneously railing against World Bank debt traps. These are not schizophrenic talking points; they are the seamless rhetoric of a movement that has solved Marxism’s deepest design flaw.
Policymakers remain trapped in bureaucratic stovepipes that separate “ideological” from “religious” extremism. Counter-terror analysts read Hadith collections, trade-policy experts read Piketty, and the two rarely share a coffee, let alone an intel brief. Meanwhile, Telegram channels in Idlib quote Edward Said and the Qur’an in the same meme. Western governments pour millions into de-radicalization programs that teach tolerance workshops, only to discover that their target audience already knows John Rawls but rejects him as a bourgeois gatekeeper of capitalist oppression. You cannot deradicalize someone who thinks your entire secular order is a factory for producing serfs.
The broader cultural impact is even more corrosive. European universities, steeped in post-colonial guilt, are reluctant to condemn a movement that mirrors their own syllabi on empire and inequality—minus, of course, the suicide vests. That hesitation produces a bizarre horseshoe coalition: activist professors decry “Islamophobia” while radical preachers borrow those same footnotes to denounce “liberal fascism.” The West thus forfeits its moral clarity, not because it doubts liberty, but because it has already half-internalized the Marxian critique of its past. Into that ambivalence marches a theologically turbo-charged revolutionary who can out-quote the post-modernist and out-pray the imam."
More...
Spanish ending meaning small is ito. My brother was called ___dilito, tinsito and ito. All that renaming stopped when he hit puberty.
The rest:
"Critics may object that the alliance is unstable, that Marxist materialism and divine law will eventually clash. Perhaps, but revolutions are not graded on centuries; they are graded on the damage inflicted before they burn out. Remember that Bolshevism killed millions and redrew half the globe despite internal contradictions that later cracked the system. A jihad-Marx hybrid needs only a decade and a handful of oil-rich failed states to recalibrate the world’s security architecture. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard already cultivates malign networks from Latin America to the Middle East, leveraging partners in Venezuela and Hezbollah to expand its reach. Turkey’s ruling party sells neoliberal growth and Islamist revival in the same campaign speech. These are not thought experiments; they are policy laboratories with real soldiers.
What can be done? First, admit the synthesis exists. Calling every bomb-thrower a “medieval fanatic” denies the thoroughly modern software guiding the weapon. Second, rebuild Western civic confidence around more than GDP curves. If the appeal of the hybrid is transcendence, then the answer cannot be another PowerPoint slide on gender quotas at the WTO. It must be a muscular vision of human dignity grounded in both faith and reason—one that affirms the sacred without surrendering democratic freedoms. Finally, decouple post-colonial grievance studies from public diplomacy; training foreign activists to quote Fanon makes little sense when the next step in their syllabus is detonating an embassy.
The fusion of Marxist analytics and Islamist eschatology is not merely “extremism with better branding.” It is a reactor that combines the ruthlessness of material revolution with the staying power of eternal reward. Marxism promised heaven on Earth and delivered breadlines; jihadism promised heaven in the afterlife but stumbled in state-building; their hybrid promises both—justice now, salvation later—and in that promise lies its perilous allure. Ignore it, and the West will replay the Cold War without the luxury of secular opponents who fear death as much as we do."
Looks to me like a way to immanentize the eschaton.
Future wind turbine droppings.
I would be willing to bet that these are Mayflies. They are much too big to be midges which make fruit flies look big. I am amazed that a trout fisherman doesn't recognize a Mayfly when he sees one.
Were taken from Wicked Bitchof teh East Goldberg to the Flying Monkeys of Lake Mendon’t-ah
Large midges the size of midget midges
That IPhone camera is amazing. If you blow up the photo you can see that they fly with their two front legs forward and curled down in front of their head.
Barbie is slapping Midge's hand away from Ken at :30.
wendtbar writes, "Photo is deceiving. They look like dragonflies!!"
The fact that these "midges" are swarming at sunrise, are large enough to photograph in some detail without a macro focusing lens, and do not bite, means they're not midges, but mayflies. Midges are true flies belonging to the order Diptera, with only one pair of functioning wings like their distant cousin, the common house fly. They are also very tiny, much smaller than mayflies, small to the point of being called "no-see-ums". Some midges do bite, and can spread diseases -- hemorrhagic fever, for one.
