RWO: Kamikaze October Bugs

Jess writes:

Recently, we have discovered that the early summer brings out some crazy things in South Africa. Some of these are typical – the heat, the rainstorms, the snakes – and some of these are not so typical – power outages, more water (what?), and some crazy bugs. In particular, we have dubbed one bug in our South African English, “The Kamikaze October Bug”, which loosely translates in American English to, “The Dumb June Bug”. Simply put, this mini creature begins appearing at the start of summer (our summer starts in October, opposite of June) like a June bug, is about the size of a June bug, with a hard-ish shell like the June bug, and comes out in the evenings due to its attraction to light and warm ground like a June bug. The primary difference with our “October Bug” is that it is downright idiotic… hence “Dumb”. Specifically, in addition to being attracted to light, it seems to be attracted to anything that spins at a dangerous velocity in which it can get caught, whirled around, and then propelled at unnatural speeds to its crashing death… hence, “Kamikaze”. Without fail, each evening, these stupid little critters find their way into our bedroom, fly themselves into either our ceiling fan or our standing floor fan, and become nature’s very own pinballs against our concrete walls. Worst of all, since their pinpall pattern is so entirely erratic, there’s always a likely chance that their Kamikaze dive will end up hitting one of us, instead of a wall – and man can those little guys hurt at that speed! Nevertheless, they seem to lessen as the summer’s heat increases, so eventually we expect that they will no longer be dive-bombing us while we eat dinner and catch up on episodes of old TV shows. Until then, we just have to protect ourselves under mosquito netting from the World War Arcade Game that has become our bedroom in the evenings! Eish!