37) Beekeeping zealotry

A 21st Century spin on the infamous gangs of New York City . . . Please phone your dearest Brooklyn locavore with an urgent plea that cooler heads prevail.

Around Bee Rescue, Honey and RancorNew York Times
City Room -- Blogging from the Five Burroughs
August 30, 2011, 7:24 pm
By EMILY S. RUEB
Tropical Storm Irene moved through New York City on Sunday knocking out power, causing flooding in some neighborhoods and knocking over many trees.
In one corner of Fort Greene Park in Brooklyn, the storm also set off a fight — over bees.
In a gale wind from the storm, a hollowed-out branch of an enormous tree was ripped off, exposing a hive of 30,000 to 40,000 honeybees. The hive’s discovery was a jackpot for the beekeeping community and word spread quickly on Facebook and Twitter that a feral hive was up for grabs.
Two beekeepers jumped at the chance to claim the bees, unknowingly setting off a feud between two of the city’s main beekeeping groups.
One of the beekeepers was Margot Dorn, an arts teacher at a charter school in Brooklyn who had taken a class at New York City Beekeeping, a nonprofit group that offers free courses, workshops and gatherings for beekeepers. When she discovered the hive, while taking a stroll through the park on Sunday morning, she called the group, and James Fischer, her former teacher, immediately drove down from the Upper East Side.
But he was not alone.
Another beekeeper, Liz Dory, a cinematographer, noticed a message sent out on Facebook by another beekeeping group, the New York City Beekepers Association, informing followers that it had a team at the ready to rescue any endangered bee swarms.
Ms. Dory contacted Andrew Coté, a prominent beekeeper and president of the association, who went to the park on Sunday to deal with the imperiled hive.
Mr. Coté and Mr. Fischer had once attended beekeeping functions together. But Mr. Coté had a more ambitious plan for a professional beekeeping association and started his own group in 2008.
Because Mr. Coté’s group regularly worked with the health department and the New York Police Department’s Emergency Services Unit on such rescues, he said he was able to secure a police van with a crane, a chain saw, and the services of the Police Department’s resident bee handler. Mr. Coté oversaw the rescue work.
As throngs of beekeepers and the curious congregated within the thin piece of yellow caution tape roping off the area around the tree, tensions rose. And even as the wood chips were flying, the two beekeeping groups squabbled over how the rescue should be conducted and who the rightful owner of the bees was.
“It was as though I brought the North and South back to the Mason-Dixon line again,” Ms. Dory said about the dispute.
The six-hour rescue operation involved hoisting the Police Department’s beekeeper, Anthony Planakis, known as Tony Bees of the N.Y.P.D., 30 feet in the air wielding a chain saw.
Mr. Fischer said he tried to halt the operation on Sunday because the high winds trailing the storm added to an already potent combination of stinging insects, heights and chain saws. But when his words were not heeded, he left the park.
“There was a lot more testosterone floating around than common sense,” he said.
But Mr. Coté defended his decision to carry out the mission.
“I was happy to be a bystander if someone else could handle the situation,” he said. “I only moved ahead with my methods when no one else could manage the job.”
That a swarm of bees would draw a swarm of people reflects the growing interest in beekeeping, or apiculture, which has been expanding since the city legalized it in March of last year. Although there are no statistics on the number of beekeepers in the city, some involved in the practice estimate that there are over 200 keepers tending hives on their rooftops or in their backyards. (Beekeepers are required to register their hives with the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, but it’s likely not everyone does.)
Mr. Fischer, who teaches about 100 students each year, said he was amazed by the number of young mothers and teachers, like Ms. Dory and Ms. Dorn, who had been drawn to bees.
“Five years ago the beekeeper demographic was an old white man who had retired after working 30 years as a machinist somewhere,” he said.
Beehives are the new ant farms, it seems.
And in the end, who would claim the Fort Greene bees? A compromise, of sorts, was reached.
As the sun went down on Sunday, Ms. Dory and Ms. Dorn loaded up a truck with the bandaged tree limb and a back seat full of bees and took them to a community garden in Bedford-Stuyvesant, where the hive rested for the night.
On Monday, the comb was carefully excised from the branch and the bees were transferred to wooden frames in a procedure that involved a vacuum, serrated bread knives and rubber bands. Mr. Fischer was on hand to settle the bees on the top of Ms. Dory’s brownstone in Prospect Lefferts Gardens after successfully introducing a new queen to the hive.
Ms. Dory will house the bees and, if they survive the winter, she will give half of them, in what is known as a “split,” to Ms. Dorn.
And, in an effort to maintain good relationships with her fellow beekeepers, she called Mr. Coté to thank him for efforts. Without his help, she said, her hive would not have survived.

