News

News. I don't watch it. Or, at least, I don't go out of my way to turn on the nightly news and I physically cannot sit through some investigative documentaries. I rarely read newspapers. Now, please don't get me wrong, this is not because I don't care or don't want to know about what's going on in the world around me, far from it, I am quite interested in quite a lot of things but for some reason, the 'news' really, utterly bugs me something chronic. ESPECIALLY sensationalistic news. You know the sort I mean. The kind of journalism that would have you hide under your duvet and never move, and even THAT might be too dangerous if these people were to be believed. If you believe even HALF the stuff that they throw at you you would never leave your house for fear that a terrorist is going to blow you up or a car will crash into you or that you'll fall over a badly repaired drain. It irritates me beyond belief. Half the time it's not even something new, it's just something that someone, somewhere, has decided should be jazzed up and given in tones of extreme panic in order to get people worried but that, for those in the know, or even those with even a modicum of common sense or intelligence, has been known about for years. Fortnightly (or, more correctly, alternate weekly) rubbish collections. Some counties have been doing this for YEARS. But, since it's been thrown into the limelight, it's NEW and it's DIFFERENT, and it 'could be bad for you!' The 4 discussions on this that I've heard today (and that was before I turned the radio off in disgust) were all just crying out 'but it must be bad because we've not done it for the last 140 years'. Just because it's different, doesn't mean it's bad. I'm certain that there are issues to be worked out on the larger scale, not just in the few counties that do it already, and I'm sure that in urban areas there will be some problems. I'm also certain that, after a while, once the news has dropped this particular bug bear, we will all settle into it, and get used to it, with remarkable ease. As we almost always do. What has really set me off tonight though was a programme called Supervolcanoes which was focusing on the Yellowstone National Park. Now, as those students reading with even a tiny bit of geological knowledge will know, Yellowstone sits on a caldera. It is a volcano. That is why it is what it is, as spectacular as it is, as YELLOW as it is (sulphur anyone?), because it's sitting on a great big load of magma. It's hot. This programme centred on the 'what might be' theory of if Yellowstone explodes. It had one particularly irritating journalist harassing a poor seismologist with questions about the likelihood of Yellowstone exploding, and blatantly not believing that an earthquake had been tectonic, not volcanic. Ignoring the fact that apparently Yellowstone has, on average, 3000 earthquakes a year (so this programme said) and none of them are volcanic, she proceeded to scaremonger with really just the one question 'so it might explode? A super-volcano might explode soon?' As was pointed out by the long suffering scientist in this, yes, it might explode. It tends to explode every 600,000 years and the last was 640,000 years ago. Yes, we are overdue. But, another 10,000 years on Yellowstone's calendar might just make it a little bit late, for us it's a huge amount of time. We are also overdue, if memory serves me correctly, another ice age (by about 10,000 years this time) and possibly another meteor strike like the one that killed the dinosaurs. Don't quote me on that one though, I shall have to look it up. It's true that Yellowstone is a super-volcano, I'm not denying that fact, and when it goes off it will be several thousand times larger than Krakatoa and will cause, no doubt, a nuclear winter and will destroy most of the United States. What really gets me though, is what do they want to do about it? Tell it not to? Hold it back with sandbags? I, for one, am not going to worry about this particular problem - or many others for that fact - because I know that there's bugger all that I can do about it. I'm just going to go to my dentists appointment tomorrow as normal and not think that someone could crash into me, or that a terrorist cell could blow up the surgery, or that any number of volcanoes around the world could blow up and cause catastrophic events to occur because I really WOULDN'T get out of bed if that were the case. 'News'? Who needs 'news'? Tell me what's going on and let me form my own opinion without being bludgeoned to death by reporters telling me that I'm going to die, or at least that my rubbish not being collected is going to be the end of civilisation as we know it.