Bedbug Registry

If you're uptight about bedbugs, there's a website in which reports of critter sightings are duly noted. The site, http://bedbugregistry.com/, offers an Anglo-Saxon perspective on the pesty creatures, with maps featuring identification of alleged American, Canadian, and UK bedbug infestations. The champ, unsurprisingly, is the Northeastern United States, with the epicenter in New York.

Over the years, I've lived in a number of New York apartments. To satisfy my curiosity, I researched most of my former addresses. First candidate -- a Lower East Side apartment that featured a bathtub in the kitchen, a hole in the wall behind the tub, and hugged the adjacent abandoned building. It came up with a clean bill of health, so to speak. Phew.

Next up was a small Soho tenement apartment above a neighborhood social club. Clean again. Well, you can't say those very good fellas in the club weren't tidy.

Batting third was a Turtle Bay studio that I sublet for a year. Nada. No bugs.

Meanwhile, many of Manhattan's currently fashionable apartments, hotels, stores, entertainment venues, and offices come complete with a bedbug population. Despite official New York's best efforts to hush the bedbug story, another sighting in a high profile location emerges and makes the Internet or (far less likely) mainstream media rounds.

The irony in my digging on the Bedbug Registry are the ads that appeared on its search page. One ad linked to hotels.com. Another connected to Google information about travel packages to the Big Apple. A third offered information on nightly rates for stays in New York condos. Frankly, bedbug phobia would inspire me to book elsewhere for a relaxing vacation.

I'll just use the Bedbug Registry in my search.