Mayflies fly in fabulous formations, you might even say they swarm. But not to bit -- to mate. Some adult mayflies don't even have mouth parts. Their entire biology is subordinated to one purpose, to mate. The males die within minutes of successfully fertilizing a female. The gals last longer, giving them a chance to deposit their eggs appropriately. If they fail, they die anyway because they can't eat. Mayfly nymphs can bite like hell, at least theoretically. The nymphs do all the eating. The month of May hasn't much to do with it except that in Europe they generally aren't seen until May. In the United States, they can be active year-round depending. Dragonflies, on the other hand, do have mouths and can bite, but only defensively, hard enough to draw blood.
Isn't Midge just a variant of Marge?
Sorry Quaestor, but they're midges. In the blow-up you can see the two feather-like antennae which mayflies don't have.
Beaver!
We get these midges every year about this time in East Central Iowa. They are terrible! They mostly get in your ears, nose, and hair. They don't bite, but I hate them. They are mostly in the country and parks, not in the city, but since I live in the country on a gravel road, I get plenty of them. They usually go away in a couple of weeks or so. The only repellent that works for me is a locally produced spray called "Bug Smoother," a spray in a green bottle that consists mostly of lemon grass oil and a hint of vanilla. No chemicals.
Peachy: ref Midge Ure- James Corden’s character on Gavin & Stacey thought his name was Mature, as he tried to name everyone on Do They Know It’s Christmas.
JSM
Leland said...
Midges are good food for birds, like Canadian Geese.
So Canadian geese do have some purpose in life other then crapping all over the place- with midge remains most likely...
On the Marxism-Islam combination- call it Socialism-Islam fusion. Hitler and Grand Mufti of Jerusalem got along just fine and were allies.
I responded to the mayfly challenge in an update to the post — with 2 more photos.
Remember that the original photo makes the size impossible to judge.
Mayflies have those 2 extensions coming out in back and I'm not seeing that.
I informed Grok of the mayfly challenge and uploaded the photo showing the insects on my leg. Grok stuck to its guns:
"The insects on your pants are small, with slender bodies and long legs. They appear to have two prominent wings, though the wings are not fully spread in the image. Their size (around 5–10 mm) and overall shape align with both mayflies and non-biting midges, but there are key differences to consider.... Mayflies typically have two pairs of wings, with the front pair larger and triangular, often held upright over their bodies like a sail when at rest. They also have two or three long tail filaments (cerci) extending from their abdomen, which are usually quite noticeable. Midges, on the other hand, have a single pair of wings and lack the long tail filaments, with wings often held flat or slightly angled. In your photo, the insects don’t show clear tail filaments, and the wings appear more midge-like (smaller, less pronounced, and not held upright). This leans toward midges.... You mentioned these insects were swarming at sunrise by Lake Mendota, which fits both mayflies and midges. However, mayflies are more associated with dramatic, synchronized emergences (often called "hatches") that happen in late spring to early summer, especially around dusk or dawn. Non-biting midges, as I identified earlier, also swarm at dawn or dusk and are common in May near lakes like Mendota.... While some people are suggesting mayflies, I still lean toward non-biting midges for a few reasons: Lack of Tail Filaments: The insects in the photo don’t show the long tail filaments typical of mayflies. This is a strong indicator they’re not mayflies. Wing Position and Shape: The wings don’t appear to be held upright in the characteristic mayfly "sail" position, and they seem smaller and less triangular, more in line with midges. Swarming Behavior: Both insects swarm, but the timing (May, sunrise) and location (Lake Mendota) strongly support midges, which are known to be prolific in this area due to the lake’s conditions. Mayfly hatches are more dramatic and often more seasonal (peaking later in June or July in some regions), though they can occur in May. That said, the suggestion of mayflies isn’t unreasonable—mayflies are common around lakes, and a smaller, less dramatic emergence could explain their presence. However, without seeing the telltale tail filaments or upright wings, midges remain the more likely candidate.... Both midges and mayflies are active at dawn, so this doesn’t strongly favor one over the other.... This lake in Madison, Wisconsin, is a known hotspot for insect activity due to its nutrient-rich waters. Both midges and mayflies thrive here, but midges are more consistently present throughout spring and summer, while mayfly hatches are more episodic...."