36) Televised reality

Ahh, the favored medium of our time and its facile chicanery . . . Makes me long for the Gutenberg press.



MasterChef's Super-Fake Crowd Shot
June 23, 2011
Eater.com

Either Fox is being totally sneaky or there's a glitch in the Matrix. In the opening credits of MasterChef, the voiceover says, "Out of thousands that applied, only 18 home cooks have made it into the MasterChef kitchen," alongside a crowd shot full of artificial people. The image was spotted on Reddit, but the one above includes the redheaded lady not in the original.

Leave it to French philosopher Jean Baudrillard to bring it on home: "It is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real, that is to say an operation of deterring every real process via its operational double, a programmatic, metastable, perfectly descriptive machine that offers all the signs of the real and short-circuits all its vicissitudes."

35) Las Vegas, a national treasure . . .

Postal Service in Statue of Liberty stamp photo mix-up
15 April 2011
Last updated at 16:30 ET
BBC News

The US Postal Service regrets issuing a stamp featuring a photo of a Las Vegas casino's replica Statue of Liberty rather than the original in New York harbour, a spokesman has said. But the postal service printed three billion of the first-class stamps and will continue to sell them, he said. And the agency would have selected the photograph anyway, he said. A stamp collector discovered the mix-up after noting discrepancies between the stamp image and the copper original. The mix-up was first reported by Linn's Stamp News, a publication for philatelists. It points out that the photo used on the stamp shows a rectangular patch on the crown that is present on the 14-year-old statue at the New York-New York Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada, but not on the 305ft (93m) copper statue in New York. In addition, the facial features on the Las Vegas replica are more sharply defined than on the original. The stamp was thought to show the Statue of Liberty in New York The image was taken from a stock photography service, the New York Times reported. Designed by French sculptor Frederic-Auguste Bartholdi and French engineer Alexandre Gustave Eiffel, the statue - entitled Statue of Liberty Enlightening the World - was given to the US by the French and dedicated in 1886.

34) The American fitness regimen

33) Name-brand sink drains

Sorry to break it to you, Price-Pfister: of all the indignities of life, I don't count advertising on my bathroom sink drain as the most tolerable.

32) YKK

Why isn't the Department of Justice looking into this all-out, no-holds-barred monopoly in the market for zippers? Ninety-five percent of the clothing I own has a YKK zipper, and this is how it's been ever since I was a wee one.

Can you imagine the pricing power these thugs must have? I say they're just begging for an anti-trust lawsuit.

31) U. S. involvement in the 2010 World Cup

I had a premonition watching the US-England match this weekend, and it's this: the US won't achieve material progress/success in international competition until it surpasses two milestones. My reasoning follows . . .

1) We'll never go all the way with beauty pageant jerseys. I can't see our men on the "pitch" w/o imagining tiaras to match their white sashes.
2) Above all, we must abandon our laughable insistence on announcers with accents that are British, Irish or some guttural derivative thereof. I know the Brits have a rightful claim to the sport, but enough of this Old World deference -- let's show some ownership and impassioned expertise of our own.

29) The Convenience Valet drinking cup

A rare visual aid here:

When I got sick on a vacation last year, this paper drinking cup came with the overpriced, travel-sized cold-relief tablets I bought in a sparse and dimly lit RV campstore a hundred yards from the craggy Pacific. It seemed awfully (abundantly!) generous of them to provide -- a thoughtful gesture to say the least.

It turns out my gracious instincts had been pre-empted, for the humble company subtlely reminded me that they were Thinking of Me when they included the small paper envelope in the package. They go as far as to refer to their company as Convenience Valet. Indeed, it seems like such a privilege to use their brilliant creation; I was left wondering, "whom should I tip for this excellent service?"

Lucky for us, they provide a website at the bottom of the cup in case we want to find out more about this marvel of modern design. Who knows, maybe their website showcases other ingenious creations they've been thinking up at this incubator for innovation.

