Winged Merchants of Death

A sign that our troubles are not so great, at least in the D.C. area, is that we are worrying about cicadas.

This year's cicada brood, Brood X, comes out every seventeen years. As a 6th grader, I was both squeamish and fascinated by the hordes of insects that became part of recess for a few weeks. They were bugs after all, possibly with fangs. But the delicate shells they left after molting were almost as precise as a cast mold, and you could place one on your finger without fear.

If I read the newspaper back then, I would have known that cicadas are a horrible menace that will ruin life in Washington as we know it and psychologically scar all children, the elderly, and those with weak hearts. Thankfully, I read the paper now, and the almost-daily articles in The Washington Post during the past month have taught me to view them as a rare but annoying event, kind of like Nature's herpes sore.

If only an enterprising terrorist could figure out how to coat the cicadas with ricin. Then the real fun would start.

To be far, The Washington Post has had some interesting articles about this brood of cicadas, like in their Science section today. I have wondered why the cicadas come out every 17 years, and not 5 or 8 or 23 years, and how do they get the timing right. The Post's article interesting theory of how this unusual cycle came into being.