Steeplechase will be all the buzz!

I leave at the crack tomorrow for another week of quality time with the family, and another hopefully fab Iroquois Steeplechase.  However, Alert Reader and Pseudo Sister Margaret sent me the following alert last week:  It's year 13 of the 13-year cicada cycle.  And they are due to peak on race day.

Holeeee.  If you've never experienced a cicada cycle, it's a B-movie terror.  While I generally find them more annoying than terrifying, the level of swam and noise and non-lethal attacks could send someone unfamiliar with the experience into a mad panic.  Cicadas are about two-inch long flying armored insects that emerge from ground every so many years to molt, mate, and return to the earth.  Seriously.  B-movie stuff.  And they are unbelievably loud.  The noise they make is their mating call.  And they're competitive.  They swarm lawn mowers and other machinery of similar sound/decibel level.  And their users.  They've been known to "attack"  (meh, "swam in small numbers around and possibly land on or nibble") passers by, particularly women with hair big enough to get caught in (this is, remember Tennessee) or early-teen girls.  Which was hilarious the first cicada cycle in my memory, which was in 1985 and I was in 8th grade.  Cicadas were handy tools for pestering girls, and boys would fight with them, or use the eating of one as high-stakes dare currency.

But these things are nasty.  And omnipresent.  And leave their crunchy shells—remember they are molting—everywhere.  And Dear God, you think the Grinch had it with all of the Who's noise, noise, noise, noise!    It's like the summer air is heavy with humidity and a deafening radio static.

I have yet to come up with an angle for my Nfocus Steeplechase stories this year.  I considered writing a fictional B-movie script based on events of the day, but the artists at the Anderson Group may have beat me to that punchline.