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Pastimes : Current Events and General Interest Bits & Pieces -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tejek who wrote (103)	11/26/2002 11:28:58 AM
From: Win Smith	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 603

As Andean Glaciers Shrink, Water Worries Grow nytimes.com URL, just for the record. The NYT may pull its links someday, but odds are NYT URLS are considerably more permanent than SI. Distantly connected to the water topic, an old film retrospective piece I managed to dig up: FILM; Jolting Noir With a Shot Of Nihilism query.nytimes.com Clip: Protagonists of American action films -- the western, film noir, war -- are all about the individual act as a means of redemption or self-definition. If that's taken away, they have almost nothing left. In ''Chinatown,'' that's taken away. Perhaps no American film ever worked with such cruel ingenuity to show not only the futility but also the catastrophic consequences of good intentions. The ending has such force because, like Gittes, we never learn; despite all indications, we assume things will not collapse so horribly. Like Gittes, we think we've seen this movie before, and we know how it goes. As we near the climax, he misinterprets a pivotal clue and re-enacts the climax of ''The Maltese Falcon,'' calling the police to turn Evelyn in and then using the pressure of their imminent arrival to demand that she acknowledge his mastery of the puzzle by confessing to his version of events. But he's in over his head. As Noah Cross warned him earlier, ''You may think you know what you're doing, but, believe me, you don't.'' . . . HOW perverse is the humor? Well, what should we make of the associations that Mr. Polanski had to know we'd bring to the image of him, of all people, slitting people open with a knife? All those closet romantics who wish to place ''Chinatown'' safely within the noir tradition that preceded it are fond of reciting what they believe to be the film's final line: Gittes's assistant's ministering and pre-emptively elegaic ''Forget it, Jake; it's Chinatown.'' They recognize the familiar appeal of its squint-eyed, tough-guy stoicism. The movie's actual last lines, though, belong to Gittes's friend the good cop. What he shouts, offscreen, as darkness closes in, is a lot less reassuring, and more fitting: ''Get off the street. Get off the street.''

To: tejek who wrote (103)	12/10/2002 10:05:02 AM
From: Win Smith	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 603

Grand Soviet Scheme for Water in Central Asia Is Foundering nytimes.com [ It turns out California isn't the only place they grow rice in the desert . . . ] The craving for water has turned the Aral Sea, once the world's sixth-largest inland ocean, into a shrunken, dust-shrouded necklace of lifeless brine lakes. Still, the nations are thirsty. Their demand for water already exceeds the entire annual flow of the two rivers by 25 percent. Adding to the pressure, Afghanistan, whose right to river water was ignored during Taliban rule, is poised to reclaim a share of the bigger river, the Amu. The five neighbors have swelling populations — growing 15 percent a decade, with a third of the residents 13 or younger. That presents their governments with the challenge of creating more jobs and growing more food, even as the water supply is divided ever more thinly. They also are not keeping up the waterworks, causing more waste. In Soviet times, the Kremlin spent at least $60 an acre every year to keep the water systems in repair. Uzbekistan currently spends less than $25 an acre; Tajikistan, reeling from civil war, spends $4. One result is an irrigation network beset by staggering waste. Now in disrepair, some parts waste more water than they deliver. The Karakum Canal, an 837-mile man-made river in the Turkmenistan desert, appears from the air as a thin line fringed by a miles-wide band of weeds. The government admits that 28 percent of its water vanishes into the sands. Scientists put the figure closer to 60 percent. The region grew used to free water, in profligate supply. One example is in the tiny village of Dzhalagash, along Kazakhstan's shadeless southern border not far from the Syr's banks. Here the rainfall averages just 5.9 inches a year, yet the preferred crop is rice.