Let me tell ya 'bout the birds and the....hey, what the?

Scared?

  • Yes.
  • No.
  • Buzz off!

0 voters

You may recognize the inimitable stylings of Bill Maher in the quoted text:

[quote]And, finally, New Rule: From now on, Earth Day really must be a year-round thing. And…and in honor of this Earth Day, starting Monday, supermarket clerks must stop putting the big bottle of detergent with the handle on it, in a plastic bag. I don’t mean to tell you how to do your job, but you see that handle you just lifted the detergent with? I could use that same handle to carry the detergent to my car.

And while we’re at it, stop putting my liquor in a smaller paper sack before you put it in the big paper sack with my other stuff. What, are you afraid my groceries will think less of me if they see I’ve been drinking? Trust me, the broccoli doesn’t care, and the condoms, they already know.

So, here’s a quote from Albert Einstein. He said, if the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, then man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination. No more plants. No more animals. No more man. Well, guess what? The bees are disappearing in massive numbers all around the world. And if you think I’m being alarmist, and that, “Oh, they’ll figure out some way to pollinate the plants.” No, they’ve tried.

For a lot of what we eat, only bees work. And they’re not working. They’re gone. It’s called “colony collapse disorder,” when the hive’s inhabitants suddenly disappear and all that’s left are a few queens and some immature workers. Like when a party winds down at Elton John’s house. Queens imagery.

But, I think we are the ones suffering from colony collapse disorder. Because, although nobody really knows for sure what’s killing the bees, it’s not Al Qaeda, and it’s not God doing some of his Old Testament shtick. And it’s not Winnie the Pooh. It’s us. It could be from pesticides or genetically-modified food or global warming, or the high fructose corn syrup we started to feed them.

Recently, it was discovered that bees won’t fly near cell phones. The electromagnetic signals they emit might screw up the bees’ navigation system, knocking them out of the sky. So, thanks, big mouth guy in line at Starbucks. You just killed us.

It’s nature’s way of saying, “Can you hear me now?”

Last week, I asked, if it solved global warming, would you give up the TV remote and go back to carting your fat a$$ over to the television set every time you wanted to change the channel. If it comes down to the cell phone versus the bee, will we choose to literally blather ourselves to death? Will we continue to tell ourselves that we don’t have to solve environmental problems, we can just adapt? Build sea walls instead of stopping the ice caps from melting. Don’t save the creatures of the earth in the oceans; just learn to eat the slime and the jellyfish that nothing can kill; like Chinese restaurants are already doing.

You know what? Maybe you don’t need to talk on your cell phone all the time. Maybe you don’t need a bag when you buy a keychain. Americans throw out 100 billion plastic bags a year, and they all take 1,000 years to decompose. Your children’s children’s children will never know you, but they’ll know you once bought batteries at the 99-cents Store because the bag will still be caught in a tree. Except there won’t be any trees.

Sunday is Earth Day. Please educate someone about the birds and the bees. Because, without bees, humans become the canary in the coal mine. And we make bad canaries, because we’re already such sheep. [/quote]

Frickin’ bees. Threaten to go all african on our asses and swarm the shit out of us, then they just buzz off without so much a howdy’do or a see ya later honey!

So it looks like it is quickly becoming our beeswax, doesn’t it?

Can’t say I’ve ever seen a bee in Taiwan. I guess they must be somewhere seeing as there sure are plants.

Douglas had it wrong. He thought the dolphins were the ones to buzz off.

[quote]So, here’s a quote from Albert Einstein. He said, if the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, then man would only have four years of life left.[/quote]Has anyone actually seen this quote ? No ? Didn’t think so. He’s a physicist not a biologist.

Otherwise he’s right, what is that with the bags ? It doesn’t help his case when he uses made-up quotes though.

Does his cause really need help? Regardless of (potential)misquotes and less than awesome allegories, facts is facts. Question whether the reality of this Colony Collapse is actual of perceived, but diminishing the argument because google doesn’t have an entry seems a tad ostrichy to me.

When Indonesian women are hoping to go into labour they will often seek out a warm tidal pool in the warm Indian Ocean to soak their nether regions, thereby blurring the distinction between in (used in this rare instance as the noun object of a preposition) and out (used also as the noun object of a preoposition in this rare instance) and thus encouraging new life to make that fateful plunge. If, very early one morning, they are partaking of this quite sensible practice really and happen upon a not in fact so young foreign gentleman in a secluded tidal pool some hundred yards from shore for a little lively bit of chit chat splashing about what have you, this can indeed have the effect of stimulating the birth process. The word “natural” takes on a new meaning and you are born again into the fold of heart felt environmentalism. This is all speculation of course. It could also happen that you inhale a ton of carbon monoxide on Taipei city streets and take up an interest in following the stock market. Given modern conditions arms manufacturing looks like a good investment.

(I had planned to re-post this in the “hate” thread as an ode to fred smith, here’s hoping you might someday develop a glimmer of a clue what the questions are at least sort of deal, but since that thread has now been locked on account of the histironic narcicism and generalized humor deficiency of a few I decided to post it here in hopes that it might at least be somehow vaguely relevant to the general motif and so on and so forth off into a future less whatever than not or something, burp*)

I don’t claim to know anything about bees, but I do recall the frog scare of the mid 1970s.

How are the froggies doing these days?

Croaking.

Well, then, there you go.

It’s a downward spiral essentially.

Easy come, easy go.

Take me to the river.

The bees are definitely dying. I’ve seen numerous reports about colony collapse in the past few weeks.

Here are a few that I googled:

canada.com/topics/technology … a61&k=2709
cosmosmagazine.com/node/1087
kansascity.com/136/story/82888.html
msnbc.msn.com/id/18274416/

Woah.
Front page of The Drudge Report.
Weird.
Taiwan stung by millions of missing bees

[quote]Over the past two months, farmers in three parts of Taiwan have reported most of their bees gone, the Chinese-language United Daily News reported. Taiwan’s TVBS television station said about 10 million bees had vanished in Taiwan.

A beekeeper on Taiwan’s northeastern coast reported 6 million insects missing “for no reason”, and one in the south said 80 of his 200 bee boxes had been emptied, the paper said.[/quote]