Random thoughts

[rbkwp]

bummer
love SPIDERS

World's oldest spider, 'Number 16', dies aged 43
The trapdoor matriarch, who lived her whole life in the same burrow, dies in Western Australia's Central Wheatbelt after far outliving her previous rival, a 28-year-old Mexican tarantula.

World's oldest spider dies aged 43 in Western Australia
Updated April 28, 2018 22:25:49

HOTO: The spider outlived the previous record holder by 15 years. (AAP: Curtin University)
Media player: "Space" to play, "M" to mute, "left" and "right" to seek.

AUDIO: Barbara York Main: Spider Woman (Ockham's Razor)

MAP: Curtin University of Technology 6102
Australia has a notorious reputation as home to some of the world's deadliest creatures and until recently also harboured the oldest known living spider in the world.

The trapdoor matriarch, named Number 16, died at the ripe old age of 43 during a long-term population study in Western Australia's Central Wheatbelt and far outlived her previous rival, a 28-year-old Mexican tarantula.

Curtin University's Leanda Mason said the arachnid's significant life had allowed scientists to further investigate the behaviour and population dynamics of trapdoor spiders.

The research project was started by renowned University of WA biologist and spider specialist Barbara York Main in 1974.

Number 16 was discovered in Professor Main's original survey in that year.

"Through Barbara's detailed research, we were able to determine that the extensive life span of the trapdoor spider is due to their life-history traits, including how they live in uncleared, native bushland, their sedentary nature and low metabolisms," Ms Mason said.

Professor Main's research has shown that the male trapdoor spider leaves his burrow at maturity, around seven to nine years old, to wander in search of a mate, after which he dies.

The female stays put, raising hatchlings inside the protection of her burrow, which she temporarily seals up with a mud plug.

She lives on in the same burrow for the duration of her life.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-04-...tm_content=ABCNewsmail_topstories_articlelink

British authorities give toxic caterpillar warning
The British Forestry Commission has warned Londoners of an infestation of caterpillars that produce various toxic effects in humans. The hairy creature is already well established in Germany.

http://www.dw.com/en/british-author...n-newsletter_en_Newsline-2356-html-newsletter


| PICTURE STORIES |
The ‘Fantastical Feasts’ Animals Have

Photo illustration by Claire Rosen
Photographer Claire Rosen prepares elaborate tables for her guests—but only animals are allowed to dine. By depicting sloths, turtles, and starfish in scenes normally meant for humans, Rosen hopes viewers will question whether we have more in common with scaled, furry and feathered critters than we realize.
SEE THE PICTURES.

| PICTURE STORIES |
The Illicit Hummingbird Love Charm Trade

Photograph by Luján Agusti
Catch a hummingbird, kill it, wrap it in underwear, cover it in honey—and then sell it to arouse passion in a lover. Some Mexicans believe hummingbirds possess supernatural powers, creating an underground market that spans the U.S.-Mexico border.

 

[rbkwp]

in a sense more like 5 year stages for myself,just happened to be
ie work, even relationships haha
all i could handle/pehaps all they could handle ha
naaah individual thinkers go on there way methinks

abstract thinking NYT/like ha



The Nineties
“There are many ways of agglomerating past events,” Louis Menand wrote, a few years ago, in a piece about the year 1995. We talk about historical periods, centuries, eras, and generations. We also “find it natural to imagine that life assumes a completely new character every ten years”—probably “because we have ten fingers.”

It’s true that there’s something arbitrary about the unit of the decade. Moreover, each person’s decade is different: for some, the nineteen-nineties evoke afternoons spent following news reports of the O. J. Simpson trial; for others, they bring to mind cherished cinematic experiences—a highly anticipated matinée of “Rushmore” or the Parker Posey cult hit “Party Girl.” In this week’s newsletter, we’re bringing you profiles and essays about some of the many people and artworks that shaped culture during the nineties. Jay McInerney introduces the decade’s preëminent It Girl, Chloe Sevigny; Hilton Als profiles the hip-hop trailblazer Missy Elliott; and Alex Ross reflects on the music of Kurt Cobain and Nirvana. Susan Orlean watches Julian Schnabel direct Jeffrey Wright and David Bowie in “Basquiat”; and Pauline Kael and Anthony Lane review “GoodFellas” and “Pulp Fiction,” respectively. John Seabrook reports from the headquarters of MTV, where the most powerful staffers are “in the demo” (that is, eighteen to twenty-four years old); Malcolm Gladwell follows two “coolhunters” as they search for trend-setting teens; and Janet Malcolm finds a postmodernist way to profile the postmodern artist David Salle. The character of a decade will always be elusive, because culture never stands still—but we hope these pieces capture some of what made the nineties so unique.

