Rush is over the top...again

After Imus' recent firing, Rush Limbaugh is playing a song called, "Barak the magic negro" and no one seems to mind. Absurd

Overworked Bees?

Bees (which are more than pests and honey producers) are disappearing in record numbers. This comes after a huge number of feral bees have passed away because of lack of habitat. Bees are dying out. Does this matter? To those of you who disdain honey, probably not. But if you happen to enjoy fruit or vegetables, or even flowers, this is cause for concern. Despite the huge number of advances in agriculture in the past 100 years we still cannot replace bees (and beekeepers) to do the work of pollination. Because of a shrinking number of natural bees, beekeepers are paid to ship their bees across the country to work pollinating everything from almonds to peaches to alfalfa (feed for cattle). This is a BILLION dollar industry. Now bees are disappearing from their hives in record numbers and agriculture is up in arms over what the hell is going on. Many suggest stress from travel, foreign environments, overwork, reliance on corn syrup feed, mites and other invaders. Either way this may disasterously affect the future of our food.

Bee colonies have been under stress in recent years as more beekeepers have resorted to crisscrossing the country with 18-wheel trucks full of bees in search of pollination work. These bees may suffer from a diet that includes artificial supplements, concoctions akin to energy drinks and power bars. In several states, suburban sprawl has limited the bees’ natural forage areas. NY Times, 04/23/07

With the recent slew of info on deadly pet food (also fed to chicken) which was a coal product used in animal feed, to the near collapse of the world’s ocean fisheries (farmed fish are in the same bad category as factory-farm chickens and pigs), tainted produce (the spinach scare) there is a good reason to look at how we get and consume our food. This isn’t just something for hippies and ‘do-gooders’ to do. This is imperative if you would like to see the earth as a healthy and remotely sustainable place in the future.

However, in an age with eating contests on ESPN, widespread obesity, and eating as a ‘fun’ activity to do; people don’t seem to care. We will continue to destroy the earth till is screws us, then we’ll freak out and blame the government. Americans like to ignore what is going on until all hell breaks loose. We are complacent until things are catastrophic. Read the writing on the wall now and do something while you still can.

Honeybees Vanish, Leaving Keepers in Peril

NYTimes, February 27, 2007

VISALIA, Calif., Feb. 23 — David Bradshaw has endured countless stings during his life as a beekeeper, but he got the shock of his career when he opened his boxes last month and found half of his 100 million bees missing.

In 24 states throughout the country, beekeepers have gone through similar shocks as their bees have been disappearing inexplicably at an alarming rate, threatening not only their livelihoods but also the production of numerous crops, including California almonds, one of the nation’s most profitable.

“I have never seen anything like it,” Mr. Bradshaw, 50, said from an almond orchard here beginning to bloom. “Box after box after box are just empty. There’s nobody home.”

The sudden mysterious losses are highlighting the critical link that honeybees play in the long chain that gets fruit and vegetables to supermarkets and dinner tables across the country.

Beekeepers have fought regional bee crises before, but this is the first national affliction.

Now, in a mystery worthy of Agatha Christie, bees are flying off in search of pollen and nectar and simply never returning to their colonies. And nobody knows why. Researchers say the bees are presumably dying in the fields, perhaps becoming exhausted or simply disoriented and eventually falling victim to the cold.

As researchers scramble to find answers to the syndrome they have decided to call “colony collapse disorder,” growers are becoming openly nervous about the capability of the commercial bee industry to meet the growing demand for bees to pollinate dozens of crops, from almonds to avocados to kiwis.

Along with recent stresses on the bees themselves, as well as on an industry increasingly under consolidation, some fear this disorder may force a breaking point for even large beekeepers.

A Cornell University study has estimated that honeybees annually pollinate more than $14 billion worth of seeds and crops in the United States, mostly fruits, vegetables and nuts. “Every third bite we consume in our diet is dependent on a honeybee to pollinate that food,” said Zac Browning, vice president of the American Beekeeping Federation.

