I am drinking coffee from my thermal Space Needle mug like a big fat Tourist McTourist. Odd to be a tourist in the town where I was born, but in a way, kind of fun, too.

The female mosquito eats blood and has a mouth shaped like a hollow needle. The male mosquito eats fruit and flower nectar and has feathery antennae. I wonder if this is the only instance in the animal world where the different genders have completely different diets.

At summer camp many years ago, my friends discovered an excellent way to torture and kill mosquitoes — but it meant sacrificing one’s own blood. One girl would wait for a skeeter to alight upon her arm and begin to feed. When the proboscis was firmly ensconced, the girl would make a tense muscle of her arm and squeeze the area around the bite, causing blood to rush into the insect’s body.

The mosquito would then *pop*, leaving a delightful spray of fresh blood on the girl’s arm, and the rest of us giggling sadistically.

And they say girls are squeamish. Hardly.

I love Björk, by the way. I could listen to her all the live long day, though I suppose if I did it would eventually grow quite tiresome. So I won’t.

Finally, this came out last week and that makes me very, very giddy: