"... conducted a vigil of 21 days, daybreak to nearly midnight, to study the life cycle of a single aphid. At the dawn of the 20th century, the American philosopher William James insisted that voluntary human attention was the linchpin of free will. By that time, some laboratory researchers had begun to turn their attention to attention as a subject of explicit scientific inquiry. One of the first to undertake such investigations was James McKeen Cattell, a German-trained American at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Cattell, the first professor of psychology in the United States, used a fast-snap shutter to flash a few letters for a tiny fraction of a second. The test subjects then repeated back to him as many letters as they could remember. Observing a range of results, Dr. Cattell concluded that they reflected a significant feature of cognitive ability: what he called the 'span' of attention. Subsequent researchers used the attention span metric to identify children’s mental 'deficiency.'"
"Defeating the forces that frack human beings in order to extract the financial value of their attention is going to require... attention activism... a new politics of 'attensity.'"
"It’s our job as ecological gardeners to figure out how to incorporate these natural processes into our landscapes in ways that are both functional and beautiful."
"Nearby, a man trying to sit on a bench swatted the bugs with a piece of cardboard. A pedestrian ducked swiftly to dodge a pair bearing down on her. 'I’m told they hate water, but it hasn’t worked,' Mr. Ahn said, pausing to bat one away from his neck. He added that he had also doused them with mosquito spray and soju, a popular spirit, to little effect...."
We're told the bugs tend to look twice their actual size, because they are commonly seen stuck together, mating.
"Even the fumigation didn’t help, said Nam In, who runs a coffee shop.... 'They’re just trying to appease us psychologically,' he said as lovebugs crawled on his cafe’s windows and tile floor. 'The number of bugs is beyond human control.'... One hiker scraped off lovebugs that were clinging to a railing along a trail and collected them in a small plastic bag. He brought them home and put them in his freezer, then made them into a burger patty that he cooked and ate in a YouTube video...."
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:
A second walk, in the mists of noon:
And then, finally, some sun came out and made the woodland phlox look quite jaunty:
Talk about whatever you like in the comments. And please support the Althouse blog by doing your Amazon shopping going in through the Althouse Amazon link.
I guess that's the way the New York Post has been talking for a long time. "Fiend" is another example.
By the way, the word "firebug" was originally used to refer to a firefly — AKA lightning bug — but it became a slang word for "arsonist" in the mid-19th century. I note that it would be highly abnormal to use "arsonist" to refer to a person who murdered someone with fire — not unless a building were set on fire and the death happened as an unintended consequence.
"Firebug" connotes pyromania — a crazy fascination with fire. The New York Post unwittingly helps this accused man with his insanity defense.
Much more could be said about the practice of likening a human being to an insect — a bug — but I will stop here... out of respect for the dead.
"... there is a real good chance that we would just all be living with the northern giant hornet, even for years to come. It is a very difficult task to eradicate an insect once it has become well-established.”
Murder hornets were a public obsession in the year 2020 — the year of the covid pandemic and a hotly contended presidential election. I was skeptical, blogging, on May 3rd:
People are desperate to concern themselves with something other than coronavirus and Joe Biden's sexuality.
That's in the New York Times, where I would expect a little more care not to randomly give off whiffs of xenophobia. Why are they insisting on calling it the "Asian giant hornet"? They already had "murder hornet" and "giant hornet." Why go big with "Asian"?
Dr. Looney said it was immediately clear that the state faced a serious problem, but with only two insects in hand and winter coming on, it was nearly impossible to determine how much the hornet had already made itself at home.
Must I worry about 2 insects simply because Dr. Looney — if that really is his name — finds the seriousness "immediately clear"?
That said, I am looking for more exciting articles that are not coronavirus or sex and Joe Biden.