30) Another TSA conversation to which I wish I hadn't been privy . . .

This time it was between two TSA agents. “Are y’all missing a uniform?” asked the woman. I think the answer was something reassuring like "I don't know."

In terms of things I don't want to overhear aiport security personnel discussing, this is right up there with "Under which rock do we hide the keys to the airplanes?"

28) The New York Times showcasing real estate for sale in Calvert, Texas

Let's face it, everyone: the New York Times allows me and other dreary, uninteresting people the illusion that we have our finger on the pulse of urbane American society -- no matter how far-removed we are from the vein.

However, the Gray Lady no longer serves as an escapist refuge when it features real estate in Calvert, Texas. Survey the "Great Homes and Destinations" article (and slide show) for yourself.

Not to be mistaken, 19th century homes are rare and captivating in these parts, but here are the parts I find objectionable:

• "This house is on a corner in the city’s historic district, a section of homes and low-lying businesses dating back to the late 1800s." I've driven through Calvert several times, and having grown up in a similarly small town about 60 miles north of Calvert, I can tell you this description is over-romanticized; by "historic district" they mean a row of dismal, dusty and vacant store fronts, where there's been very little sign of life since the late 1800s.
  
• "There are a few shops and restaurants along Main Street, including a European-style chocolatier." A European-style chocolatier? I bet that means they sell Ferrero Rocher and Godiva instead of Hersheys. I can guarantee you that Juliette Binoche wouldn't dare step foot in Calvert, Texas, and the same goes for the rest of the cast (and crew) of Chocolat.
  
• "For more options there is Hearne, a city about nine miles down the road." Here the phrase "more options" is used very loosely. There might be one or two fast food chains in town, plus a "small-town cafe" where the gravy on my chicken-fried steak once wreaked of household cleaner, but I doubt Hearne's grown big enough for a Walmart.
  
• "The closest big city is College Station, home to the main campus of Texas A&M University, about 45 minutes south." If you're reading this in New York City, you're not going to find a big city by driving to College Station. You could drive another 100 miles to Austin or Houston, but upon arrival, you would continue to wonder where the closest big city is.

27) The Walmart Annual Meeting in Orlando, Florida (2010)

Judging by the midweek exodus at Orlando International Airport, this year's grand corporate gathering featured an informal competition for whose dress shirt most closely approximated the official Walmart blue.

I find the loyalty and asymptotic ambition of Organization Man just as alluring as the next guy, but when it spills over into your closet, that always seems excessive .

26) Starving artists with iPhones

If only man could live off apps alone . . .


I have a hard time believing conspicuous possession of the latest gadgetry inspires much philanthropy; if someone doesn't hurry up and develop an app for cultivating benefactors, a whole generation of art might be in peril.

25) Any magazine displayed on the racks of your local grocery store's checkout aisles

I struggle to find anything other than completely dispiriting messages about the state of our national culture when I review the cover-stories.

24) Mail-order beef wellington

I'm grimacing as we speak. There must be a curse on our household because -- no matter how hard we try -- we can't get this "steakhouse" to stop sending us their monthly catalog full of meats they'd love to ship to us in a box.

23) Prescription-strength eyelash medication.

This should be self-explanatory, but in case it's not, here is some of the gut-wrenching promotional material from the website (http://www.latisse.com/):


"Hypotrichosis is another name for having inadequate or not enough eyelashes.
Great eyelashes don't just happen overnight. That's why it's important to note that LATISSE® (bimatoprost ophthalmic solution) 0.03% works gradually and remarkably — with full results after 12 to 16 weeks. Once you begin treatment, you must continue applying the topical solution each night and follow the directions for best results. Remember results are gradual over time. If you stop using LATISSE®, your eyelashes are expected to return to their previous appearance over several weeks to months. Your eyelashes will experience real measurable growth. LATISSE® works from the inside out. As the treatment progresses, you'll begin to see changes in length, thickness and darkness gradually. After week 16, you'll see the full effect of LATISSE® — and so will others. There are possible side effects. The most common side effects after using LATISSE® solution are an itching sensation in the eyes and/or eye redness. This was reported in approximately 4% of patients. LATISSE® solution may cause other less common side effects which typically occur on the skin close to where LATISSE® is applied, or in the eyes. These include skin darkening, eye irritation, dryness of the eyes, and redness of the eyelids.If you develop a new ocular condition (e.g., trauma or infection), experience a sudden decrease in visual acuity, have ocular surgery, or develop any ocular reactions, particularly conjunctivitis and eyelid reactions, you should immediately seek your physician’s advice concerning the continued use of LATISSE® solution."