—Erin Overbey and Joshua Rothman, archivists


smile
is quite brilliant PULP FICTION/Tarantino haha
1st saw in Aussie seemed to make it more sureal,plus a little MM ha

John Travolta and Uma Thurman in “Pulp Fiction,” 1994.

Photograph by Miramax courtesy Everett

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Everybody knows the old E. M. Forster distinction between story and plot: “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. Fair enough, but what Forster failed to foresee was the emergence of a third category, the Quentin Tarantino plot, which goes something like this: “The king died while having sex on the hood of a lime-green Corvette, and the queen died of contaminated crack borrowed from the court jester, with whom she was enjoying a conversation about the relative merits of Tab and Diet Pepsi as they sat and surveyed the bleeding remains of the lords and ladies whom she had just blown away with a stolen .45 in a fit of grief.” It is hard to know what Forster would have made of Tarantino’s new movie, “Pulp Fiction.” I suspect he would have run gibbering into his study, locked the door, and hidden behind the bookshelves. Not just because of the bloodshed—all that brain matter suddenly appearing on the outsides of people’s skulls, instead of working quietly within, where it belongs—but because of the equal violence done to narrative form.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/...pJobID=1382414757&spReportId=MTM4MjQxNDc1NwS2

 

[rbkwp]

its an ECOWATCH day
- he said

13 Climate Justice Leaders Imagined as Comic Superheroes

How to Raise an Environmentalist

Bike-Sharing Companies Transform U.S. Cities

Scientists Develop 'Infinitely' Recyclable Plastics Replacement

For Baby Sea Turtles, Beaches Become Safer While Ocean Hazards Mount

 

[rbkwp]

priorities
chemical warfare
govts dont really give a F'

bomb the shit out of an already wartorn country
talking USA/UK/FRANCE

lets have an afterthought moment,nothig important duh

ABC Rural Australia just as bad
several days later they make it a secondary topic

EU votes for outdoor ban on common insecticide over danger to bees
European Union member states vote for a outdoors ban on the use of neonicotinoids over the danger it poses to bees.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-04-28/eu-votes-on-insecticide-ban-over-danger-to-bees/9706756?utm_source=sfmc&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=:8940&user_id=cb53a1c368e708ac713d21ca78e70f2312c4d01d8c26bf97af51ee964c35adbc&WT.tsrc=email&WT.mc_id=Email||8940&utm_content=RuralMail_ArticleLink

Millions of ladybirds descend on remote radio tower
Millions of ladybirds are massing under a remote radio tower near Mount Burr in South Australia, with the location also attracting visitors keen to see the unusual sight.

mmmmhashit these shores
VIP,AUTION!!!

Dozens of dogs confirmed sick in investigation into popular dog food Advance Dermocare
More than 70 dogs across Australia have been struck down by a debilitating and incurable illness, 7.30 can reveal, with the popular pet food they ate suspected of causing the condition.

 

[creek47]

How can Fox still be pushing our Family Guy? It’s just bad.

 

[rbkwp]

smile, naaah LAUGH
at big companys that think theyve aleady made it and dont need innovations ha

GOOD for them
damn ineresting

just love the smaller person achieving over the a'holes of the world?

and
bloomberg is one of the few media sources who dont continually ask for support/donations to stay alive ha
wonder why??

CHRISTMAS IN APRIL
How to Make a $4 Billion Company By Just Having Fun

When two inventors approached a fledgling toy maker with an air-powered plane, the company's co-founder didn’t know it had already been rejected by larger rivals. All he knew was that it was a blast to fly. More than two decades later, Air Hogs is still winning accolades, and the company that made it has grown into a $4.1 billion toy powerhouse. Now it's looking for the next big thing.

Never miss an update

Introducing @tictoc, the first and only global news network built for Twitter. You’ll find 24/7 coverage by 2,700 Bloomberg journalists and analysts, reporting from 120 countries.

