Bugged Out

Even in a post-9/11 world, Americans love to talk trash about New York City. This LA Times article on bed bugs is no different. While I didn’t find anything of significance in the article that I haven’t already blogged about, I did find this particular passage interesting:

They used to be associated with cramped and dirty living quarters, grimy motels and high-rise living in places like New York.-Los Angeles Times

Because cramped and dirty living quarters and grimy motels can only be found in New York, right? Right.

If you click on the second page of the article, you will find some interesting bed bug trivia to share with your friends when you’re up at three in the morning because you’re too paranoid to go to sleep. But if you don’t feel like making that extra click, I copied and pasted the factoids below:

Bedbugs are established members of the global community. Archaeologists in Europe have found bedbug fossils dating back 3,500 years, the University of Kentucky’s Potter said, “and they go way back before that.” They arrived in the New World with the first colonists and were plentiful until about the 1940s, when DDT seemed to do away with them.-Los Angeles Times

By the way, someone has already posted in the comment area four bed bug haikus. They’re really good, but as promised, I would only post my next ten bed bug haikus when you guys submitted ten of your own. So try and send in six more, and only then will I unleash to the world my next ten bed bug haikus.

Later.

Last month a reporter from the Queens Tribune left a comment on Bugged Out saying she wanted to interview me for a story about bed bugs in Queens (where I live) and left her number. So I called her, did the interview and yesterday picked up this week’s copy of the Tribune and found the article.

Check out the article. It’s pretty good.

I’ve often wondered, as I write this blog, is the proper spelling bed bug or bedbug? Sure, it’s a minor concern in the face of all the crap we must worry about, but it’s still a question to which few have the answer.

Well, I came across an article in the Village Voice by Mara Altman that seemed to clear things up. Here’s a quote from that feature article, which by the way is an interesting read if you have the time (you know how long those Voice feature articles can be, and this is no exception). And if you don’t have the time, you can read the fun excerpts below:

“Sorkin went to the Bug Off convention the next day as part of his ongoing
efforts to ensure that his information is the latest. As Branscome strode up,
the male exterminators whistled and clapped as if she were their favorite
comic-book hero come to life. The first issue she addressed is one that has
mystified us all: Is it bedbugs, or bed bugs? According to this expert, it’s two
words in the United States and one word in Europe (in direct opposition to
Village Voice style). With information like that, the $100 entrance fee has
already paid for itself. “

Here the article focuses on the stigma caused by bed bugs:

“In a city where people already depend on Ambien for a good night’s sleep, the
thought of bedbugs has wreaked havoc on circadian rhythms from homeless shelters
to $2 million loft apartments. The thought of them is making people itch—not the
bedbugs themselves, whose numbers don’t even quite live up to the media hype.
What has yet to be quantified—but what has become an urban infestation of its
own—is the paranoia that the bedbug craze has produced. It turns out, perhaps no
surprise in a city as neurotically obsessed as New York, that something as small
as a bedbug can grow colossal in the minds of millions.
The stigma alone is enough to make hardened city dwellers cringe and cry on Eisenberg’s shoulder. He begins each office visit by walking new clients over to a sliver of mirror around the corner from his desk. “Repeat after me,” he says as he forces the victims to study their reflection. “I’m not a dirty person.” Then he offers them a shot of scotch from a bottle he keeps in his filing cabinet. It’s an equal-opportunity bug, he explains. The bugs find a 40-year-old pediatric neurosurgeon on the Lower East Side equally appetizing as a 27-year-old comedian in midtown. In the world of bedbugs, a big-time entrepreneur on the Upper East Side has nothing on a twentysomething unemployed actor. A successful movie director on the Upper West Side shares equal ground with a 22-year-old starving grad student. All the bugs are looking for is a drop of blood, and each of us has about five liters. In a city of 8 million, that’s 10,566,882 gallons of bedbug food. Is it any wonder we’re terrified?”

The article also covered an exterminator’s convention where among the topics discussed there was creative, chemical methods of rendering bed bugs unable to mate and therefore reproduce.

“Anti-Viagra: That’s what Linares calls one of his most promising bedbug-fighting pesticides. The pesticide was originally used for cockroaches; it freezes them in an adolescent phase so they never could mate. But Linares found the substance does something different to bedbugs. It shrinks their appendages, making them unable to harden up and penetrate. I didn’t ask what the substance does to bipedal mammals.”

Enjoy!