“I think I’m going to write a humorous essay,” I said to my husband recently. “What should I write about?”
“Write about how everyone always wants to punch you in the head,” he said.
“What should I call it?” I asked him.
“Call it ‘Everyone always wants to punch me in the head’,” he suggested.
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Since it’s Fashion Week, I have a confession to make: I’m kind of a dressaholic.
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Last night I happened to be watching David Letterman, and John Malkovich was a guest. Malkovich was actually really funny, and he told several stories about his family, including his daughter inviting scads of her teenage friends to his house in France. Then he told a story about how his mom saw a picture of his nephew’s dog, and she said, “Is that Bob Dylan? No, it’s Sting.” Needless to say, I nearly fell over.
Oddly enough, this is pretty close to what originally started the whole idea of “Temple of Sting” many years ago: my friend kept randomly insisting everyone was Sting. I then suddenly began to see the actual Sting everywhere, and would point out, “Now, that is Sting!” Then I began to wonder why Sting seemed to be ubiquitous, then I became obsessed with bees, and you know the rest. Maybe Malkovich’s mom is actually a Temple of Sting reader?! That would be a logical explanation for her comment.
For those of you not familiar with all those acronyms, that means that the National Resources Defense Council (a non-profit environmental advocacy organization) has filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regarding a possible (at this point, highly probable) cause of Colony Collapse Disorder. The most recent CCD theory involves strong evidence that many pesticides, particularly a class known as neonicotinoids, have been affecting honeybee colonies.
According to the website Celsius, “Clothianidin, made by German chemical company Bayer, was approved by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 2003 as a seed treatment. This, despite the fact that the EPA’s own report acknowledges clothianidin is highly toxic to honeybees.” In 2003, the EPA called for additional studies on this chemical’s affect on honeybees, but it isn’t clear if these studies were ever completed. The NRDC requested this information and did not receive it, so they have now filed a lawsuit. They believe that the EPA has been willfully hiding information from the public about the connection between neonicotionoids and CCD.
In related news, I started reading a wonderful book called A Spring Without Bees by Michael Schacker, which is all about Colony Collapse Disorder. I saw it in the window of my favorite bookstore and ran in and bought it immediately. Right now I happen to be reading the chapter about neonicitonoids, and I will post more about this book when I’m finished reading it.
I never thought I’d say this, but here it is: I have a doorman. Well, technically I have a part-time doorman. And he is silently judging me. (more…)
I don’t usually read a lot of glossy magazines, and I never read InStyle… but the exception to this rule occurs when I find a big old pile of magazines in my building’s trash and recycling room. Then I will grab a pile, and happily look through a bunch of free magazines.
So while flipping through an old issue of InStyle (May 2008 - hey neighbors, you hang on to your magazines for a LONG time), I came across this sentence: “It’s 5:30 PM and Carrie Underwood [for those of you who don’t know who this is, she is an American Idol winner] hasn’t eaten all day. In 90 minutes she’s due at a Grammy Awards rehearsal, and there’s a platter nearby piled with sandwiches. But Underwood sips a diet soda and nibbles on a Weight Watchers bar instead. ‘Everything shows up immediately right here,’ she says, pointing to her flat tummy. ‘So I monitor what I eat.’ ” And what does the author of this illustrious article write in response to this? “The woman has willpower.”
Ugh. The feminist in me recoils at this. That’s not WILLPOWER, that’s called ANOREXIA. I mean, isn’t that about 200 calories for an entire day? On the other hand, at least Carrie Underwood is honest about why she looks as thin as she does, and doesn’t say things like “I don’t count calories! I just try to exercise when I can, I looove walking my dogs and doing yoga!” like half the celebrities (who have clearly had plastic surgery) say in the puff pieces that appear in many publications - even those purportedly dedicated to women’s health and fitness (SELF magazine, I am looking at you).
Well, folks, apparently Sting and co. have gone ahead and retired the money making machine known as the Police. According to Stereogum, the Police reunion tour earned the aging rockers $358,825,665. Hey, Sting, have you considered donating some of that money to colony collapse disorder research? After all, without the bees, you wouldn’t have your famous nickname.
This weekend, there was a massive swarm of honeybees on the NJ Turnpike near Cherry Hill. It’s believed that the bee onslaught was a result of a beekeeper’s beehive falling beside the highway.
In other not-really-news, this past weekend I briefly attended the Siren Festival in Coney Island, where I caught a few Malkmus tunes, breathed some sea air, and got a Siren Festival t-shirt featuring a giant squid and a subway car! I also did some more bee watching. Plus, I gained new insight as to why my local Key Food is so completely, utterly insane: I overheard the manager tersely tell an older gentleman who was asking if the store carried an item advertised in a coupon that NO, they didn’t have any and he would not go look in the stock room, TOO BAD. The same manager then told a cashier that people who “stole $.25 bags of popcorn” were “going to go to hell” (the un-labeled, small bags of popcorn were near the cash registers and looked like free samples). I also finally managed to get some much-needed hardware and software so that I could play music from my laptop wirelessly through my stereo speakers; my life is now 1000% more awesome as a result of this.
This video was posted by the Haagen-Dazs “Help the Honeybees” campaign. It’s especially appropriate since bees do in fact do a dance - known as the “waggle dance” - to tell the other bees where to find the best nectar. Although, not to quibble, but I think it would usually be females (worker bees) rather than males (drones) doing this.
There was an excellent article in Friday’s Wall Street Journal about hobbyist beekeepers. The number of “beekeeping hobbyists has risen by about 10% to 100,000 in the past year or so” as people become more aware of colony collapse disorder and breed bees to try to help the honeybee population. Yet many towns have, or are enacting, ordinances that limit backyard beekeeping. In some instances, backyard beekeepers must have a certain amount of land, or buy a permit, or put up tall fences to discourage the bees from popping over to the neighbors’ place. Yet beekeepers like Omid Ghayeb, who was forced by his town in Maine to move his bees to a more rural area, prevail. He said, “I’m not going to take up golfing instead. We need more bees.”
In other bee-related news, there is also new evidence that bumblebees may be in decline as well:
Evidence for decline in eastern North American bumblebees (Hymenoptera: Apidae), with special focus on Bombus affinis Cresson
Sheile R. Colla and Laurence Packer
Biodiversity and Conservation Volume 17, Number 6/ June, 2008Abstract Bumblebees (Bombus spp.) have been declining rapidly in many temperate regions of the Old World. Despite their ecological and economic importance as pollinators, North American bumblebees have not been extensively surveyed and their conservation status is largely unknown. In this study, two approaches were used to determine whether bumblebees in that region were in decline spatially and temporally. First, surveys performed in 2004–2006 in southern Ontario were compared to surveys from 1971 to 1973 in the same sites to look at changes in community composition, in one of the most bumblebee diverse areas of eastern North America. Second, the extent of range decline for a focal species (Bombus affinis Cresson) was estimated by surveying 43 sites throughout its known native range in eastern Canada and the United States. Our study documents an impoverishment of the bumblebee community in southern Ontario over the past 35 years. Bombus affinis in particular was found to have declined drastically in abundance not only in southern Ontario but throughout its native range. The loss of any bumblebee species may result in cascading impacts on native fauna and flora and reduce agricultural production. Implications for the conservation of this important group of pollinators are discussed.