Extraction of groundwater is harming Earth . . . and dart-throwing

If it feels like you're more likely to stumble now than a few decades ago, there's a reason: The Earth's tilt is shifting.

Really.

The reason? We're sucking out so much groundwater that the globe is leaning to the east at a rate of about 1.7 inches per year. Talk about East Coast bias!

According to a study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters in mid-June, our constant extraction of groundwater has shifted the axis on which Earth rotates. So when you miscalculate while stepping off the curb and stumble, it's not your fault. It's the fault of water hogs. They're really pumping it out!

A CNN report on the study included this: "Between 1993 and 2010, the period examined in the study, humans extracted more than 2,150 gigatons of groundwater from inside Earth, mostly in western North America and northwestern India, according to estimates published in 2010."

I suspect the term "gigaton" is made up, but that seems like a lot. And it's . . . wait, what? "Mostly in western North America?" That's, that's, that's . . . that's us!

We're in western North America! We're making the Earth tilt!

Of course, you might be able to explain the tilt otherwise. The Earth spins on its north-south axis at about 1,000 mph, which explains why your ears sometimes pop and you get carsick while sitting on a couch (or are both those just me?). Plenty of things can affect the rotation of the Earth: Changes in glaciers, changes in air pressure, changes in attitude, changes in latitude, as Jimmy Buffet fans can attest.

However, this one seems significant and tough to change, since it's not like humans are extracting water from the top layer of the Earth's crust for giggles. We need water for food, we need water to survive. Can you imagine making Ramen, for instance, without water? Or making coffee without water? I'm sure there are other uses of water, but I can't think of any off the top of my head.

Oh yeah – imagine a world where you can't make Tang. Nightmarish.

According to the study, this has been going on for a while. Redistributing groundwater has shifted the rotational axis by more than 31 inches in less than 20 years, according to models created by the study's authors. Thirty-one inches! No wonder it's harder to shoot a basketball now than it was in the 1990s: The hoop has moved nearly three feet. No wonder we're so terrible at darts now: The board is 31 inches to the east! (the science behind my claims has not been verified by independent sources).

There are important long-term effects of changing the angle of the Earth, such as changes from season to season (for instance, how we experience summer). And the aforementioned dart throwing.

Since we're taking too much water out of the Earth, I propose simple solution: We just pump more back in.

Seriously. Let's all turn on our sprinklers and let the water soak into the Earth. We can return things to their natural state and improve our dart-throwing and basketball-shooting at the same time.

Where will we get this water? Simple: Just turn on the sprinklers. We can save the future of Ramen, Tang, dart-throwing and return the Earth to its normal axis.

You're welcome, Earth.

Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@outlook.com.

How AM radio shaped me: NBA from Seattle, MLB from Anaheim, music from Portland

In late elementary school and junior high, my nighttime ritual was simple: I'd go to bed, turn on my Panasonic radio and begin searching for sports.

I lived in Humboldt County, about five hours north of San Francisco and seven hours south of Portland. Other than Giants and 49ers games broadcast on a Eureka radio station, there was no sports on local radio. We got two TV stations (no cable for my family), so I'd see national sports broadcasts on weekends only.

Laying in bed, I would find AM radio stations from far-off cities and tune in. Play-by-play of the NBA's Portland Trail Blazers and Seattle SuperSonics. Baseball games involving the Oakland A's, Seattle Mariners, California Angels and even the hated Los Angeles Dodgers. University of Southern California football and University of San Francisco basketball. The Denver Bears, then the top minor-league baseball affiliate of the Montreal Expos. Even the Bay Area Golden Gaters of World Team Tennis had games broadcast on a radio station I could pick up.

Those cities were hundreds – sometimes thousands – of miles from my bedroom, yet I could listen in. The broadcasts faded in and out, but I could hear them.

I also listened to a Portland station play the most-requested of the day every night. I listened to Ronn Owens host his talk show on San Francisco's KGO radio, unaware that I was hearing the early stages of arguably the greatest local talk show host career in radio history.

Those were – for me, at least – the glory days of AM radio.

I wrote a week ago about car manufacturers removing AM radio from many models. It made me sad because I loved AM radio. As a kid, it was my window to the rest of the world.

The AM signal travels farther (and has lower sound quality) than FM radio. Thus I could hear stations in Denver or Salt Lake City or Los Angeles or Seattle.

In 2023, it seems quaint. It sounds like how when old people used to talk about going to silent movies. In the internet era, when you can stream almost anything to your phone, the idea of a 13-year-old searching the radio band for a far-away baseball or NBA game seems ancient.