 

[rbkwp]

How a Rose Blooms:
Its Genome Reveals
the Traits for
Scent and Color

French researchers are completing
a full map of the rose, pinpointing
genes to edit for continuous blooming
and its other signature features.

Trilobites

By KAREN WEINTRAUB APRIL 30, 2018

Continue reading the main storyShare This Page

• 
  
• 
  
• study, published in the journal Nature Genetics, also reveals a detailed family tree of the rose, and how it differs from its closest cousin, the strawberry, and its more distant apple and pear relations.
  
  Photo
  
  
  Because of centuries of breeding, most of the modern rose cultivars have four copies of genes, two from each parent — rather than the more typical one from each parent.CreditM. Bendahmane
  “I think it’s a huge improvement on the current rose sequence,” said Rob Martienssen, a plant biologist and professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island.
  
  “A lot of these genes were known before, but it’s a very nice way of putting them all together and showing their history. And I think it’ll be very important for breeding,” said Dr. Martienssen, who was not involved in the new study.
  
  Continue reading the main story
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  Continue reading the main story
  The new sequence is one of the most complete maps of a plant’s genetics. By identifying genes with great precision, it will be useful for breeding plant species other than the rose, as well, he said.
  
  Now, to develop a new type of rose, breeders typically make thousands of hybrid offspring, looking for the combination of traits they want. Then, they have to select and identify the offspring that have the desirable trait. It’s a process that can take up to 10 years and require lots of greenhouse space and land, as well as water, said Mohammed Bendahmane, a senior author on the paper and research director at the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, in France.
  
  Continue reading the main story
  Continue reading the main story
  
  
  The researchers also sequenced genomes from ancestral rose species and newer hybrids to understand the composition and the structure of modern roses and the origin of important traits.Olivier Raymond
  
  
  Pascal Heitzler
  
  With data from the more detailed sequence of the rose genome, this process should be significantly shortened, reducing the cost and energy consumption needed to introduce new species, he said.
  
  Because of centuries of breeding, most of the modern rose cultivars have four copies of genes, two from each parent — rather than the more typical one from each parent. This complexity makes the genome tricky to sequence and to assemble. To circumvent this, the researchers created a rose with just a single copy of each of the genes.
  
  Dr. Bendahmane and his colleagues and partners started with a rose variety called Rosa chinensis “Old Blush,” which originated in China and was introduced to Europe in the 18th century. European rose breeders hybridized their plants with some from China to take advantage of the continuous blooming, scent signatures and color of the Asian plants.
  
  The researchers also sequenced genomes from ancestral rose species and newer hybrids to understand the composition and the structure of modern roses and the origin of important traits.
  
  “Now we can combine the information from genetics that have been done before, together with our data from the genome, including gene diversity and structure, to discover which of the ancestral botanical roses participate in which trait,” Dr. Bendahmane said.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/30/...lid=64436595emc=edit_sc_20180501&ref=img&te=1

 

[rbkwp]

human interest
not only Canada
a few instances here
we Chinese have been known to do so and suffer similar
ironically Hong Kong/Malaysian Singapore etc Chinese seemed to be/do more so than NZ born
i always thought/believed it was the stressful overcrowded untrusting environment they were brought up in
not so much now tho

we have similar here and they are invaluable

Human Rights Tribunal , a governmental board that resolves discrimination and harassment claims


A black man was forced to pay upfront at a Chinese restaurant. He got his meal — and $10,000.

Business
A black man was forced to pay upfront at a Chinese restaurant. He got his meal — and $10,000.
By Amy B Wang April 30 at 3:06 PM Email the author
Emile Wickham and three of his friends were forced to pay upfront at Hong Shing Chinese Restaurant in Toronto on May 3, 2014. (CityNews Toronto)
In the early hours of May 3, 2014, Emile Wickham and three of his friends went out to eat in downtown Toronto for Wickham’s birthday. The group chose to celebrate at Hong Shing Chinese Restaurant, a mainstay in the area for nearly two decades, in part because they saw other people eating there at that hour.

The group was seated and ordered food, but a waiter told them they would need to pay upfront for their meals before they could be served. It was the restaurant’s policy, he said.

According to court documents, Wickham said the request “didn’t sit well” with him, even after he and his friends — the only black diners at Hong Shing at the time — had paid in advance. Wickham began going around to other tables in the restaurant and asking whether they, too, had been asked to pay for their meals ahead of time.

