So I’ve peeled my calendar off the wall where the persistent, driving rain has seeped into the brickwork and glued it into place, and what do you know, summer’s over! And thankfully, all that rain drove away the wasps. Do you realise  how fortunate you are?  Yeah, I’m talking about these little buzzing slivers of nightmare dust.

Pure evil.

They build nests out of paper vomit, invade picnics, sting you.  Not many people like wasps.  Normally I’d be the first to defend these creatures, with their marvellous evolutionary adaptations to extraordinary ecological niches.  Hey, live and let live, right?  So what if they jab you now and then with their venom-filled ass syringe, it’s just a little sting, right?  Wrong!  Wasps are the goddam rattlesnakes of the air, and I’m going to prove it to you.

Karnataka Kidney Punch

So this Indian chap, he’s rolling down the dusty track, when these wasps step out in front of him and are all “Yo punk, we’re here to mess your day up.”  And he’s not afraid, because there’s only a half dozen of them and he’s a big lad, so he’s like “Get out of my way, I’m off to check out the new Shahrukh Khan movie!” So they start whaling on his arm but he batters the wasps and goes about his business.  A couple of days later, he’s not feeling so hot.  His arm is the size of Ganesha’s belly and his insides hurt. So he checks into the hospital and the doctor tells him: “Bad news son, them wasps done sucker-punched your kidneys.”  And he’s all “What? Acute renal failure? Me? The chances have gotta be a billion to one!”  But by the virtue of subcontinental healthcare our hero pulls through. What the hell, wasps?

Change from a fifty

So there’s this middle-aged Danish dude, just mowing his profoundly flat lawn or whatever, and this baying mob of wasps flies out of nowhere and stings the poor guy fifty times.  FIFTY TIMES.  And if that’s not bad enough, something weird happens when he finally stops trying to claw at his burning skin.  He’s sat at home, swaddled in camomile lotion, supping a Heineken and thinking “What was that about?” when all of a sudden, bang! Glasgow Scale 6 coma!  After he wakes and mops up the spilled beer, cursing at those damn wasps, he’s just getting another brew out of the fridge and bang! Down he goes again.  The wasps are probably watching from the ceiling panels at this point, laughing their little poison asses off at the poor guy. This goes on for months.

Four on the floor

Everyone knows that the Slavs are tougher than boots made out of nails, but that’s scant protection against Slavic wasps. One ten year old boy discovered that after a brief encounter with a Bratislavic full metal yellowjacket. The kid knocked it back and told the wasp he’d curbstomp it if it tried to pull that again, and the wasp slunk off all coy, looking over its scaly shoulder and smirking and going “oh yeah?”.  A little later and the the ten-year-old isn’t feeling too good, and then next thing he knows is the floor has come up and kicked him in the ass because he’s paralysed from the neck down. And while his poor frantic mother is carrying him to the hospital in her Skoda, the wasp adds insult to injury by dropping a little incontinence into his lap. And you know what? That was in the summer of 2009. That wasp was probably just getting drunk and paralysing ten-year-olds in celebration of the fact it could now roam its neurotoxic ass anywhere in the EU.

Augmented depravity

Here’s a tale of one little Enola Gay of the insect kingdom that, like a psychotic big game hunter filling his hollow tipped bullets with chilli powder, decided that the kidney-failing, coma-inducing, child-paralysing venom in its tail just wasn’t enough to give someone a bad day. So after days of unutterably disgusting preparation, the wasp tracks down an unassuming Hungarian and stings the poor citizen in the back of the knee, like a goddam sadist. Thinking the worst is over, the Hungarian tries to enjoy the rest of summer. But the damn wasp sting won’t heal, and now it’s all raised up in a big cyst. That’s when the doctors figure out that the wasp has inoculated the poor Hungarian with a dog tapeworm.  That’s right, the wasp got jealous of mosquitoes and decided to join the “we inject parasites into people” club. The next thing we know, they’ll be filling their stings with smallpox.

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So there you have it. Wasps are evil yellow and black bullets from Satan’s own revolver. If you see a wasp, punch it in the face and run. Or rather, get Chuck Norris to do the punching. You concentrate on running.