Grok asked me if I wanted it to check for news of recent insect activity in this area. I said yes and got:
"A report from Wisconsin Public Radio (WPR), published today, May 16, 2025, notes a significant midge hatch in Madison and Milwaukee. Jake Vander Zanden, chair of the Center for Limnology at UW-Madison, observed "thousands of midges" forming a "pulsating plume" near Lake Monona on Sunday, May 11, 2025. He described this as the "Mother’s Day Midge Hatch of 2025," attributing the large numbers to a "perfect storm of conditions." Vander Zanden also mentioned that midges are often mistaken for mayflies, which aligns with the confusion you noted. This report strongly suggests that midges are the dominant swarming insect in the Madison area right now, including near Lake Mendota, which is part of the same chain of lakes as Lake Monona. A post on X from @WKOW on May 12, 2025, supports this, quoting UW Entomologist PJ Liesch identifying swarms around Madison lakes as midges, also called "lake flies," and not mayflies. While X posts aren’t conclusive, this aligns with the WPR report. An article from madison.com, dated May 13, 2025, confirms that the current swarms in Madison are midges, not mayflies, noting that mayflies are larger and often confused with midges. This further reinforces the prevalence of midges this week. Historical context from the UW-Madison Center for Limnology blog (2020 and 2017) indicates that midges typically swarm in April and May around Wisconsin lakes, with May being the peak. These sources note that midges are often mistaken for mayflies, but midges lack the long tail filaments and upright wings of mayflies, matching my earlier analysis of your photo. On the mayfly side, there’s no specific 2025 report of a mayfly hatch in Madison or Lake Mendota around this date. However, a Wisconsin hatch chart from WiFlyFisher.com (updated 2025) lists common mayfly hatches in northern and central Wisconsin, with some species like the Hendrickson (Ephemerella subvaria) emerging in May. A separate WiFlyFisher article notes a decline in mayfly populations in southern Wisconsin, including areas near Madison, due to pollution and habitat degradation, suggesting mayfly hatches might be less prominent in the Lake Mendota area. Additionally, a 2023 National Weather Service report on mayfly emergences along the Upper Mississippi River Valley mentions peak hatches in June and July, not mid-May, making a large mayfly emergence less likely right now. Conclusion: The insects on your pants and in the earlier swarm at Lake Mendota are almost certainly non-biting midges, not mayflies. Recent reports from Madison, including one from today, confirm a massive midge hatch this week, dubbed the "Mother’s Day Midge Hatch of 2025." The lack of long tail filaments and upright wings in your photo, combined with the timing (mid-May) and location (Lake Mendota), aligns with midges, which are known to swarm heavily in this area during this season. Mayflies, while possible, are less likely given the absence of specific hatch reports, their typical later emergence (June/July), and their declining presence in southern Wisconsin."
Here is an infamous video of midges during the MLB Playoffs in October 2007:
https://youtu.be/f_GJse-anfk?t=53. They seem different than what Althouse encountered this morning.
I conveyed Rabel's point to Grok, saying "someone who looked at my photo said 'In the blow-up you can see the two feather-like antennae which mayflies don't have.'"
Grok said: "The presence of feather-like (also called plumose) antennae is a key identifying feature. Non-biting midges (family Chironomidae) have this trait, particularly in males, who use these feathery antennae to detect females during mating swarms. Mayflies, on the other hand, do not have feather-like antennae; their antennae are typically short and bristle-like, not prominent or feathery."
Looks like Grok may be right (from UW-Madison, no less): https://blog.limnology.wisc.edu/2020/04/22/learn-your-lakes-midges-not-mosquitoes-or-mayflies-give-us-springs-first-swarms/
No flies on you! Oh… wait…
They are fish food!
Midge looks like Howdy Doody's little sister. How'd she get a modeling contract, Party politics?
Midges? I always thought they were mayflies.
Midges? I thought they were tinier and yet more annoying. Have their diets made them grow larger?
Don't forget Midge Decter, Norman Podhoretz's wife, and a force in her own right.
I read upon "small black bug swarms" and the fun fact I found was that female midges dive into these swarms looking for mates.
Henry David Thoreau discussed midges in his travel book The Maine Woods, Kaatdn chapter,check it out.
Henry David Thoreau discussed midges in his travel book The Maine Woods, Kaatdn chapter,check it out.
That top down snap is a lovely photo. I also like the one in which you seem to be explaining a notion in a classroom
I spent a lot of time fly-fishing back home on the Delaware River. My best guess is they are a variety of stone-fly, not a mayfly. The wings are the tell.
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