Mosquitoes

“That peacock bed doesn’t look so fancy now, does it?” the bears smirked. Nothing sucks the charm out of fancy-schmancy wrought iron like a DDT-laced mosquito net wrapped around it. Lots of penguin owners were wringing their hands over what the DDT would do to the birds’ eggs, but nobody worried about those polar bears, stuck up there on those lukewarm, rock-hard floors.

Malaria returned to the continental U.S. in about 2020. It was especially nasty in the DC area, and someplace called Crawford. For reasons the polar bears and penguins couldn’t quite grasp, this caused people who lived everywhere else to snicker (something about the Dark Times between 2001 and 2009).

And it turned out that the best pharmaceutical products (Rogaine®, Viagra®, Levitra®, Cialis®) weren’t so effective in treating malaria. Poo.

About the same time air conditioning got expensive. Really expensive. It was back to the old-fashioned methods for beating the heat: table-top fans and ice cream. Again, the polar bears were tickled. They were still gagging on those stinking Sish Sticks®, but unlike those spoilt-rotten penguins, at least they weren’t getting fat from too much dairy. Except for Nunzio, of course.