The bee losses are ranging from 30 to 60 percent on the West Coast, with some beekeepers on the East Coast and in Texas reporting losses of more than 70 percent; beekeepers consider a loss of up to 20 percent in the offseason to be normal.

Beekeepers are the nomads of the agriculture world, working in obscurity in their white protective suits and frequently trekking around the country with their insects packed into 18-wheelers, looking for pollination work.

Once the domain of hobbyists with a handful of backyard hives, beekeeping has become increasingly commercial and consolidated. Over the last two decades, the number of beehives, now estimated by the Agriculture Department to be 2.4 million, has dropped by a quarter and the number of beekeepers by half.

Pressure has been building on the bee industry. The costs to maintain hives, also known as colonies, are rising along with the strain on bees of being bred to pollinate rather than just make honey. And beekeepers are losing out to suburban sprawl in their quest for spots where bees can forage for nectar to stay healthy and strong during the pollination season.

“There are less beekeepers, less bees, yet more crops to pollinate,” Mr. Browning said. “While this sounds sweet for the bee business, with so much added loss and expense due to disease, pests and higher equipment costs, profitability is actually falling.”

Some 15 worried beekeepers convened in Florida this month to brainstorm with researchers how to cope with the extensive bee losses. Investigators are exploring a range of theories, including viruses, a fungus and poor bee nutrition.

They are also studying a group of pesticides that were banned in some European countries to see if they are somehow affecting bees’ innate ability to find their way back home.

It could just be that the bees are stressed out. Bees are being raised to survive a shorter offseason, to be ready to pollinate once the almond bloom begins in February. That has most likely lowered their immunity to viruses.

Mites have also damaged bee colonies, and the insecticides used to try to kill mites are harming the ability of queen bees to spawn as many worker bees. The queens are living half as long as they did just a few years ago.

Researchers are also concerned that the willingness of beekeepers to truck their colonies from coast to coast could be adding to bees’ stress, helping to spread viruses and mites and otherwise accelerating whatever is afflicting them.

Dennis van Engelsdorp, a bee specialist with the state of Pennsylvania who is part of the team studying the bee colony collapses, said the “strong immune suppression” investigators have observed “could be the AIDSof the bee industry,” making bees more susceptible to other diseases that eventually kill them off.

Growers have tried before to do without bees. In past decades, they have used everything from giant blowers to helicopters to mortar shells to try to spread pollen across the plants. More recently researchers have been trying to develop “self-compatible” almond trees that will require fewer bees. One company is even trying to commercialize the blue orchard bee, which is virtually stingless and works at colder temperatures than the honeybee.

Beekeepers have endured two major mite infestations since the 1980s, which felled many hobbyist beekeepers, and three cases of unexplained disappearing disorders as far back as 1894. But those episodes were confined to small areas, Mr. van Engelsdorp said.

Today the industry is in a weaker position to deal with new stresses. A flood of imported honey from China and Argentina has depressed honey prices and put more pressure on beekeepers to take to the road in search of pollination contracts. Beekeepers are trucking tens of billions of bees around the country every year.

California’s almond crop, by far the biggest in the world, now draws more than half of the country’s bee colonies in February. The crop has been both a boon to commercial beekeeping and a burden, as pressure mounts for the industry to fill growing demand. Now spread over 580,000 acres stretched across 300 miles of California’s Central Valley, the crop is expected to grow to 680,000 acres by 2010.

Beekeepers now earn many times more renting their bees out to pollinate crops than in producing honey. Two years ago a lack of bees for the California almond crop caused bee rental prices to jump, drawing beekeepers from the East Coast.

This year the price for a bee colony is about $135, up from $55 in 2004, said Joe Traynor, a bee broker in Bakersfield, Calif.

A typical bee colony ranges from 15,000 to 30,000 bees. But beekeepers’ costs are also on the rise. In the past decade, fuel, equipment and even bee boxes have doubled and tripled in price.

The cost to control mites has also risen, along with the price of queen bees, which cost about $15 each, up from $10 three years ago.

