January 11, 2004

• Oimyakon and Oodnadatta

  
  

  There’s another blog about Doug, and about perfectionism and parenting, now percolating and fermenting in the back of my mind.  Meanwhile, I’ve been distracted by the news.

  
  

  Readers here, at least some who don’t read very closely, might think from the number of blogs featuring stories from ADN.com that I am a regular reader of the newspaper.  In fact, most days I don’t touch the paper.  That’s Greyfox’s thing, and he often reads the choice bits to me or else I’d never see them.  The exception to that is Sunday, when for years I have made a point of reading two sections of the paper.

  
  

  One is the funnies.  I remember I was barely old enough to walk when I used to haul the big heavy Sunday paper in off the front porch and climb onto my parents’ bed with it.  Newspapers were where I learned to read, in those colorful Sunday funnies and the fascinating front page news I’d get every evening sitting on my father’s lap as we waited for Mama to fix dinner.  Even after I’d gone to getting most of my news from NPR or online, I would make a point of reading the Sunday funnies.

  
  

  When I noticed, sometime between one and two decades ago, the Earthweek feature in the Anchorage Daily News each Sunday, that became part of my Sunday routine, too.  I’m an unapologetic tree-hugging dirt worshipper.  Nowhere else have I found such a concise and all-inclusive look at the current state of the late great planet Earth.  The Bigquake notification service brings me email alerts to every major tremor and I sift the broadcast and online news sources for stories about environmental topics, and every week Steve Newman’s Earthweek: A Diary of our Planet brings me, below the fold on the Science page of the Sunday paper, a digest of the big news.

  
  

  This week, people are dying of cold in India while kangaroos are abandoning their young in order to survive the heat in Australia.  Twenty-some years ago, I read of computer projections that global warming would bring about a new Ice Age, and it now seems to be coming true, perhaps, to some extent.  In Oimyakon, Siberia last week the global low was -74°F, and in Oodnadatta, South Australia, the high was 117°F.  If I have my druthers, I’ll take Siberia, thanks.

  
  

  In Iran I suppose some people are wondering if Allah is trying to tell them something, what with, first, the earthquakes and then the meteorites.  But the good news is that birds are returning to the Gharna Wetland Reserve in Kashmir, now that India and Pakistan are observing a cease-fire there.  Unless the shelling starts back up again, they can relax there for about four more months before they return to Siberia to lay their eggs and teach their young to fly.  Teaching the young to fly…  I said I had a parenting blog percolating, didn’t I?

  
  

  Earthweek – A Diary of the Planet

  • 4:05 pm
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