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Saturday, May 26, 2012

Question of the Week

O.K.  Remember about a year or two ago, on the cover of Time magazine, Newsweek, all the newspapers, TV, you couldn't go anywhere without reading about or seeing . . . bedbugs. 

Everywhere.  Bedbugs.  Under the bed.  On the walls.  In your luggage. At your theatre.  And everyone freaked out and were spraying their houses, calling pest control companies, hiring Bedbug Dogs to sniff out bedbugs.  Crazy.  Everyone went crazy with bedbugs.  Little bedbugs.. Big bedbugs.  Bedbugs in their hair, bedbugs in their clothes, bedbugs in the rugs, in the sofa.  Bedbugs up the gazoo.

Then.  Poof!  No bedbugs.  When is the last time you read or heard even one mention about bedbugs in the media?

So, where did they all go?

Or was it all some grand joke played by magazines wanting to sell copies?  Mass hysteria? Sure, there actually were some people who had bedbugs in their homes.  But there have always been bedbugs in some homes.  They have been around for a gazillion years.  But an epidemic?  That then simply disappeared?

So, where did they all go?

5 comments:

Alon Perlman said...

You just ruined a media campaign -"Bed Bugs takeover 2012".
These types of pseudostories can be recycled every two years or less with the shrinking national attention span.
Probably not senility or my own attention span decay, but actually I don't remember it- At all.
I vividly remember, around 1979 in the morning, a cheerfull TV Anchor duo anouncing, "There are things in your home that can kill your baby. Watch us at our 8:00 PM broadcast." Even though I knew it was something like "Bleach bottle under the kitchen sink", I had to wonder how many innocent babies would perish in the intervening hours.
I stopped watching network news on a regular basis, around two years ago.
Magazines, newspapers? what are those? is that the new media everyone is talking about? After all, everything under the sun was already covered by Echlisiastes.
Wake me up when we are ready for a woman, or minority President.

Churadogs said...

Ah, yes, the old "you'll kill your baby, details at 11" ploy. Too bad bed-bugs aren't lethal, maybe that would have gotten more attention. For now, we have to settle for the Time cover with the 4-5-6 year-old little boy standing on a stool nursing from his hot-mamma's breast, touting some new cultural phenomenon, a country overrun with mothers who nurse their kids well past the toddler stage. (some new version of helicopter mothers? Imagine the kid in the YouTube age gong to college with this image in his past (which is now no longer past. Ever.)

All to sell magazines.


Seth Meyers of SNL had the perfect comment, said, if you wanted a really great cover, you would have photo-shopped out the stool,thereby leaving an image of a 5 year old dangling from mommy's breast( while wearing little cammo pants, by the way. )

Bev. De Witt-Moylan said...

The problem with bedbugs, aside from the unpleasantness of the bites, is that once they get into luggage or clothing, they can hitch a ride home. So it's still wise caution for travelers who stay in hotels to check the room for them. It's quick and easy to do. You can check this site for info on bedbugs: http://www.badbedbugs.com.

For what it's worth, a hotel rating web site called raveable.com provides bedbug info in the form of bedbug reports that have appeared in the past 12 months. I don't know how raveable.com obtains these reports. Not every hotel that you may want to stay at anywhere in the U.S. is listed and rated there. But even posh, expensive hotels have bedbug reports on that site. Not too long ago I saw a report saying that DC is the American city with the most reports of bedbugs.

Unknown said...

My home just got infested with bedbugs. I don't know how to get rid of bed bugs and I'm freaking out. What do I do?

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