Updates...Again???

   Think of the news and of how quickly we can both get it and how quickly it can change once we do so.  Breaking news has become a term so overused that we often pay no more attention to it than to a car alarm that is blazing in the street, which is a shame because sometimes there really is something important, something that rises momentarily to the top of the bubbling pot before quickly sinking back into the morass of entertainment, sports and whatever miscellaneous items are needed to fill those broadcast minutes or those pages, all of which are fighting for your eyes and your minds in anyway possible...look at me, pay attention to me, listen to me they all cry, as loudly and as emphatically as your spouse or partner or child or pet.  Bright colors, sexy images, movement, what on earth will work to catch your eyes even if just for a moment?  Think of a grocery display or a store's advertisement, a homeless person holding a virtually unreadable cardboard sign, a billboard on the highway, a person yelling "stop."  There is so much vying for our attention that we sometimes tune it all out...no time, have to prioritize, too much to do, sorry.  You're not listening, my wife says, loud and clear to the one side of my head that takes it all in as if valiantly stalling for time for the other side to try and finish the article I was reading.  Gasp...caught like an old sturgeon that was master of the lake.

    I couldn't help but think of this as I (belatedly) finished the book Avid Reader by Robert Gottlieb (who was once the editor for such authors as Toni Morrison, John La Carre, Doris Lessing, Michael Crichton, John Cheever and others); having moved onward to become the lead editor of The New Yorker for a time, he wrote of editing the magazine as being "a rest cure...gulping down even the longest piece was nothing after a lifetime of gulping down seven-hundred page novels or biographies," a time when he read (and edited) an average of 20-30 books each year.  Who are these people?  And how much news and reporting did he have to go through, only to watch it all change just minutes or days after publication, all despite every section or article having a fact checker, a grammar checker, the author and of course, Gottlieb himself at each of the meetings.  One result of all of this (or so it seemed to me) was his cavalier tossing out of words as if they were (and the truth is, they probably really were) part of his everyday vocabulary...words such as dedaigneuse, and myrmidon and coruscation.

    Things happen quickly in today's world, sometimes even taxing our rapid light communications as they twist through fibers in zeros and ones across every one of our oceans.  I get that and thus these updates will be quick, just additional fillers in some cases and extensive quotes in others.  Time is valuable and again my acknowledgement that you're devoting valuable minutes of your day to peek at this...my thanks to you.

    Sleep:  In three short years we'll be spending an estimated $52 billion on products that will help us sleep, including such expensive gadgets as high-tech sleep masks and white-noise speakers, says AARP.  What's up with that?  But here's some of their ideas to save a bit of that money and to try something more natural.

    Volcanoes:  Have you been to Italy recently, especially that popular area around Naples where cruise ships dock and where, you know, there's also Sorrento and Capri and the Amalfi coast...oh, and did I mention Pompei?  Turns out that the supervolcano --so defined as one that "can spew at least 240 cubic miles of lava and other ejecta in a single eruption"-- is slumbering and stirring more than a few geologists.  Located under the city of Naples, the Campi Flegrei caldera formed 39,000 years ago and was thought by many to be Europe's largest volcanic eruption (and possibly led to the demise of the Neanderthals) and "is nearing a critical pressure point."  Said National Geographic: Campi Flegrei means "burning fields" in Italian...Like other supervolcanoes—such as the one responsible for the geothermal features of Yellowstone—it is not a single volcanic cone.  Rather, it's a large complex, much of it underground or under the Mediterranean Sea, that includes 24 craters, as well as various geysers and vents that can release hot gas...A sudden release of hot magmatic gasses is possible in the near future, which could trigger a large eruption, the scientists warn.  Yikes!

    Calendars:  Remember all that talk about those stores being stuck with all those calendars (or so it seemed at the stores I visited...even the dollar store had cases left over).  Well, here's the data said The New York Times: In an age of smartphones and the internet, you might think the days of paper calendars are numbered, but data suggest otherwise.  Not only have they survived the digital revolution, but sales of some kinds of print calendars have increased.  The sales of appointment books and planners grew 10 percent from 2014-15 to 2015-16 to $342.7 million, and decorative and other calendars increased by 8 percent to $65 million in that time, according to figures from the NPD Group, a consumer research firm.  Mea culpa.

    Guns: Said the Washington Post, gun usage (and deaths) are getting closely tied to younger and younger ages: “During the first six months of this year, minors died from accidental shootings --at their own hands, or at the hands of other children or adults-- at a pace of one every other day, far more than limited federal statistics indicate.”  Added the Press Union, the trend includes guns used by toddlers.  Double yikes!

    Mosul:  One other thing I enjoying reading is that of rebuttals or letters-to-the-editor.  There are a lot of educated people out there ready to test the waters of fact-checkers or to give a personal perspective based on family or another form of history, something the writer may not have had access to.  Here's a comment from Kate Horner, the executive director of International Rivers, on the piece in The New Yorker about the crisis facing the Mosul Dam: Thank you for Dexter Filkins’s recent article about the grave risk that the Mosul Dam poses to Iraq (“Before the Flood,” January 2nd).  Large dams, relying on shaky science (or ignoring good science), have for decades devoured development funds while creating more problems than they’ve solved.  Dams are often built under authoritarian regimes, exacerbating political instability while destroying many citizens’ lives and livelihoods.  History has shown that dams are too costly a method of generating electricity, and this is particularly true in Iraq, which has vast and unexploited solar potential.  Factoring in the ninety-seven-per-cent average cost overrun for large dams, a new structure downstream from the Mosul Dam could cost around four billion dollars.  Dams are also a foolhardy investment: in our changing climate, desert reservoirs are drying up. More than twenty per cent of the Tigris River’s precious freshwater is evaporating from its reservoirs, leaving behind saline-irrigation water that’s slowly poisoning the adjacent land.  The Mosul Dam, the project of a dictator’s hubris, is a literal and metaphorical sinkhole—for the dreams of a nation and for funds that could be better used elsewhere.  Pouring more money, and more concrete, into this ill-conceived behemoth, or into other dams, will only delay the inevitable.  But there is a possible solution for Iraq: to decommission this dam.  We can only hope that it does so before it’s too late and the precarious region is plunged further into chaos.

    So there you have it, some quick updates which should be good for a minute or two.  Doesn't matter, we seem to update our lives almost constantly, liking this and then not liking it, flared pants or skinny pants, rescued dog or purebred puppy mill, GMOs or CRISPR?  What??  It's tough to keep up...even with something as simple as a word or two.  Sort of like a waterfall of information just coruscating...