To give bees energy while they are pollinating, beekeepers now feed them protein supplements and a liquid mix of sucrose and corn syrup carried in tanker-sized trucks costing $12,000 per load. Over all, Mr. Bradshaw figures, in recent years he has spent $145 a hive annually to keep his bees alive, for a profit of about $11 a hive, not including labor expenses. The last three years his net income has averaged $30,000 a year from his 4,200 bee colonies, he said.

“A couple of farmers have asked me, ‘Why are you doing this?’ ” Mr. Bradshaw said. “I ask myself the same thing. But it is a job I like. It is a lifestyle. I work with my dad every day. And now my son is starting to work with us.”

Almonds fetch the highest prices for bees, but if there aren’t enough bees to go around, some growers may be forced to seek alternatives to bees or change their variety of trees.

“It would be nice to know that we have a dependable source of honey bees,” said Martin Hein, an almond grower based in Visalia. “But at this point I don’t know that we have that for the amount of acres we have got.”

To cope with the losses, beekeepers have been scouring elsewhere for bees to fulfill their contracts with growers. Lance Sundberg, a beekeeper from Columbus, Mont., said he spent $150,000 in the last two weeks buying 1,000 packages of bees — amounting to 14 million bees — from Australia.

He is hoping the Aussie bees will help offset the loss of one-third of the 7,600 hives he manages in six states. “The fear is that when we mix the bees the die-offs will continue to occur,” Mr. Sundberg said.

Migratory beekeeping is a lonely life that many compare to truck driving. Mr. Sundberg spends more than half the year driving 20 truckloads of bees around the country. In Terra Bella, an hour south of Visalia, Jack Brumley grimaced from inside his equipment shed as he watched Rosa Patiño use a flat tool to scrape dried honey from dozens of beehive frames that once held bees. Some 2,000 empty boxes — which once held one-third of his total hives — were stacked to the roof.

Beekeepers must often plead with landowners to allow bees to be placed on their land to forage for nectar. One large citrus grower has pushed for California to institute a “no-fly zone” for bees of at least two miles to prevent them from pollinating a seedless form of Mandarin orange.

But the quality of forage might make a difference. Last week Mr. Bradshaw used a forklift to remove some of his bee colonies from a spot across a riverbed from orange groves. Only three of the 64 colonies there have died or disappeared.

“It will probably take me two to three more years to get back up,” he said. “Unless I spend gobs of money I don’t have.”

New(ish) sounds from David Brown (Brazzaville)

Given this extended winter and dull life I have, about the only thing that gets me up during a boring job, a slow social life, and a moribund economy, is music. Knowing nothing about David Brown or his band, Brazzaville, I collected some friends and headed down to the Cactus Club in Bayview last Thursday for the final US date of David Brown's 3-city US tour. Thanks to WMSE Mil-town was lucky enough to be on this brief tour.

F.Y.I. David Brown was an LA runaway who spent his teen years on the streets, then traveled the world on a shoestring, played sax with Beck, then moved to Barcelona and started Brazzaville. David Brown strikes me as a younger, more street gigolo friendly, globe trotting, and sexier version of Jonathan Richman. Though Mr. Brown deals in more serious topics such as squalid slum life, international trade, child soldiers, and of course ladies, an affection he shares with Mr. Richman. However, David Brown is a more complicated study. He channels the likes of Lou Reed and even Tom Waits in his singing but is smoother and less down and out. His style evokes much of bossa nova, pop, jazz, and folky indie rock with Latin influences.

I had never listened to any of Brazzaville's music prior to the show. Brazzaville is basically David's band with a crew of Spaniards and expats formed in Barcelona. They tour the world in such diverse locales as Russia, the Ukraine, Turkey, and recently embarked on a journey in a vegetable oil powered boat. This music is perfect for any romantic who also happens to cry whilst reading The Economist, has spent time in Brazil, and loves to go on the road and make new friends.