No one else had had the same experience.

“That’s really messed up,” one diner told Wickham after he explained why he was asking.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...ot-his-meal-and-10000/?utm_term=.9bc1a290e2e5


personally Trumplike hate
when theres talk of

Could Help Save the Planet

Climate Change

Vincent Fournier for The New York Times
How Oman’s Rocks Could Help Save the Planet
By HENRY FOUNTAIN
The rocks in this part of the world have a special ability: They can turn carbon dioxide into stone.

Shorebirds, the World’s Greatest Travelers, Face Extinction

By JOHN W. FITZPATRICK AND NATHAN SENNER
A 9,000 mile migration? It was no problem for these remarkable birds – until humans got in the way.

Gustavo Hormiga

A New Spider Family Tree Tries to Untangle the Evolution of Webs
By VERONIQUE GREENWOOD


Scientists have fiercely debated the origins of the orb-style web. A new study challenges the idea that all spiders who make this web had a common ancestor.

FOOD & DRINK
White Strawberry

Only grown in the Chilean city of Purén, this specialty smells like a flower and tastes less tart than its red relatives.

VIEW THI

Gefilte Fish Joke

In the 1960s or 1970s, a news station reported gefilte fish had gone missing from New York's waters. If you know anything about this prank, tell us.

 

[rbkwp]

brilliant lovely wondeful
THEY/WE DONT HEEDNO WARS!!!

reminds me of the top of the NI NZ
Tasman Sea/Pacific ocean converge
Indigenous legend our spirits jump off and head back to Hawaii

little more to life thoughts than European sheep huh

Especially here, in the infamous Drake Passage — a body of water near Cape Horn where the Pacific and Atlantic oceans converge.

BIODIVERSITY
The mysterious world of Antarctic life
New scientific techniques are expanding our knowledge of terrestrial fauna in Antarctica. Kingdoms of tiny mites and bacteria might not have the penguin's charisma, but they take the prize for extreme survival.

admire the adventurers, for us and the younger generations to learn/experience
we know you will leave it untouched, unlike other evil humans

A stomach-churning voyage
Photojournalist Alexandre Meneghini knew the voyage to Antarctica might be a bumpy ride. But he refused to take motion sickness pills. "That was a mistake," he later admitted. At times, he felt like he was inside a centrifuge. Especially here, in the infamous Drake Passage — a body of water near Cape Horn where the Pacific and Atlantic oceans converge.

http://www.dw.com/en/the-mysterious...n-newsletter_en_Newsline-2356-html-newsletter

 

[rbkwp]

Billionaires, butterflies and brooding skies — April’s top science images
The month’s sharpest science shots, selected by Nature’s photo team.

Credit: Mads Claus Rasmussen/AFP/Getty

Credit: Chris Van Wyk/ZSL

Credit: Paige dePolo, Univ. Edinburgh

Credit: Petar B/REX/Shutterstock

Credit: Kyodo via Reuters

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41...il&utm_campaign=briefing&utm_content=20180503

SCIENCE
Star Wars

YURI BELETSKY
The Milky Way shines over the Las Campanas observatory in Chile, one of the facilities that helped to confirm the existence of gravitational waves last summer. The orange cloudlike effect in the sky comes from an especially bright atmospheric afterglow.
When scientists in California and around the world finally solved the mystery of gravitational waves last year, only one question remained: Who should get credit for the discovery?

Credit for the kilonova
When scientists detected a neutron-star collision that triggered worldwide discoveries last year, it was hailed as the discovery of the decade. Alta explores how “the initial giddy excitement soon gave way to a harsher reality: how to fairly apportion credit among many thousands of ambitious scientists, representing dozens of different organizations, for such a monumental, multipronged discovery.”

Alta | 12 min read
https://altaonline.com/star-wars/

 

[rbkwp]

04/30 Photos of the week
Image 18 / 33 : Aza, an 18-year-old female Himalayan bear, and one of her two newborn cubs walk in their open-air cage at the Royev Ruchey Zoo in Krasnoyarsk, Russia, on April 26. The cubs are named Yashin and Streltsov, in honor of well-known Soviet professional soccer players and Olympic champions, Lev Yashin and Eduard Streltsov.


ANIMAL LOVE
A Global Look at Cozy Relationships Between People and Critters.

