A C. T U. A L. L Y

If it’s Sunday, it must be time for Tick Tock the Climate Clock .   Here are a few nuggets of recent climate news. Time to Hang Up Your Skates .   The Elfstedentocht (11 cities race on ice skates) hasn’t been held since 1997 in Friesland, the most northern part of Holland, because the canals don’t freeze anymore. Now You Don’t Have to Add Salt!   Fields in coastal North Carolina are becoming too salty for farming.   Scientists fear rising sea levels are shifting the underground gradient where fresh groundwater meets salty seawater.   Dikes and pumps can hold back ocean flooding, but they can’t prevent it from mixing with the fresh water aquifers.    1993 Redux .   According to NOAA, nearly two-thirds of the lower 48 states have an elevated risk of flooding from now until May, and 25 states could experience serious flooding, worse than the historic floods of 1993. They’re Having Twins!   Last week twin cyc...

I don’t remember being read to as a child; I would have been very young, but I’m sure someone did.   My mother was an avid reader, and there were always books around the house.   Her sister, my aunt, was a kindergarten teacher and my grandmother taught first grade.   My grandmother’s brother was a superintendent of schools for the city of Paterson, New Jersey, and my grandmother's sister was a vice principal.   With all those educators on my mother’s side of the family, surely someone(s) read to me.   My bookshelves hold very few books from my childhood.   I left most of them at home when I went away to college.   They were stored in the basement and were so badly damaged in a flood that my mother had to throw them away.   But I remember having several Little Golden Books— Mother Goose and This Little Piggy and Other Counting Rhymes , which were among the original 12 Little Golden Books published in 1942 and which sold for $.25 eac...

Picasso in his Studio La Californie in Cannes It takes a perverse sense of humor to leave this mortal coil with: ·          over 45,000 art works ·          two châteaux ·          three studio / residences ·          $4.5 million in cash ·          $1.3 million in gold ·          an undisclosed value in stocks and bonds ·          6 antagonistic heirs AND…no will!   But when Pablo Picasso died on April 8, 1973, at the age of 91, that’s exactly the joke he left behind.   His family may have found itself suddenly very rich, but it was not at all amused. Under French law, one-half of Picasso’s estate would go to his second wife, Jacqueline Roque (above), a...