David was joined by two local musicians playing drums (and percussion) and bass (and keys and vocals). They ran through about 20 Brazzaville tunes, none of which I knew. I did really enjoy some of the tracks like "Jesse James" and "17" off of his new album and then of course that song I can't yet identify which is about the peace found flying above the ocean. There were some tracks he sung which took me to a time when I was 20 and flying from New Zealand to Fiji and just staring at the sun glistening on the ocean being hypnotised by it all.

What I really loved was that his music was weird, romantic, and fun! He got the crowd trained to sing parts of songs, got us to jangle keys as accompaniment, dance, and I had a contented feeling at one point thinking, "I'm 27, single, and alive in this age, and it is alright". Despite the horrors and tedium of hyper-modern life things can still be beautiful and I could feel that, something I rarely find in music. There is beauty in life.

For more information please check out: www.brazzaville-band.com/

In Case You Missed It...

In case you missed the Rolling Stone or Vibe promos you gotta check out Pittsburgh's own Wiz Khalifa. Though his lyrics aren't ground breaking I'm glad someone with skills and pride in the Burgh is out there making waves. Enjoy!

Salsa Vs. Reggaeton

In total my formal dance experiences, not counting House music where it is acceptable to walk in a circle with your eyes closed and hands in the air, is limited. Experiences include 2 salsa lessons and 1 night swing dancing over a decade ago. The rest of my endeavors (however limited) run the usual gamut of trying to dance to ska, reggae, Motown, r&b, house, 80s, and hip-hop.

It was with great enthusiasm that I decided to go out and dance at a salsa club with about 8 other friends (mostly beginners) on Saturday night. We got to the club for a free one hour lesson. It took me 1 hour the night before to learn the basic step so another hour to learn about 6 twists and turns, fancier footwork, and more just didn’t cut it. A neurotic white guy cannot learn how to dance (let alone loosen up) in 1 hour! I spent the better part of the evening on the floor figuring out the steps and keeping rhythm; trying to lead someone to moves which I don’t conceptualize let alone understand or have confidence in drove me insane.

The frustration of this dance (while fun anyway) was having a pretty girl complain “lead me, lead me”, when I in fact had no idea where or how to lead her in a dance I barely understood (this sorta thing comes up and derails relationships I imagine). That was very, very frustrating for a passive individual like myself who normally spends weekends in the library.

For myself, being the embodiment of passivity, ‘leading’ someone on a dance floor (or in any endeavor for that matter) is quite overwhelming. I have studied and perfected the passive life of Haruki Murakami's characters whose only pursuits involve excessive and solitary reading, cooking, exercise, cleaning, and drinking. Like Repo Man’s Otto I’ve lived my life in the passenger seat, taking it all in, while doing nothing. However, my passivity has yet to carry me on any Murakami-esque adventures with psychic, crippled, 13 year old girls to Hawaii or into deep wells. Realizing that as a purely passive human being I need to be proactive and lead people in life, even in something as simple as a dance, is very daunting.

That being said, I gave up on dancing to the salsa and meringue (I found cumbia to be easier) and found solace in reggaeton, of all things. I’ve never been a fan of reggaeton prior, finding the lyrics a bit misogynistic and the beat boring. Compared to the complicated and proactive salsa rhythms reggaeton was a relief. To reggaeton I could dance with abandon without having to lead, figure out moves 3 steps ahead or worry about complicated steps, yet it is just as sexy and fun as salsa. No wonder everyone is into this stuff! Maybe I need to rethink music, it is hard to criticize music when your dancing to it, while it is just too easy to do while sitting on the sidelines. I will no longer deride reggaeton!

What I leared from this night was that without serious study of the various forms of Latin dance I will continue to remain frustrated and in the dark and reggaeton won’t always come to my rescue. I enrolled in a beginner’s salsa class and will figure out this ASAP. Until then I'll stick to dancing to House in my kitchen and to try and 'dance like no one is watching'. I urge you, dear reader, to do the same.

Mountains out of molehills

Paranoia strikes me all of the time. For example, I heard a loud booming noise the other night around 2am. I assumed that it was someone breaking into the house by kicking in the door. Turns out that it was just my neighbor’s ajar screen door banging against the house during a wind storm. No need for me to fear the worst.

