To borrow a phrase from former President Barack Obama, the news media is currently getting all wee-weed up about the coming cicada apocalypse this spring.

Here’s how Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs defined the term to NPR’s Robert Siegel at the time (August of 2009, for those of you keeping score at home).

SIEGEL: Gibbs defined getting wee-weed up as when people, and I quote, “get all nervous for no particular reason.” Finally, he came around to this.

Mr. GIBBS: Bed wetting is – would be probably the more consumer-friendly term for…

SIEGEL: For getting all wee-weed up. Thus ending what our correspondent Don Gonyea tells us is one of the strangest exchanges that he has witnessed at the White House in almost a decade.

Except, in the case of the upcoming cicada blitz, the wee-wee part is kind of literal, as Alla Katsnelson reports in the New York Times.

This spring, when the ground temperature hits 64 degrees Fahrenheit, trillions of cicadas will dig their way up from beneath the soil across the Southern and Midwestern United States. In a rare so-called double emergence, two distinct cicada broods — one on a 13-year life cycle and the other on a 17-year one — will take to the trees to sing, eat and mate.

And though we may prefer not to think about it, considering their lodgings in the branches above, the cicadas will also eliminate waste in the form of urine. Despite their size, cicadas have an impressively powerful stream, scientists reported in an article published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In the summer of 1970, I muddled through Cincinnati’s cicada invasion, although I did manage to keep the little passers at broom’s length, as detailed in this account of the seven-year stretch I did in the Midwest back then.

In the summer of 1970 Bob Dylan traveled to Princeton University to receive an honorary Doctorate of Music. Once there, he encountered both a) very loud protests, and b) an even louder swarm of 17-year cicadas that drowned out his introduction by a university official.

Subsequently Dylan wrote a song about that experience called Day of the Locusts.

And the locusts sang, well, it give me a chill,

Yeah, the locusts sang such a sweet melody.

And the locusts sang with a high whinin’ trill,

Yeah, the locusts sang and they was singing for me . . .

(Actually, cicadas aren’t locusts, but why get technical about it when Bob Dylan is involved.)

In Cincinnati, which was another 1970 cicada hot spot, a local historian noted that “you can’t wear sandals outside because they crawl right onto your feet.”

The high whine, the crunching of cicadas underfoot, the constant cries of “God, they’re everywhere!” – that was the soundtrack of my summer of 1970.

Each morning I would sweep the overnight cicada blanket off my car with a broom . . .

Good times, yeah?