Would You Swim With a Crocodile?
In Ghana’s Paga Ponds, people and crocodiles coexist.

 

[rbkwp]

and why not
rather keep it quiet tho

We asked you you to tell us about your random acts of kindness. These were our favorite stories.

PRI's The World
Bren_Thumb_02.jpg

The World host Marco Werman (left) with artist Bren Bataclan. Bren gave away these paintings to two people after they posted their "random acts of kindness" on the World's Facebook page.

Credit:
Steven Davy

Boston artist Bren Bataclan often gives away his paintings with a note asking people to "smile at random people more often." He gave us two to give to PRI listeners and readers. Bataclan selected two people who commented on PRI The World’s Facebook page about the random acts of kindness they did for others or someone had done for them.


The responses we got on Facebook were often heartwarming. Here's one from the runner-up of the contest. Her name is Mandy Henderson Burgess and she's from Santa Barbara, California.

"I am so happy to have listened to the World today to discuss random acts of kindness!!" Henderson wrote on Facebook. "Last week as I walked along the bluffs which overlook the Pacific Ocean near my home in California, I struck with such gratitude. I wondered how I could share this moment with someone totally not expecting it. I had recently painted the exact scene I was looking at with my kids, so I picked a wild mustard flower which is currently growing and filling the entire bluff top, and went home and found a random address in Alabama. I wrote a little note on the back of the painting asking to spread joy, compassion and kindness if they could. I sent it with no return address and hope I put a smile on someone's face. My goal is to send random artifact to someone in all 50 states."

Bataclan really enjoyed reading all the posts on our Facebook page, commenting and liking but what drew him to our social media channels in the first place was seeking out people who were touched by a genuine human connection. "I would love to hear back from a person who's, like, found that random art in that mailbox. It's wonderful."

Bataclan started his "random acts of kindness" when he moved from Ohio to Cambridge, Massachusetts. Originally from San Francisco, he says he was "friendly and always making eye contact," but noticed people in Boston weren't really responding to his politeness.

"So I said, 'You know, I will do my own street art project to spread more smiles around Boston.'"

That was 15 years ago. Since then, he's given away more than 3,000 paintings — not just in Boston, but all over the globe. He recently gave away one of his paintings to a woman in Aruba.

So, who were the two lucky people that will receive one of Bataclan's paintings and what were their "random acts of kindness"? The first winner is John Stewart from Salt Lake City, Utah, who works as a professional Santa, a job that can often be thankless and taxing. His goodwill extended beyond the North Pole when this happened:

"One year, I finished up a private party at a family's house. It was a lot of fun, and at the end, the parents gave me a Christmas card containing my fee. Once I got home, I opened the card and discovered that they had paid double my normal rate. It was very nice of them. Later, I went to dinner with a friend at a restaurant. She was asking me about being Santa, and I told her I always loved when the older kids at the party would not let on to the younger kids. They played along and made it fun for everyone. The waitress overheard and told us that she had to tell her young son the truth about Santa this year. I asked her why, and she said that because she had just finished a round of chemotherapy for cancer, and this was her first day back to work, and Christmas was not going to be like it had been in previous years. Like a shot of lightning, the universe was giving me a message. I gave the waitress the extra money that the family had given me. I told her Santa always made sure kids had a good Christmas."

You'd have to be pretty tough not shed at least one tear over that story. "A few hankies were needed to get through some of these stories," Bataclan said when he read what people posted.

The other "random acts of kindness" winner is Ruth Deakins. She befriended a homeless man in San Diego and posted this:

"I've gotten to know him over the years. While talking to him recently, he told me he was married at one time and has a grown son and a daughter who died in her 30's. I asked him if he had worked during his life. He said he had for many years and once owned a home. He's now 70 years old. I asked if he would qualify for social security. He said he does, but he didn't know how to apply. He knows his social security #, but doesn't remember much else about his life; i.e., addresses where he once lived, etc. I think he may be in early dementia. He's all alone now and has no connection with his family. I took him to the social security office and spent the day there in the lines. At being 70 years old, turns out that he could collect $1,600/month in social security benefits. That would be life-changing for him, but he has no documentation that he is a legal citizen in the U.S.; therefore, he will not receive the money. He said he came here from Mexico when he was four years old, but has no documentation that he can remember obtaining. He may be a legal citizen, but he just doesn't know."