Yet AM radio had an impact. My favorite NBA team was the Sonics, not the Warriors (whose broadcasts I couldn't find). My dream job was being the play-by-play announcer for the Giants. My musical tastes were cemented by listening to the top-40 station in Portland playing the most-requested songs every night (which eliminated the chance for me to ever like hard rock).

AM radio is fading. Why listen to talk radio when you can hear a podcast? Why listen to static-filled music when you can stream it to your phone or car? Why find a distant radio station for baseball when the MLB app has all the broadcasts?

I don't believe childhood was better in the 1970s than it is now. I don't believe technology is ruining the world. I don't believe we were better off without the internet.

I just know I still have fond memories of listening to Bob Blackburn broadcasting Sonics games on KOMO radio and Bob Clarke presenting the most required songs of the day on KEX radio from Portland. In my childhood, AM radio brought the world outside my small town to my bedroom every night.

Decades from now, someone will talk about how obscure podcasts and TikTok shaped their childhood and it will seem similarly old-timey.

Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@outlook.com.

AM radio in cars may soon be a thing of the past

Another staple of Americana could soon go away, joining the trash compactor, mustard-yellow appliances, Mary Tyler Moore, cars with stick shifts and a TV universe with just three networks.

Many car manufacturers will no longer offer AM radio, limiting their audio options to FM, satellite radio and streaming apps.

The first blow was struck by electric car manufacturers, partially because electric motors interfere with AM radio signals. Tesla, Mazda, Volkswagen, BMW and other electric car manufacturers removed AM from some models over the past few years and it kind of makes sense: There is a constant buzz while listening to AM radio when driving an electric car. At least that's my experience: When we bought our first Prius about 15 years ago, I couldn't listen to Giants games (available then only on AM radio) or most talk radio. It was FM or CDs or (later) streaming via Bluetooth.

So AM radio doesn't work well with electric cars (although that seems like it's fixable, right? They figured out how to make a car run on electricity, but can't they get it to stop interfering with the AM signal? Come on, man). But the snuffing out of AM radios in cars won't stop there.

A May article in the Detroit Free Press revealed that Ford would eliminate AM radios from its fleet. Next year.

My first thought was it was Ford's payback for the old AM radio jingle of, "Baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and Chevrolet." Revenge is a dish best-served cold.

AM radio is a part of our history. Radio and cars emerged around the same time and by the 1940s, about 40% of cars had radios. Within a few decades, virtually every car had an AM radio. Some had FM, some had cassette (or 8-track) players, but all had AM.

Car AM radios were how we heard traffic reports and news and music. "Morning drive time" and "evening drive time" were a crucial part of the radio universe – formats built around the fact that people were driving to or from work while listening to the radio. AM radio stations dominated ratings until at least the turn of the 21st century (KGO radio, an AM powerhouse, was the Bay Area's top-rated radio station from 1978-2008. Thirty years!).

With the emergence of FM radio (with much better sound), music moved away and AM stations became the world of talk radio, sports, religious and non-English-speaking radio. The format has increasingly struggled to keep listeners.

But . . . auto manufacturers who elect to drop it are finding resistance. There are still 4,000 AM radio stations in the U.S. and they emphasize that AM radio remains the front line of the Emergency Alert system, which seems an old-timey reason, but maybe it's good enough.  Anyway, there were protests. And they worked: In the days following that report that Ford would discontinue AM radios in many models, elected officials protested the move. Ultimately, Ford relented and said AM radios will be part of its entire fleet in 2024.

But the first shot was fired. AM radio's decline continues. We're seeing the beginning of the end.

Someday soon, we'll look back on AM radio like we do celebrity-hosted TV variety shows and "The Lone Ranger" on radio and pre-Starbucks coffee shops. It already is something that we have warm memories of, but don't use anymore.

AM radios will still be in many cars for a while, but is anyone listening?

I hope so, if only for our memories.

Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@outlook.com.

Mrs. Brad and I catch up with the world by finally getting COVID

It took a while, but we finally caught up.

In the same way Mrs. Brad and I were late to cell phones, using streaming-only for Netflix and watching "Mad Men" and "Breaking Bad," we were late to COVID.

By the time we were hit with the pandemic-causing virus in mid-June, three years had passed since our first friends got sick. Two years had passed since masks largely disappeared from public places.

No one worries about COVID anymore. We're vaccinated multiple times. Most people have had the virus. COVID is so 2021.

Mrs. Brad and me getting COVID in 2023 was like falling in love with "Saturday Night Fever" in 1981 after everyone else was sick of Bee Gees music. We had Saturday Night Fever when everyone else had Stars on 45 Mania. (That is the greatest reference you'll see this year to 1981 pop culture.)

We returned from a brief work-related trip to Washington, D.C. feeling great. I got sick and tested positive for COVID-19 two days later. She followed shortly three days after me.

