CREDIT: HEALTHFREEDOMS.ORG
A Swiss study suggests that cellphones may be the cause of a dwindling bee population.

I was behind a balding, middle-aged, short, portly, pseudo-business, rayon-goldand- brown-tie-wearing man at the grocery store the other day. He was wearing one of those slick, over-the-ear Bluetooth cellphone thingies; he looked like he was modeling a vintage hearing aid. His ability to maintain a conversation while running 16 items through the 10 items or less express lane was quite impressive. Now there were three things that irritated me about him. If I wanted to listen to inane banter, I'd go talk to the staff at Red Lobster.

I often wonder at our capacity to impose ourselves onto others. We are inundated with continual snippets of one-sided personal conversations. I sure don't need to listen to the idiotic musing of every person riding the Oxford East Bus. You know what? No one cares what you are wearing to the FROG tonight, or how wasted you're going to get, and I sure don't want to be subjected to your shallow debate on the relative merits of the new Carrie Diaries TV show. (For the record, it's a damn fine show!)

To be fair, many of us are not quite so extroverted and prefer to communicate with the world by plugging in our earphones, sending a text, and ignoring everyone else. The infamous 'awkward silence' has effectively been replaced by our ability to focus on a small black box grafted onto our hands. We can thank cellphones for giving us an excuse not to make eye contact and therefore converse with our neighbours, the mail carrier and that guy on the corner asking for change.

'Real' conversations have been usurped by the text message. Receiving a text is like getting a shot of morphine. Our texting addiction is only getting worse: we text at dinner, in the movies, in class, in the bathroom, while driving, and in bed. A great wave of dark and foreboding loss washes over us during those panicked moments that we think we lost our hit - I mean cellphone. An entirely new and strange language is being created here - the language of texting - and it is slowly breaching the cellphone and entering into our spoken colloquial. Please stop using the terms LOL and WTF in an oral conversation... or oral anything for that matter.

A new study shows that cellphones are responsible for the loss of almost half of the world's bee population. Apparently bees detect the cellphone signal and it puts them into a state of unrest. The frequency increases their anxiety to a point where they become confused, muddled and aggressive, and eventually they leave the hive and die. I'm not sure if this amounts to a parable befitting Lao Tzu and an added chapter in the Tao Te Ching, but it does say something about the possible outcome of our addiction.

I suppose that we must all find our escape, our release in this tumultuous world of ours. Perhaps the social idiosyncrasies — the threat of cancer from the bombardment of microwave radiation emitted by our phones, the labour crisis in third world factories that produce our cheap and disposable technology, the extraction and manufacturing effects on our environment, the locked-up monopoly of cellphone providers — are all worth it? Perhaps the price for continual updates is worth the price of our culture, health, economics and environment. Perhaps cellphones are nothing more than a forced threeyear commitment with a quickly outdated piece of technology that has made all of our thumbs more dexterous than a pole dancer on coke.

As Einstein once said, "If the bee disappears from the surface of the earth, man would have no more than four years to live."

What a waste, we would still have two years to go on our contract.
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