22) Multi-grain bread

Don't get me wrong; I'm a fan of the stuff. But everytime I go to the supermarket, the number of grains has multiplied exponentially. It's like the Mach-12 shaving razors people make fun of . . . there's no end to how much they can add in a Sisyphean effort to blow away the competition.

In this case, instead of razor blades, it's 10, 12, sometimes 15-grain baked goods. Eventually, it's going to stop being bread and all we'll be left with is something more like gargantuan granola bars that you have to eat with a pick axe.

21) All things Celtic

It's the surreal overlap of bastardized WASPs and (Druid-wannabe) Wiccans.

But why do 95% of Celtic things always look so cheap? Something tells me you'd be hard-pressed to find any of this junk that's manufactured outside of Asia. I can just imagine the underpaid factory workers looking at the bric-a-brac and wondering, "Who are these people?"

20) Cheetos lip balm

Now if we could only get moist towlettes that have been dusted in orange powder, then the circle would be complete.

In terms of bizarre consumer products, this is second only to the Dasani water flavored lip balm. I've heard Coke adds salt to Dasani to give it flavor, but unless the lip balm stick just tastes salty, I can't imagine what the benefit to water-flavored lip balm is.

I feel incredibly disgruntled just having to write about this.

All this was reported by John Kessler at the Atlanta Journal Constitution.

19) Electric toothbrushes

The Hummer of dental hygiene.

My wife should be ashamed.

18) Sonic Drive-In now sells green tea.

I saw it for myself on their glorified Lite-Brite of a scrolling marquee.

17) Nordstrom's, Neiman Marcus, etc.

. . . such a spectacularly obvious illusion of elitism. Are all the cars parked out front not a big clue that the wares they're trafficking are still mass market? What about the nationwide footprint? . . . I think they just spiff it up, mark it up, and throw in the occasional piano player lest you focus too intently on the mirage.

Come to think of it, all department stores seem incredibly anachronistic to me.

16) National Night Out

Getting out of the house and socializing with neighbors is now so rare we need a national holiday for it: http://www.nationaltownwatch.org/nno/

Thank God: at least we still have our sitcoms.

15) Fantasy football

It's Dungeons and Dragons for the Sportscenter demographic.

We were at a pub on Sunday and watched a table of 10 men spend hours simulating a players draft for their upcoming season, with all the intrigue and emotion they could possibly fabricate.

14) Juicy Couture

Haute non sequitur.

13) Professional pool, televised

I started to say the seemingly inexhaustible coverage of the World Series of Poker, but that seemed much too predictably apocalyptic. (You know anything sponsored by a large beef jerky corporation is going to be transcendental).

12) Sneakers with wheels built into the soles.

Some advertising company could market jet packs well enough so that children would persuade their parents to buy them . . . That doesn't make it a good idea.

As a rule of thumb, children should not careen.

11) TIE: Anderson Cooper & Nancy Grace

Take your pick.

10) Dog, The Bounty Hunter

And all his crew.

9) Hardly anyone drinks out of jugs anymore.

I’m talking straight-out-the-hollow, White Lightnin type jugs. The good stuff.

And here's an equally heinous assault on our culture: does anyone remember how the characters in The Sun Also Rises drank out of these amazing leather pouches with leather strands that strapped over your shoulder as they walked through the Basque country? (Or at least that's how I imagined them at the time). Whatever happened to those things? Wouldn't you rather see some yuppies walking around with those instead of the fruity eco-friendly metal things? Wouldn't we all be enriched?

(And by the way, I guess I'm technically one of those yuppies, but since when was it environmentally friendly to mine for iron ore?)

8) How Phil Collins is obsessed with the Alamo.

