Duck season. Mosquito season.

We here at Corn Chips & Pie have been dutifully watching the three-part PBS series on global health (final segment tomorrow). And we are generally impressed: good overview, only moderate kowtowing to pharmaceutical companies (Merck is a sponsor), nice balance between the appropriate focus on developing countries and the necessary focus on developed countries, comically grave inflections by narrator Brad Pitt during harrowing scenes. Perhaps more impressively, the segments chart a reasonably cautious route between the Scylla of fundraising-friendly alarmism and the Charybdis of Pollyannaish success stories.

But look: we know our place. Nobody comes here for public health punditry. The motto for CC&P should be "Come for the cheap jokes on light topics, stay for the cheap jokes on heavy topics." In this spirit, let's salute the vector control technicians. These are the dudes who go out & spray the shit out of standing water in order to kill mosquitoes. These are America's unappreciated heroes. Do mosquito abatement personnel get beefcake fundraising calendars? Hell, no. I knew some of these guys back in my hometown. If they hadn't been working for the county, they'd be doing whipits and playing Bloody Knuckles. But they were monomaniacally committed to Killing Skeeters. They were nuts. They were probably effective.

Here's what I say: let's harness the sociopathic and murderous tendencies of our adolescents in the service of a greater good. Let's get the acne-ridden dispossessed to focus their anomie at Anopheles. We cannot fail.