Plain Honey is a hive buzzing with essays, stories, and discussions. ____________ Click on each comb, About and Pollinators to find your way around.

In an op/ed titled “‘Gums’ control for Bob Costas,” a piece written prior to Friday’s mass shooting, sportscaster Mark Rosen criticized his better-known colleague for a segment aired on Monday Night Football following the Jovan Belcher murder-suicide in which Costas firmly asserted the necessity for gun control.

Adorno: “Technology is making gestures precise and brutal, and with them men. It expels from movement all hesitation, deliberation, civility […] which driver is not tempted, merely by the power of his engine, to wipe out the vermin of the street, pedestrians, children and cyclists?” (Minima Moralia, p. 40)

And man-with-gun is a totally different beast than man-without.

Ebony (October, 1981)

A couple minutes after I closed my eyes last night, hours before I fell asleep, I was given the chance to find, among a crowd of people, the “woman of my dreams” (as long as we agree this is only a phrase of speech). This parenthetical is necessary because the whole riddle of this daydream centered around the inability to manifest desire in form.

Pollinators, feel free to buzz on this one at home. Pleazzze, just bee responsible! – Peaty

Peaty’s BeeGarita Recipe

Behold this vacant wasp-comb fragment, photographed just moments ago in Northern New England. Note how our wasp counterparts invoke the hexagonal comb structure, while opting for wood-fiber construction over our wax secretions. Know your “Comb Architecture BUZZWORDS”!

This isn’t exactly topical, since Michael Jordan gave his infamous Hall of Fame speech over three years ago. But while reading an article about Nietzsche’s critique of the liberal conception of freedom, I think I began to understand exactly why MJ’s vindictive and petty speech came off as not only, well, vindictive and petty, but also pathetic and farcical. The connection may seem at first glance a little ridiculous, but I think there’s something here.

Since Aristotle, philosophers have opposed the concepts of action and passion. Action designates what we do; passion refers to what happens to us, what we undergo. For Aristotle the distinction is purely logical: the proposition “X does Y” indicates X as the actor; “Y is done to X” implies, on the other hand, that X is strictly passive. Simple opposition, at least on the hard grounds of logic. But once we try to imagine concrete situations through the lens of these categories, things get messy.