Singer Phil Collins' new passion: the Alamo
09:59 AM CST on Wednesday, March 4, 2009
Associated Press

SAN ANTONIO - Phil Collins says his new "main thing" is the Alamo.
The 58-year-old singer is in San Antonio this week for the anniversary of the March 1836 battle of the Alamo. Collins says he has "hundreds" of cannonballs, documents and other artifacts, including a receipt signed by Alamo commander William Barret Travis for 32 head of cattle used to feed the Alamo defenders. In an online story for the San Antonio Express-News, Collins said he's basically stopped being "Phil Collins the singer. This has become what I do." Collins narrated the introduction of a 13-minute "Alamo diorama light and sound show" at the History Shop by the Alamo. He's scheduled to speak to the Alamo Defenders Descendants Association on Saturday.

7) Bling h2o

A $40 bottle of water really has to be the textbook definition "irony of ironies." It's almost as outdated feeling (sooo 2007) as triumphantly screaming from the rooftop of some urban office building "I'm investing all my retirement savings in Merrill! It feels good!" As much as I hate to play into their loathsome marketing scheme, I'll bite for the sake of my soothsaying integrity: http://www.forbestraveler.com/food-drink/bottled-water-story.html?partner=rss

You know the earth's about to shatter into thousands of tiny fragments when people think it's reasonable to charge $40 plus for a normal size bottle of water. I don't care how good it sounds in theory, there's absolutely no practical reason to decorate a water bottle with Swarovski crystals, to import the water from the South Pacific, to age it for millenia in the skull of some glacier-frozen neanderthal, or to collect it from the condensation that forms on the tiny noses of Ugandan albino children*.

*In case any Ugandans are reading, Sean roundly and categorically condemns the persecution of albinos in Africa. This post was intended for non-Ugandan audiences.

6) Southern California and pathos in the star-spangled state

I don’t want to be too harsh b/c I’m sure there are plenty redeeming qualities that you simply miss in a three day visit to a place, but on the face of it, a preponderance of flat-billed Hurley caps and Ed Hardy muscle shirts does not a utopian society make.

5) The bizarre language on the shampoo bottles in my shower . . .

Apparently, b/c French has all the sensuality we can humanly fit into one language, someone somewhere decided that we would enjoy shampoo much more if foreign words were on the bottles. The ironic part is that, in order to get by with this, they often have to translate "shampoo" into "shampooing" which I think is unusually (but amusingly) clumsy for French.

Another bottle places the word "Rejuvenating" in a seemingly random place on the bottle. Ponce DAY Le-on himself would be mighty disappointed to find out, after all that exploring, that hundreds of years later we so easily and elegantly packaged the Fountain of Youth in a bottle of shampoo. That same bottle is the company's "Asian Pear & Red Tea" line of body care products, despite the fact that these two ingredients are preceded in quantity by Disodium Laureth Sulfosuccinate, Cocamidopropyl Betaine, PEG-120 Methyl Glucose Dioleate, Decyl Glucoside. Call me old-fashioned, but Cocamidopropyl Betaine just doesn't make me feel as exotic as Asian Pear.

And back to the bilingual bottle: "If your hair acts bored . . ." then simply apply "Nature's boredom-banishers, including clarifying Florida Grapefruit and invigorating French Peppermint, giv[ing] ho-hum hair a refreshing burst of enthusiasm, while mounds of frothy lather sweep away the clingy deposits that drag hair down and leave it lifeless. Limp, lazy, lackluster locks get back into the swing of things, shine again, take on a totally fresh, new attitude." Enthusiastic hair? Grapefruit that clarifies? I think you can see where all of this is heading . . .

4) The TSA agent’s question to me after he searched my carry-on. . .

He found four bags of stone-ground grits, two packages of pumpkin seeds, and a medicine bottle full of Madagascar vanilla, and then he said “You’ve got some strange stuff in here; what do you plan to do with all of it?" His question caught me a bit off guard because I don't consider grits, pumpkin seeds, or vanilla the most versatile of materials . . . you can cook with them, you can eat them, and I think that's about it. But who knows what those mad scientists (culinary geniuses?) have thought up while in safe haven on the cavernous border of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

3) Am I the only one who finds it disconcerting the zeal with which my neighbors decorate for Halloween every year?

This, if anything, must surely be a sign of the end times.

2) “Easy Mac and Cheese” -- just dump it all in a bowl and nuke it.

Was it not easy enough to begin with?

1) I'm going to have an infant crawling around my house in just over two months.