theFadd, you don't happen to work for a cell phone company, do you?
I had myself all worked up into a frothing panic over the demise of the honeybee. And now you're all like "cool down, dude, this is normal." Well EX-CUUUUSE ME if I am all upset about honeybee colony collapse disorder. I don't want to spend 20 bucks for a jar of honey. Nor do I want to have to send out Mexican immigrants to pollinate my genetically altered corn crops. And this is TOTALLY going to kill the plot of the next X-Files movie...
When I read about the demise of the human race do to the lack of bees, I first thought that humankind would die off due to some kind of sexual ennui. I didn't make the food connection at first.
It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine
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Re: Be happy, eat your honey
Tue May 08, 2007 at 02:17:18 PM EST
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sexual ennui? Whoa. I never thought of that before.
And we were running out of apocalypse ideas. Meteors, superstorms, earthquakes, alien invasions, killer spiders, viruses, zombies, infertility, even a supernova sun, they have all been made into great disaster movies. But a scenario where the human race is done in by sexual ennui? THAT is fucking creative, dude.
I guess I must be reading a lot less into those "shrill" stories than you are, fadd, because compared to other panic stories the media has brought me before, they're fairly level-headed and restrained. The central valley link relies on an insurer, who sounds as if he was facing a massive hit to his business if this happened to be true; in the food chain of media sources, insurers have got to rank as far more serious than (the much maligned) "environmental activists." The Clarion Ledger story mentions among the possible explanations ones which eventually turned out to be the case. And how much weight to place on a story on an AOL blog filed under "rants and raves" is a question that isn't going to vex me long . . .
Now think back about the tone regarding, say, "killer bees", where the fear mongering far outweighed the threat-- "one domesticated type of bee displacing another" just doesn't have the same ring as "KILLER BEES ARE COMING!", but that's what we got in the 70s and 80s.
The coverage of radon gas in homes was, IIRC, nearly as bad, with story leads like "killer in the basement" or some such being the pitch, compared to the more accurate, "a gas that might give you cancer after years of exposure." But I guess the latter doesn't sell advertising for the local nightly news, eh?
So if the balance is between degree of threat, immediacy of threat, and possible outcomes, this was only slightly over the edge. Or was this submitted with tongue fully in cheek?
Ex ignorantia ad sapientiam; e luce ad tenebras
I couldn't reconcile the concept of cell phones killing off bee colonies with the stories I'd heard of people successfully keeping hives in Manhattan. If hives can survive amidst the AM-FM-GSM-CDMA-GPS-EMF-Homeland Security Mind Control rays bombarding the heart of New York City, why would they get so much trouble from a few towers out in the sticks? I'm going to stick with the fungus theory for now. Damned Eurasians, keep your foreign fungus to yourselves!
(is 3fingerspointback)
Every once in a while as a treat I buy honey that's still in the comb.
It's incredibly delicious.
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Interesting to note that the TnT Bee story is so much more sophisticated than the one running on plastic.
