Beltane is an ancient Gaelic holiday celebrated around May 1. Historically, this festival was celebrated in Ireland, Scotland and the Isle of Man. There were similar festivals held at the same time in the other Celtic countries of Wales, Brittany and Cornwall. The festival survives in folkloric practices in the Celtic Nations and the diaspora, and has experienced a degree of revival in recent decades.

Beltane Fire Festival is an annual participatory arts event and ritual drama, held on April 30 on Calton Hill in Edinburgh. Video is from the 1996 festival.

Beltane Fire Society

It would be practically impossible to mention Eddie Boros, a charismatic, sometimes cantankerous artist from the East Village, without describing his most ambitious work, a looming sculpture made of scrap wood and salvaged objects that rises 65 feet above the southern end of the Sixth Street and Avenue B Community Garden.

Mr. Boros’s sculpture rises 65 feet above the southern end of the Sixth Street and Avenue B Community Garden

The wood of the ramshackle tower is aged and graying. The flotsam suspended from it includes a string of red and white buoys, toy horses and a statue of the Virgin Mary. Mr. Boros called it the toy tower, but others likened it to a psychedelic treehouse.

Mr. Boros died on Friday at 74, and now his sculpture will be the most visible reminder of his long presence in the neighborhood.

A wake was held yesterday for Mr. Boros at a funeral home on East Seventh Street, but before that, members of his family visited the garden, where photographs of him were taped to a tall iron fence and candles sputtered in the breeze.

“He had a great soul,” said one of Mr. Boros’s nieces, Helen Boros, 50, from Massapequa on Long Island. “He was a very giving man.”

She said her uncle had undergone surgery to have both legs amputated below the knees at a Veterans Affairs hospital in Manhattan in the winter. He had been recuperating at a veterans center in St. Albans, Queens, but was taken last Monday to Mary Immaculate Hospital in Jamaica, where he died.

His relatives said that Mr. Boros was born, and until recently, lived in an apartment on East Fifth Street. He served in the Army and worked delivering ice and painting apartments. But he was always an artist, and the Avenue B sculpture was his masterpiece. And its mere survival over more than two decades has elevated it to the status of neighborhood institution.

Mr. Boros began constructing the sculpture on a 4-by-8-foot garden plot in the early 1980s, initially as a form of protest because the garden’s founders wanted to relegate him to one plot. Before the garden was formally organized, he had been using a bit of empty space on the site to work on wood carvings. For years, Mr. Boros added to the structure until the base expanded to cover six times the original space.

Not everybody was pleased that Mr. Boros had turned a significant chunk of the garden into an outdoor folk art studio. As the sculpture rose, some gardeners accused the artist of insubordination born of bitterness. There were angry meetings. In the early 1990s, some of the garden members spearheaded an effort to evict Mr. Boros and his sculpture. In the end, they settled for an agreement in which Mr. Boros accepted a height limit.

As time went by, the sculpture became a local landmark. People used it as a meeting place, and feral cats used it as a home, climbing their way through the intricate interior of the piece. Sometimes, Mr. Boros himself was known to clamber to the top, where an American flag flew. He sat there, like a lookout on the Pequod straddling a spar, while surveying the streets and skyline.

A documentary featuring Mr. Boros was broadcast on PBS in 1998, and for a time, an image of the sculpture was among opening shots of the television show “NYPD Blue.”

In recent years, Mr. Boros’s health declined and he quit climbing. Instead, he could sometimes be seen sitting near the sculpture in a folding chair and chatting with visitors.

Yesterday afternoon, a garden member, Pat Russell, gazed up at the sculpture.

“It’s given so much to this garden,” she said. “It’s been a talking point for strangers walking by and for longtime neighbors.”
By COLIN MOYNIHAN - Published in the New York Times: April 30, 2007

Search for Junk Tower on the GammaBlog

Photo by BugMan50

“This is totally new and no one knows what the cause is,” said veteran beekeeper and retired Indiana University biologist George Hegeman. “The bees just disappear from the hive, leaving behind all of their stores, the nectar, the pollen and the baby bees.

