1. What the heck are those? And does one use Stingers or a Phalanx?

   1. Cicadas. This year is a banner year because two broods with different dormancy spans are both emerging at close to the same time. (The cicada lifecycle goes like this: eggs hatch underground, larva come out, eat, grow into adults, the adults fly around and eat and make a LOT of noise, mate, lay eggs underground, and die. The eggs lie dormant for a set number of years before hatching; how many years depends on the brood.)
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      As I understand it: One of this year’s broods comes out every seven years, the other every 13. But they’re both coming out this year, for the first time in a century.
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      Cicadas are noisy — drives some people nuts — but generally harmless. They aren’t venomous or toxic, they don’t bite or sting. They’re just loud.

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      1. aaaahhhhhh!! we all gonna DIE!!! heh heh. they are like crickets with guitar amps..

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      2. They take the “overwhelming predators with numbers” strategy to an extreme. The long spans between emergences is to give predators time to die back.

         As a brother described them: “why are the woods squirming?”

2. O/T but some of the people on here will probably find this poignant..

   The end of an era:

   https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/end-of-era-zilog-discontinues-z80-microprocessor/

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   1. It is ancient as microprocessors go. Ubiquitous.

      https://www.techspot.com/news/102684-zilog-discontinuing-z80-microprocessor-after-almost-50-years.html

3. We get them every year out here. There’s a window of time between “too windy and/or stormy to be outdoors” and “too loud to be outdoors” when it comes to evenings on the porch. It’s, oh, two weeks?

4. Time for tacos…

5. Back east it’s Cicadas. Out here in the Great Basin it’s Mormon Crickets. Either way it makes for a nasty, noisy few weeks.

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