Likewise, many people around me are sick with the flu. This includes co-workers, a roommate, and others. Friday during a basketball game the man behind me coughed the entire game, covering my jacket and neck with germs. Then on Sunday I sat next to a woman for 2 hours and later shook her hand and ate an apple with that dirty hand, only to learn that she just recovered from the flu.

Add to this my usual litany of symptoms: stomach pains, irritability, sleeplessness, mild sore throat (probably from the common cold) and nausea and headaches due to excessive caffeine. I, of course, assume that I am the next candidate for the flu with these symptoms. Later, looking at life and realizing that I’m stressing about my future, procrastinating over schools, afraid to ask out a girl, and the ‘rigors’ of life are causing me to grind my teeth and have a sore jaw. I ignore these psychological factors and assume the worst, that I have the flu. Taking the necessary precautions I begin sleeping 10 hours a day, consuming excessive amounts of water, Emergen-C, raw garlic, fennel seeds, oranges, steeped ginger root, and washing my hands 30 times a day.

So far I’m not sick and don’t think I will get sick. But the clenched jaw, sleepless nights, and fear in my stomach remain. I think that the illness is in the mind, not my body.

March Madness

Another weekend come and gone. My NCAA basketball picks are proving to be quite off this year, but Pitt and Georgetown are advancing so it's all good. Went to Chi-town to catch a few games this past Friday. An odd situation, the tickets were procured through a “friend of a friend of a friend” who was told to meet ‘a guy’ in a rest stop near O'Hare International Airport. After unsuccessfully selling my friend on a pyramid scheme we got the tickets and headed to the game.

First game, Georgia Tech vs. UNLV. Kind of boring. I picked GT, but they lost. The true highlight was the pathetic mascot of Georgia Tech, Buzz, the Yellow Jacket, which had NO SPIRIT! Clad in Chuck Taylors he seemed to be an indie rocker drafted into this position at the last second as he had perfected only two moves: a celebratory fist pump more suitable for punk rock shows and an apathetic shaking of the ‘stinger’. Poor Buzz didn’t dance or rev up the crowd, he spent more time flirting with the UNLV cheerleaders! Buzz also failed to perform his patented ‘Buzz flip’. This pathetic critter is a previous winner of mascot of the year. The results of this Atlanta based poll are dubious at best, either way the person playing Buzz needs some serious training to live up to the Buzz legacy. A friend recommended that 'the bee' be hoisted up on strings and fly around the stadium. That would have been wonderful, at least emerging from some sort of hive would have added character. The GT cheerleaders were equally boring with only 5 men and 3 ladies who just stood around and CLAPPED to the music, occasionally hoisting the gals up and letting them shake their pom-pons. UNLV’s Showgirls style performance was more worthy with serious booty shaking and a cowboy (Runnin’ Rebel) mascot who danced around and could sorta keep rhythm.

The Badgers barely won against unknowns Texas A&M-Corpus Christi, but the Texas Islanders won based on the mascot alone. I don’t know what an “Islander” is in Texas. Perhaps it is a part-Polynesian, part-German/Mexican Texan with a tiki face and grass skirt. Izzy the Islander danced it up and had some real pride is his/her job with slides, shaking, fist pumps, and serious movement (Izzy had rhythm, so probably was a woman). The Texas A&M CC Blue Crew also did a good job with their cheering (rather boisterous and animated) despite being outnumbered and overshadowed by the local Badgers squad.

Besides the shoddy performance by Buzz I was struck by the fact that most songs by the bands were old rock tunes. What was once a novelty with DJs sampling the Compton High School Marching Band’s rendition of 'Low Rider,' it is now commonplace for college bands to play such anthems as ‘Ring of Fire’, ‘Low Rider’, or ‘Iron Man’ --so much for fight songs.

NCAA consumption with the unhealthy food, high prices, regional rivalries, sensory overload, and sitting all day was too much for me, add to that a long car ride, and stomach full of heavy Chicago Pie and I was beat. Let’s hope Pitt wins this thing and we can move on with our lives.