Word: tsunami
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...inspired to write this because of the tsunami of December '06. In the wake of that there was all this bloviating by religious people from imams to leading evangelicals about whether there was some sin that people were being punished for where the tsunami struck. What struck me is that there was this assumption that God must be all good and all-powerful. For a long time on earth humans didn't worship good Gods; that's a new idea. The ancient Greek Gods, the Hindu Gods, are fairly amoral, most of them. We get stuck when we insist that...
...cliché, and is also engagingly honest. "In mid-March 2005, U.N. humanitarian chief Jan Egeland announced Congo had become 'the world's worst humanitarian crisis,' " he writes. "For the few Western journalists based in the capital, this was fantastic news, meaning we'd somehow edged out the tsunami in Asia and the genocide in Sudan in the race for absolute misery...
...children with a body mass index (BMI)--a rough factoring of height and weight--higher than the 85th percentile of figures from the 1960s and '70s, before the obesity epidemic hit. Obesity is defined as the 95th percentile. That's far from healthy. "The childhood obesity epidemic is a tsunami," says David Ludwig, an obesity researcher at Children's Hospital in Boston and the author of Ending the Food Fight. "We can see the wave heading toward shore...
...This tsunami, however, is a highly selective one. It discriminates by race: according to the CDC's 2006 figures, 30.7% of white American kids are overweight or obese, compared with 34.9% of blacks and 38% of Mexican Americans. It discriminates by income: 22.4% of 10-to-17-year-olds living below the poverty line--less than $21,200 for a family of four--are overweight or obese, compared with 9.1% of kids whose families earn at least four times that amount...
...Chicago Tribune splashed headlines about it the next day. A seiche (pronounced saysh) occurs when an approaching thunderstorm pushes water away from a large enclosed body of water's shorelines. But after the storm passes, the water swiftly returns in the form of a wave. Sort of like a tsunami. Last weekend's Lake Michigan seiche occurred over a roughly 60-min. period and was not noticeable to the untrained eye. But now seiches have entered into the Windy City's vocabulary of weather apocalypse...