That story really resonated with Bataclan. "As an immigrant, I know folks who have similar challenges. I just really felt for that guy and the woman who's helping him."

If you want to read more random acts of kindness, grab a box of tissues and head over to The World's Facebook page.

https://www.pri.org/stories/2018-05...s of kindness These were our favorite stories

 

[rbkwp]

days of youth travel
cant beat it
WW
share food talk and all

QUESTIONS? CALL: 877-877-8759 |REQUEST A CATALOG
| SEE ALL TRIPS |APPLY NOW

PASSIONATE LEADERS, ENGAGED TRAVELERS
At the heart of each student expedition is a team of dynamic leaders—inspiring adventurers who embody the true spirit of National Geographic. We hand pick experienced mentors who are actively pursuing careers in science, exploration, and storytelling, and have a genuine passion for sharing their knowledge with the next generation of explorers. And for a portion of each expedition, these exceptional guides are joined by a National Geographic expert: a photographer, writer, researcher, or explorer.

With summer fast approaching, our leaders and experts are gearing up for their trips, and there’s still time for you to join them in the field. Spots are filling fast—apply today!

 

[MickeyLee]

SAMMY!!
*anguish goes here*

 

[LaFemme]

SAMMY!!
*anguish goes here*

Shhhhh....it’s okay...mostly.

 

[MickeyLee]

Shhhhh....it’s okay...mostly.

Tumblr is making it worse. How do they make gifs so quickly?

 

[LaFemme]

Tumblr is making it worse. How do they make gifs so quickly?

It was scary. Sammy’s my boy.

 

[rbkwp]

How Taking a Chance on an Industry and Disrupting it Can Pay Off
1-800-FLOWERS COM, Inc. made a bet on agriculture when nobody else would and is still reaping the rewards.

THE AGRICULTURAL INDUSTRY’S NET INCOME WILL DECLINE BY $4.3 BILLION THIS YEAR, HITTING ITS LOWEST LEVEL SINCE 2006, ACCORDING TO THE U.S. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE.

https://www.ozy.com/acumen/how-taki...018&variable=2a7c7073d11b33ec576dc49ca0852af6

 

[rbkwp]

sort of smile
LIVE WITH IT if you can
nothing more than we deserve, FRACKING/PIPELINES and all,as if our lives depended on those
dont give a shit tbh

altho this particula case is an exception of course
eason to state a case tho

Elements
Coming to Terms with a Life Without Water

By Rosa Lyster

May 3, 2018

For some residents of Cape Town, the memory of the drought is already fading. But, in an increasingly parched world, will the anxiety ever really end?

Illustration by Owen Gent

Afriend of mine got married in her parents’ garden last year, on a lavishly beautiful late-summer afternoon in Cape Town. Many of the guests were British, and they could not stop remarking on the fineness of the weather. It was a startling reminder that some people still relish hot days with no possibility of rain, that not everyone looks upon February in the Western Cape as something to be endured. After the ceremony, my date and I stood by the swimming pool, drinking sparkling wine and monitoring the canapés. My friend’s stepfather came by to say hello, carefully picking his way past the bride’s two young brothers, who were playing an ecstatic game of hide-and-seek on the lawn, getting grass stains on their tiny suits. After gracefully accepting our praise about how lovely everything had been, he told us that he’d been having torrid anxiety dreams. We nodded. Weddings are notoriously hard on the old nerves—guests to be tended to, speeches to be made, and the pool just lying there, waiting for any old idiot to accidentally fall in and cast an undignified pall over the happy day. He shook his head. His dream, he explained, was about the garden.

Cape Town’s drought was officially declared a national disaster a couple of months ago, but even last year it was bad enough that using the municipal supply to water your garden was tantamount to taking out an advertisement in the newspaper that read, “I Don’t Care at All About Other People, the Environment, or Anything Except My Thirsty Hydrangeas.” Like many residents of Cape Town’s wealthier southern suburbs, however, my friend’s parents had a borehole. The garden had been made wedding-ready using groundwater, which is relatively plentiful, rather than municipal water, which is not. In the dream, though, the neighbors didn’t know that. In the dream, the neighbors believed that my friend’s parents were watering their garden day and night with the municipal supply, and were so enraged at this wanton excess that they staged a protest outside, screaming at guests through bullhorns as they arrived.