Illnesses are always worse for Mrs. Brad than me, so it was unsurprising that her symptoms – cough, fever, headaches, tiredness – were worse. But since I'm a Type 1 diabetic, I'm considered at risk, so my doctors put me on medication while she soldiered through.

The good news? My symptoms were mild. The bad news? I got "rebound COVID," and tested positive again after going through an entire isolation/masking/testing cycle. It meant a second week of isolation and wearing a mask.

Two weeks of isolation. I felt like I was in prison – if prison involved working from the kitchen table, watching TV and taking naps every afternoon on the deck. Still, I didn't leave our house for six days, meaning a lot of TV and naps and reading and naps.

Unlike the darkest COVID days of March and April 2020, we were doing this alone, which was good news and bad news:

The bad news was that we didn't have friends going through the same thing with whom to commiserate.

The good news was that all sports continued: We watched a lot of baseball and cycling and Formula 1 and even some USFL football. We watched a lot of Netflix and "Shark Tank."

The bad news was we couldn't even play games (first because Mrs. Brad was afraid of infection, then because she was too sick to play, then because my doctor advised me that my rebound COVID was possibly contagious to Mrs. Brad again).

The good news was we survived, of course.

Nearly everyone survives COVID now, which is why it's no longer such a big thing. We were appreciative of our vaccines. We were grateful for the advances made over three-plus years. We were reminded how difficult it can be to be sick and isolated and unable to leave your house.

But we also joined the majority. We're now part of between 52% and 82% of Americans (depending on your source) who have had COVID.

Like listening to "Stars on 45" on repeat, it's not very pleasant.

Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@outlook.com.

America's little-known history shows today is really the Fourth of July (kind of)

If we practiced a facts-based celebration of history, today would be Independence Day.

Yep, we should celebrate the Fourth of July on July 2 (or something like that. I'm starting to get confused), because the Continental Congress actually declared independence from Britain on July 2, 1776.

Yes. July 2, not July 4.

The reason for the two-day mistake (which is the working title of a country music song I'm writing) is that the authors of the Declaration of Independence postdated their document like they were writing a postdated check. They voted on the resolution for independence July 2 and "ratified the text" July 4.

The actual reason for the delay is lost to history. One theory is that the absence of laptops, electric typewriters, manual typewriters, ditto paper or telegrams forced them to wait. Some scholars believe that the lack of affordable cable TV for early Americans made C-SPAN unavailable for most residents, so the Founding Fathers were forced to wait.

The "why" is unclear, but the "what" is obvious: They voted for independence July 2, and they dated the document July 4.  And nobody signed the Declaration until Aug. 2, 1776, according to the National Archives.

It turns out that the Fourth of July should really be the Second of July (again, I may be slightly confused between the date and the holiday).

I'm not here to overthrow Independence Day. I don't suggest we go to the parade in Fairfield, the waterfront in Suisun City, set off fireworks and eat hot dogs on July 2 (although the waterfront isn't the worst idea, right? And your crazy neighbors will set off fireworks today).

We can keep the Fourth of July on July 4, because details behind holidays sometimes change as we get more information, but we don't need to eliminate the holidays or even change the way or time we commemorate them.

For instance . . .

People often act as if they're winning an argument when they say Jesus Christ likely wasn't born on Christmas day, as if Dec. 25 is mentioned in the Bible and to admit that the date is just a commemoration would discredit Christianity. The specifics of the date pale in comparison to what it commemorates.

Same thing with Thanksgiving. It's now widely accepted that the version of the first Thanksgiving that I learned in school – Pilgrims joining happy Native Americans around a table to enjoy turkey and dressing after watching NFL games in Detroit and Dallas – was wrong. The original Thanksgiving is more about a short-lived peace, with a dark cloud of disease and upcoming conflicts that would wipe out civilizations. However, we can still celebrate a holiday of being thankful and gathering with friends and family and watching the Lions and Cowboys (the only part of the first Thanksgiving story that is true).

Same thing with Columbus Day (the real one, Oct. 12), which people historically considered as the day Christopher Columbus went ashore in the Bahamas. We now know that he brought European colonization, disease, enslavement and genocide to people who were already living in the Americas and would be surprised to hear the land had just been "discovered." The pushback against Columbus in recent decades led to the growing commemoration of Indigenous People's Day on or around Oct. 12, which also happens to be my birthday. Columbus Day? Indigenous People's Day? Either is fine, as long as it's celebrated with a birthday cake at my house.

Which somehow brings us back to today and the lesson of that first Independence Day. The takeaway is that today is July 2, which is our nation's 247th birthday.

That means both today and Tuesday are the Fourth of July. Kind of.

Reach Brad Stanhope at BradStanhope@outlook.com.