…are in the news. In fact a recent post on the newsgroup Resilient Manitoulin has them for sale at a price of $10/100, or ten cents apiece (for the grubs, of course, which are otherwise known as maggots).

It’s probably obvious at this point that blog topics are in short supply at the moment. Nonetheless, black soldier flies are interesting. They have immense potential. They reproduce rapidly, eat garbage and compost, and produce prodigious amounts of high quality protein. (They may already be part of our diet —disguised as protein shakes and the like.)

But I did not come here to talk about flies. In the photo above, the stripes are lines of dried saline solution, which is applied to sidewalks all around campus in advance of adverse weather. Nowadays saline stripes are a fairly reliable predictor of coming attractions, up there with the barometer. Sharp cold last night, today, and tonight. Ice is being made, but, of course, the snow will soon be coming.