April is upon us and I haven't written. Je suis Desolee'.

"At the end of March, an estimated 286 tornadoes had hit the US, against an average of 70 for the same three-month period over the past three years. " That was a sentence in one of today's story about the dramatic and deadly weather in the south central states the last few days. Does there seem to be a theme here? I notice that Australia, in its cyclone season, appears to be battered by bigger storms than is typical. A Science section article in the paper yesterday dryly noted that the amount of carbon dioxide being absorbed by the oceans has reached the point that the acid/alkali balance has shifted...and the creatures at the bottom of the food chain are dying out because of the shift. How long might it take for that die out to run up the food chain? I don't profess to know. I find myself trying to imagine what my children will be telling their children to explain the conditions that exist twenty years from now. I find myself imagining that I should tell my children not to have children, to take orphans under their care, to salvage what they can. I find myself watching the weather pass over and feeling sad because it may not last....

Our lives are full and rich and extraordinarily high velocity. At the State Tourism Conference we were treated to a presentation on the subject of "ubercool" by Mark Tchong from SF. He's a trend analyst and has snagged dozens of examples of behavior on the edges of culture that signify what we might be taking for granted in the future. The speed and character of change is going to leave us old folks speechless. Mark's work can be seen at ubercool.com. Maybe more to the point, his last slide was of a child at the London Aquarium staring with amazement into the tank where an iridescent robotic fish swam. God knows we may be short of real critters in the future, but we can engineer some aweinspiring stuff....

Je suis desolee.