Wet It Was

Yesterday was the wettest day in Tucson -- at the airport, anyway, where they record the official figure -- in 22 years: 2.29 inches of rainfall. As I just explained to Bean, the last time it rained as much as it did yesterday, I was still in high school. "Before you met Mom?" she asked.

Dreamland

Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis report that the part of the brain that young people use when daydreaming is the same part of the brain that degenerates in old people with Alzheimer's. What's most striking about the AP wire story is not the news of this discovery, however, but the conclusion to which it is reported to lead. "It suggests the normal brain activity of daydreaming fuels the sequence of events leading to Alzheimer's." I'm not sure whether the researchers themselves would agree to this formulation, but it certainly is a striking one. Searching for the path to long-lived mental acuity? May we suggest a life without hope for a better, different future. The ideological implications are staggering.