Tony Yarusso's Blog

So, I had been thinking perhaps we'd see it sometime this winter. Maybe next spring/summer at the latest. What I hadn't expected was dollar parity already in September! What am I talking about? Well, turns out the Canadian Dollar surged past the US greenback in value earlier this morning. It settled down slightly after that, but is still trading at 0.999102 CDN per USD at the time of this writing.

Possibly most entertainingly, Bush commented in a news conference that he thought the US economy was still strong and healthy. Sometimes I wonder which leader in the "war on terror" spends more time in caves.

On to the links:
$1 Cdn = $1 US (CBC)
Canadian dollar hits parity with greenback (CTV)
Canadian Dollar Trades Equal to U.S for First Time Since 1976 (Bloomberg)

Okay, fine - mild pun intended. Perhaps you've heard about the recent rapid decline in honeybee populations, first in the USA and now being reported in parts of Europe as well. If you haven't, see stories via Google. In short, farmers are checking on their bee hives, and finding that the workers are simply disappearing, leaving the queen and larvae behind, and no bodies are being found to show that they died. The reason it's a big deal is that we rely on the bees to pollinate crops, which of course become our food, so no bees means not enough food.

So, now the pondering: Has this happened before? Not necessarily bees, but any small portion of the food chain that humans rely on without thinking heavily about it. Obvious things like the potato blight don't count - I'm looking for disruptions that weren't really acknowledged directly, but had or were potentially capable of having a fairly significant impact. Must be during recorded human history. Anyone know?

Well today was a disturbing news day. We have, in no particular order:

The woman who went to the hospital to deliver a baby, and woke up with no limbs. The hospital refuses to explain why.

The wife with a sex drive instead of a brain who almost kills her husband by slipping him drugs.

The police department that arrests a rape victim with an outstanding fine, and prevents her from taking the morning after pill the doctor had provided because someone disagreed with its use personally.

The fundamentalist "christian" who tells her homosexual son that he is unacceptable, who then kills himself.

Way to go world. Insects may outweigh us in terms of the force of gravity, but we beat them by many orders of magnitude when it comes to blatent stupidity.