Hacker News Reader

Comment by timonoko | Hacker News Reader

I remember sitting in Kautokeino bus with an older Sami man. Dozens of mosquitoes just sat on his forehead just waiting for something edible. I was only semi-edible with DEET. But an Italian couple was totally. It was incredible to watch, I wish I had a camera. Blood bath and genocide.

View on HN

There is a joke about mosquitoes in Northern Norway that goes like this:

Two mosquitoes caught a soldier and one asked the other: should we eat him here or bring back home? To which the other mosquito answer: No, lets eat him here lest we want one of the big mosquitoes come and take him.

Source: close friend who served next to the Russian border.

I was south in Troms and down there they were so small we could easily kill them with a shovel or something ;-)

Yeah, the mosquitoes in northern Norway can be brutal. I have family in the region and was invited on a fishing trip to one of the large salmon rivers. The air was thick with HUGE mosquitoes and after a while I gave up trying to keep them away. A blood bath indeed.

We found the gpt-3 everyone

it makes perfect sense to me.

I'm not sure why the comment is dead, but I also don't really understand the comment. Could you explain it please?

He's giving an anecdote. Mosquitos would land on a native man but not bite him. Some mosquitos bit him(timonoko) but he had DEET on so not many did. An Italian couple got very badly bitten and spent the trip trying to slap and genocide all of the mosquitos.

Ha. That's what I thought but the comment's dead status swayed my outlook and made me search for another meaning :O

I was trying to point out that Mosquito saliva produces somekind of deterrent and antigen. It takes only few bites and days to adapt with suitable genetic background. But Italians were offended and it turned into flame war.

I vouched your comment. I don't know why stuff needs to be downvoted to oblivion around here. HN voters, stop it and stop being so damn fickle.

I mostly agree, there is an omission of "edible" after "totally" that makes it read confusingly. However, I find the last sentence - "blood bath and genocide" - to be very out of place, to the point where invoking "genocide" to talk about some mosquitos getting swatted feels quite inappropriate.

Wouldn't the reverse reading make more sense, that the mosquitoes were creating a blood bath? And when did colorful metaphors become anathema?

it's metaphoric. Language can be used outside of its typical idiomatic expression.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com