A Million Stories

All the news we care to print.

by Jeffrey C. Billman, Holly Otterbein and Will Stone

Evan M. Lopez

Longtime readers of this esteemed publication may have noticed a certain affection — some might term it a "fetish," though we wouldn't because that's gross — that some writers, past and present, have displayed toward the lovable honeybee over the years. In fact, City Paper founder (and former Loose Canon columnist) Bruce Schimmel is himself a beekeeper, so you could argue that an affinity for the stingy little bastards is ingrained in this paper's very DNA. Ipso facto, when bee news comes along, we are required to care, even if we don't want to.

Ergo: Breaking News! Last week, the Pennsylvania State Beekeepers Association (PSBA) issued a dire warning: Over the last few years, about one-third of the country's bees have been dying off — that's a lot of dead bees — and no one's sure why. Well, that's not exactly true. Colony Collapse Disorder — the term affixed to this phenomenon — could come from any of the 61 viral, parasitic or environmental elements that can kill off bees en masse. Scientists just aren't sure which.

This problem isn't exactly new: Commercial beekeepers first started noticing large die-offs in bee colonies in the Eastern U.S. in late 2006. A few months later, a Penn State researcher quoted on sciencedaily.com forewarned, "Because the number of managed honey bee colonies is less than half of what it was 25 years ago, states such as Pennsylvania can ill afford these heavy losses."

That's because honeybees do more than make honey. Their pollination is key to the survival of, for instance, Pennsylvania's rather large apple industry: Bees do 90 percent of the pollination work  They're also vital to the cucurbit family — squash, cucumbers, gourds and assorted melons, for those of you who slept through freshman biology. And things seem to be getting worse: "Honey production was at its lowest nationally and in Pennsylvania in 2009," says PSBA president J. Lee Miller.

But! All is not lost, Miller says. The upshot of the fucking hellish weather we've seen this year — record snow, record heat waves, etc. — is that an early bloom gave the bees a better shot at doing their thing.

"This means the health of bees is looking better," he says.

And Miller professes confidence that science will find a cure, eventually. We'll keep you posted. We don't really have a choice, after all.

Heroes

So last week, we get this press release about how, beginning July 30, Penn student Caroline Matthews will pedal from Philly to Washington, D.C., to raise awareness — not of breast cancer or AIDS or the Iraq war or the bee apocalypse, but get this — our $13 trillion-and-growing national debt. The 21-year-old is also the director of operations for Concerned Youth of America, an organization dedicated to enlightening young people about the country's debt, which she co-founded as a college freshman.

It all looked like a sexy, twentysomething rebranding of the Tea Party.

And so we kind of wanted to hate Matthews, mostly because she's a Penn student, but also because she says things like, "This is my Paul Revere attempt to bring the issue of national debt to the forefront," and "I want to have mini fireside chats, where I interview Americans about debt, throughout the trip."

Plus, as the country tries to wriggle itself out of a recession and 10 percent unemployment, Matthews' cause seems afflicted by seriously bad timing.

But then she told us something that gave us a teensy-weensy bit of hope: Matthews and her cadre have traveled to high schools and colleges throughout the country, and one of the things she gets students to do (we don't know how) is try to solve the national debt clusterfuck themselves.

"No matter what school it is," says Matthews, "the question of whether we should be spending all this money on defense and wars comes up, again and again."

Maybe our expectations are just dreadfully low, but that's a good thing, right?

Meet The New Guy

And finally, some housekeeping: Look directly below, and you'll find the latest addition to this page, a new weekly cartoon called The Other White Meat, by the illustrious Mr. Fish (real name: Dwayne Booth). Mr. Fish, who recently returned to the Philadelphia area after a sojourn in Los Angeles, where he won a bunch of awards cartooning and writing for LA Weekly, has toiled for basically every awesome publication under the sun, including Harper's (!), where we all secretly want to work. He's been lauded by no less than the leading Croatian daily newspaper, Novi list, which described him as Croatia's favorite American cartoonist. In 2008, Best Life magazine ranked him No. 1 on its list of the top 10 voices to listen to during the election.

In so many words, he's a get, we got him, and we're super excited about it. You should be, too. In addition to this weekly cartoon, Mr. Fish will be writing and illustrating for this publication and its website.

If you want to learn more about him — for instance, that he's written a few novels and screenplays, and that he's the Dwayne part of the band Dwayne and Jeff, which a purported Christian Science Monitor review cited on CD Baby once described as "what the Carpenters might've sounded like if Richard Carpenter had been Roger McGuinn and if Karen Carpenter had been Colin Blunstone and she'd avoided anorexia by using heavy doses of hallucinogens to keep her weight down" — and see more of his cartoons (he cranks them out by the dozens, and we only have room for one), check out his website, clowncrack.com. (For even more fun, view comically anachronistic photos of his old band, The Horse's Mouth, playing The Khyber Pass at this column's online abode.)

Asked for comment, Mr. Fish responds via e-mail with a quote from Lenny Bruce: "Knowledge of syphilis is not instruction to get it."

Make of that what you will.

This week's report by Jeffrey C. Billman, Holly Otterbein and Will Stone. E-mail us at amillionstories@citypaper.net.