Remember back in April when I posted several stories about the crippling bee shortage that was taking the world by storm? Or, should I say, swarm? No? Okay. There were stories about cellular phone radiation and its relationship to bee extinction, and the New York Times even went so far as to assume a loss of bees would mean an inability to pollinate crops. Then stories starting popping up about how Einstein was quoted as saying once the bee population was extinct, humans would have only forty years before we wee extinct. These were combated by articles about how there was a fungus that was attacking hives, and about how the Einstein quote has never been attributed to him (and probably isn’t true). Well, I think I found out where all the bees went. They went on vacation to Katy, TX and crashed at some woman’s house. Exterminators and pest control found half a million bees (and perhaps as many as six queen bees), some of which were Africanized, and removed 500 pounds of honey from the walls of her house. [story]
The theory about bee extinction leading to human extinction carries about as much weight as the idiotic belief that the year 2012 is going to be our last. I was at the bookstore last week and I saw a prominently displayed new book which reviews various predictions and argued that it was entirely possible that dangerous solar storms, cosmic rays, hurricanes, global warming, earthquakes and super-volcanoes are all on the verge of destroying the earth that year. Yeah, whatever. Everybody panic.
Ilya and I went to check out Magnolia Electric Co. at the Echo last night. There was a large hummer limo parked out in front of the club, and as we walked over I made a biting remark about how it probably belonged to the guy who looked like he just stepped out of a Marlboro ad, leaning against the exterior of the club in a hipster-y cowboy hat. Upon closer inspection, that hipster turned out to be Jason Molina. Oops!
The show was good, as all Molina shows are. Even his blander songs usually sound better in person than they do on record. He closed with a stretched-out rendition of “I’ve Been Riding With The Ghost.” That was the first time I’ve been to the Echo on a night when the crowd was dressed mostly in jeans and t-shirts, not like they were posing as homeless runaways or American Apparel models. Ilya hit the nail on the head when he noted, “some of the girls here tonight don’t have bangs!”
