The Bugs of Summer

I really don't believe that Japan is buggier than other places on the planet. After all, I heard from a resident of Minnesota that the mosquito is their state bird. Nevertheless, there are a lot of pesky, buzzing things in the air in summer and keeping them at bay is a full-time occupation. The Kincho Company (Motto: Live with nature the better way; spray it) offers a delightful spread of options for dealing with mosquitoes. There are the mosquito incense coils to "kill them", a wearable vapor-emitting device to keep them away for "240 hours", a selection of bug repellent sprays, a wearable canister which can hold a burning mosquito coil, an electric heater for "vapor mats", and electric vapor-heaters for bottled liquid (good for 60 days!). All this for only mosquito protection.
There are two products which I would like to discuss today. The first is the blue electric zapper. Everyone has seen one, standing on a pole in someone's yard, emitting a small snapping sound when an insect – obviously overcome with religious fervor – "sees the light" a little too closely. My question has to do with the theory behind them. You see, they ATTRACT bugs. Isn't that what we DON'T want to happen?
Scenario
1. I hang a blue-light bug zapper in my yard.
2. It attracts bugs from miles around.
3. A lot of the bugs stop off for a snack before they go on their crusade into the light.
4. I do a lot of scratching.
Clearly this is not a good plan. We need to get someone else to buy these things and hang them as far from us as possible.

Next. Cockroaches. A lot of companies (including Kincho mentioned above) make little boxes that catch cockroaches. In the US they are called "Cockroach Hotel" -- "the roaches check in, but they don't check out". Clever.
In Japan they are called Gokiburi Hoi Hoi, which I loosely translate as "Cockroaches! C'mon C'mon!"
But... do they work? Let me relate a story about cockroaches.
When I was in college, being poor I lived in a basement apartment, a "refinished" living space in the hot- water-heater, central heating-unit space of the old house above me. It was cheap.
I shared that space with other creatures who also could not afford the rents of the better rooms above, rats and cockroaches in particular.
The roaches were always out in my kitchen, foraging for treats. When I saw them, I would smack them with Time Magazine or spray them with one of those chemical weapons that has the skull and crossbones on it. I also used the roach hotel traps and would occasionally find one or two stuck in the little box in the morning when I woke up – very satisfying!
Smacking them worked; it would usually do them in on the spot, but it made a mess of my magazines. The spray seemed less immediately successful. I remember seeing one come out from under my fridge and look up at me as if to say, "You still here?"
I sprayed it so much it looked like a tuft of whipped cream running around on the floor, but it simply shrugged off the spray and ran into the wall that divided my living area from the heating units for the apartments above.
Aha!
The roaches live in the wall! (I imagined a small tribe of a couple of dozen insects warming themselves cozily in there.)
I bought several cans of DEATH TO EVERY LIVING THING THAT ISN'T HUMAN spray and carved small holes with my Swiss Army Knife in the wall that separated my living space from the heater area. I then unleashed a whole can of the aerosol weapon into the holes in the wall and waited.
The waiting took only a few seconds.
A sea... a tsunami... a vast flow of cockroaches of all sizes and shapes poured out of the wall into my living room.
Naturally...
I freaked.
I got my trusty Zippo lighter, flicked it on and sprayed the Death Spray over the flame, creating a flame thrower to incinerate the roaches as they flowed in their thousands out of the wall. Males, females, babies... I confess... I killed them indiscriminately. Hundreds of them. Maybe thousands. I lost count. They overran my ability to kill them, so vast were the hordes.
I moved out.
But I learned a lesson. The lesson was that the cockroach hotels are just for show. The cockroaches send their sick and lame to get caught in them, so that we humans will feel ok about having thousands of roaches around.
"OK, Gramps! You have been spending too much time loafing around, and we are tired of your flatulence. You have been chosen by our Executive Committee to go get yourself stuck in that stupid roach hotel thing the humans have put out."
So grampa roach shuffles out and sacrifices himself for the horde, getting himself stuck in the trap which we then put out gleefully on burnable trash day. The swarm, however, continues its work for world domination in our walls unscathed. And in our hearts, we know they're right.