“In the past, we’ve had problems but we’ve had dead bees,” he said. “This is completely different. The bees just disappear. We don’t know where they went or why they didn’t come back.”

As spring moves across the southern states to the northern ones, many beekeepers travel with the pollination season like carnival troupes, ensuring farmers that the bees will be on hand to pollinate their crops at what is often a short and critical time for optimal agricultural production…

“It’s a nicotine-based pesticide that is primarily used in the areas where the most migrant pollinators are used — which incidentally is where the greatest losses are being seen,” he said. “It seems to make the bees disoriented and would account for them not finding their way back to the hives.

“That’s all conjecture,” he added. “I think once the real problem can be isolated, the resources are available to attack the source.”

Excerpted from:
Disappearing bees stump beekeepers By MIKE LEONARD
The (Bloomington) Herald-Times

Is New Pesticide Less Than Bee-nign?
Dave Hackenberg, a Pennsylvania commercial beekeeper whose bees have pollinated wild Maine blueberry crops for decades, was the first in the nation to report the mysterious disappearance of millions of honeybees this winter.

He is blaming a newer class of pesticides touted as being more environmentally benign.

Hackenberg, who has supplied beehives to Jasper Wyman & Son and other Maine wild blueberry growers since the 1960s, suspects neo-nicotinoids may have triggered “colony collapse disorder” and the mass abandonment of hundreds of thousands of bee colonies around the country this winter.

The insecticides, increasingly used to treat agricultural crops ranging from corn to wheat, are favored because they isolate specific pests.

Hackenberg, who is contracted to supply more than 10,000 beehives from his own stock and from seven other commercial apiaries next month to Jasper Wyman & Son, reports honeybees now are failing to return to their hives in some Florida citrus groves sprayed with neo-nicotinoids. Speaking this week from Florida, where his bees have been pollinating cantaloupe crops and he has been rebuilding his decimated stock, he says neo-nicotinoids break down bees’ immune systems and cause memory loss and other side effects.

“It’s something we’ve never seen before. It’s just like someone swept the hives out with a sweeper,” the 58-year-old beekeeper said by cell phone Monday while at work in the cantaloupe fields. “It’s just astounding. It’s mind-boggling.”

Pesticides may be hurting honeybees: researcher
Researchers at the University of Illinois think they may be on track to linking the bee losses with increased pesticide use.

May Berenbaum, head of the entomology department at the university, said chemicals may be causing bees to forget the way home.

“There are some neurotoxic insecticides that can interfere with honeybee memory, and that might be manifested in disruption of their orientation and navigation abilities,” Berenbaum said.

It’s too soon to say exactly which pesticide may be causing the problem, but there is evidence that points to new synthetic pesticides called neonicotinoids, Berenbaum said. Studies in France have already shown some link between the products and a declining bee population, she said.

The neonicotinoids are newly designed synthetic chemicals that act essentially against the nervous system,” Berenbaum said. “They’re relatively new and they have been shown in lab studies to impact honeybee behaviour.”

More tests need to be done and the honeybee problems may end up being traced to dozens of pesticides in the air, Berenbaum said.

Senator Dick Durbin, who was on the Senate Intelligence Committee during the lead up to the war, fills us in on what was going on behind the intel scenes in 2002-2003 and how accurately it matched up with what we were being told publicly. Unfortunately for all of us, he was sworn to secrecy back then…

Randi Rhodes has been suggesting that this was the case for years.

Via Blog Soup

Hans Albrecht Bethe - July 2, 1906–March 6, 2005. Nobel Prize in Physics in 1967 for his work on the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis. Head of the Theoretical Division developing the first atomic bombs, and also played an important role in the development of the larger hydrogen bomb.

Bethe later campaigned together with Albert Einstein in the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists against nuclear testing and the nuclear arms race. He influenced the White House to sign the ban of atmospheric nuclear tests in 1963 and Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (SALT I) in 1972.

He is one of the few scientists who can claim a major paper in his field every decade of his career, which spanned nearly sixty years. Freeman Dyson called Bethe the “supreme problem solver of the 20th century.”

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Bethe

This lecture was recorded late in his life. The pace is slow, but the thought is lucid.