At that point, I had not yet developed my own personalized version of the water-anxiety dream, and I remember a brief jolt of surprise at how vividly realized his was. What I mainly remember, though, was the cold thread of worry that vined its way up the back of my neck, spread out along my collarbones, and settled there. I don’t know why it dawned on me then that the water crisis wasn’t a temporary problem, or that “crisis” is probably the wrong word for something that is never going away. Perhaps it was the grim specificity of the stepfather’s dream, which contrasted with the whirling happiness of the day. Perhaps it was the slightly too on-the-nose reference to W. H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts” that I was only just able to prevent myself from making (“how everything turns away / Quite leisurely from the disaster”). I don’t know why I felt it then, and, a year later, I still don’t know how to describe it. Something like: Oh, no. Something like: We’re all going to have to be scared about this, every day, forever.

In his new book, “Being Ecological,” the scholar Timothy Morton argues that humans must find “a way of feeling ourselves around the age we live in, which is one of mass extinction caused by global warming.” It is an arrestingly horrible requirement to have to meet. I don’t want to think about the implications of the latest U.N. World Water Development Report, which concludes that, by 2050, around three billion people could be living in “severely water-scarce areas.” I want to avert my gaze at the cinema when the trailer for “An Inconvenient Sequel” comes on. Being in Cape Town for the past year has made these feats of willed obliviousness impossible. It has also revealed them for what they always were: luxuries of middle-class thinking. Water insecurity is both a cause and a symptom of poverty; in the government’s latest community survey, South Africans listed it as the most significant problem facing their municipalities, far ahead of unemployment and crime. According to the same survey, more than two and a half million people in the country have “no access to safe drinking water.” Most of them live in the poorer, less urbanized provinces. They do not need to be told to think about something that already defines their lives. The rest of us are catching up.

It’s true that the threat of Day Zero, the date on which the municipal taps will be shut off, does not dominate conversations as it did earlier this year. Now city officials tell us that Day Zero has been “defeated”—pushed back to July, when the rainy season ought to take care of things for the foreseeable future. (Recent projections bytwo local climate scientists suggest that this has less than a five-per-cent chance of happening.) Some people already look back on those stricken months with a kind of detached bemusement as to what, exactly, the fuss was all about. There are still buckets in every shower to catch runoff, pleading signs in every restaurant bathroom, electronic billboards informing us that the dam levels continue to drop, water tanks planted in gardens where the agapanthuses used to be. Water restrictions remain at fifty litres per person per day. But the gnawing fear of a few months ago has loosened its grip. In our waking lives, we worry about other things. Two weeks ago, Cape Town’s deputy mayor announced that water consumption had increased by five per cent.

Yet the dreams keep coming. Two, in particular, have visited me often since my friend’s wedding. In one, I am in the quad at my old primary school, and I realize that my brother, who in the dream is a little kid, is about to have a swimming lesson but doesn’t know that the pool is empty. I start sprinting across the quad and screaming at him to be careful, but I know that I won’t get there before he jumps in and hits his head on the concrete. The second dream is set in an old office building, at night, lights off. Every tap in every bathroom on every floor is turned on full blast, and I am tearing up and down the stairs trying to turn them off. The water keeps running, though, and after a while I understand that this is because there is a person, unknown to me, who is turning the taps back on. I don’t know how to get out of the building, or how to turn on the lights, or what is going to happen when the person catches up to me.

Morton suggests that living in the age of mass extinction caused by climate change has resulted in “a traumatic loss of coordinates”: we don’t know how to see the world anymore, and we don’t have the words to talk about it. A few years ago, the same idea drove the artists Alicia Escott and Heidi Quante to found the Bureau of Linguistical Reality, a crowdsourced “dictionary for the future present” that coins neologisms for our troubled age. Solastalgia: “a form of homesickness one gets when one is still at home, but the environment has been altered and feels unfamiliar.” NonnaPaura: “the simultaneous sensation of a strong natural urge for your children to have children mixed with an … urge to protect these yet unborn grandchildren from a future filled with suffering.” Shadowtime: “a feeling of living in two distinctly different temporal scales simultaneously, or acute consciousness of the possibility that the near future will be drastically different than the present.”

• Rosa Lyster lives in Cape Town, South Africa.
  
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[MickeyLee]

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