What was the sex and Joe Biden topic? Had you remembered the murder hornets? Yesterday's ephemera. You remember covid, of course, but it's wearing thin. They're cuing up the next scary insect + disease. I see Gavin Newsom has declared an emergency — in California — over "bird flu." Which sounds like "bird flew." I guess that's why they usually say "avian flu." While you wait for whatever insects they've got cued up, you can watch the wonderful old movie "Killer Bees":
But seriously, congratulations to all the good people who swarmed together to conquer the murder hornets.
"Before I read Robert Hilburn’s biography of Randy Newman, I didn’t know Newman was kind of lying in interviews when he said his song 'Short People' was about prejudice. 'I just thought it was funny,' he said. 'The Art of Dying,' a posthumous collection of writings by the New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl, came out this year. He was ill with cancer when he compiled it. He wrote: 'I swatted a fly the other day and thought, Outlived you.'"
You could go your whole life without using a word, then one day, it seems like the perfect word, and you use it for the first time. That happened to me yesterday, with "echoically": "Trump responds echoically, then darkly...."
Trump dealt with something Musk had said by echoing it, then quickly inserted what he wanted to say, which was quite different. The segue was easily accomplished. Listening to the audio, you might not notice how little he gave back to Musk and how abruptly he changed the subject, but it jumped out at me, reading the transcript.
The first commenter, Mike (MJB Wolf) said, "Dig that word 'echoically' and don't recall ever encountering it before."
Yeah, I don't recall ever encountering it before either, so why did it strike me as the perfect word? That's odd, no? How often do you use a word and know you're using it for the first time and have no memory of anyone else using it either?
I was stunned to see that in the top post of a search of my archive this morning, 2 days after re-watching "My Dinner With Andre," and one day after blogging "A big theme in this movie is whether, when things connect up, it's not just a coincidence but something mystical and important...."
What do you think? Mystical and important?!
I don't know, but what I was searching for was the topic of habit. In the movie, there's some discussion — blogged here yesterday — of the problem of doing things out of habit. There is, one person thought, "a great danger" of "fall[ing] into a trance" and no longer "seeing, feeling, remembering."
Well, I was just wishing I'd created a tag for "habit," because it would collect some good material, and it's a topic I want to think about. I like my habits. I think my habits are good.
Bedbugs can survive a year or more without feeding. About as big as flattened apple seeds, they squeeze into tiny cracks in walls or in the joints of bed frames during the day; they crawl out at night, attracted by a sleeper’s exhaled carbon dioxide and body warmth. At the turn of the 20th century, an estimated 75 percent of homes in the U.K. contained bedbugs. Bizarre prescriptions for remedies have circulated down the years, including a recipe for “cat juice” in a pest-control guide from 1725. The formula called for suffocating and skinning a cat, roasting it on a spit, mixing the drippings with egg yolk and oil, and smearing the concoction into crevices around the bed....
That article is a decade old. I dyggyd it up this morning because — waiting for the blizzard — I wondered why the past tense of "snow" was not "snown," like the way the past tense of "show" is, at least sometimes, "shown."
"... but humans aren’t the only ones who think and feel. There are animals that cherish their offspring, feel lonely if their life partner dies, and jump for joy. If you burn an insect with a cigarette, it feels pain. If insects were automatons, ants wouldn’t be able to build fungus farms or form boats; bees wouldn’t be able to communicate complicated directions to hive mates; and cockroaches wouldn’t have learned not to eat certain baits that kill them.... So, I quit giving a milquetoast answer to the question of where I draw the line. Now I say: 'We know insects think and feel, so if we ever have an option to avoid harming them, let’s go for it.'
If there are insects in your home, Peta has developed a handy guide to non-chemical, non-lethal methods of asking them to please go somewhere else to think things over."
I am a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for me to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.
Encourage Althouse by making a donation:
Make a 1-time donation or set up a monthly donation of any amount you choose:
Burnett, Loh, and Schmidt have a book, "Attensity!" (commission earned). The word "attensity" appears in the column like this:
Posts
