the unlikely orange

well, it may be hard to believe, but i finished yet another book this week.  this time i finished cormac mccarthy's pulitzer prize winning novel "the road."  it was awesome.  not the "oh my gost i loved it so much and can't wait to read it again because it takes me to a happy place" awesome, but more like the true meaning of the word.  the book inspired awe.  and fear.  and the smallest little embers of hope, too, which i suppose, is where the book's greatest power lies.  it is a bleak tale.  well, bleak doesn't even begin to describe it.  first, a note about the style.  i've never read a mccarthy novel before (he's written several popular books including "no country for old men," and "all the pretty horses," to name a few), so i don't know if all his books are like this or not, but the book didn't include some basic grammatical fundamentals like complete sentences or quotation marks.  it took me awhile...

shannon and i watched an absolutely fascinating show last night on pbs called " silence of the bees ," which is obviously a titular twist on a famous film, and appropriately so, as the film details a recent horror developing in nature: the loss of honeybees. it was a slightly disturbing but genuinely eye-opening documentary about the drastic disappearance of honeybees not just in the usa but all around the world. nearly whole hives of adult bees just vanish. i think i heard that at one point in 2006, about a third of the honeybee hives in the usa had been lost. scientists have named the situation ccd : colony collapse disorder, and it has many of them significantly worried because without honeybees we have very few pollinators, and without pollinators we have no fruits and veggies and nuts. there are many theories as to the cause of ccd , but very few answers. most scientists and beekeepers have determined that a broad range of factors have led to this situation, inc...