I was peacefully eating breakfast before the TV the other morning, the set tuned to "Today". Suddenly there began a report so shocking I nearly spilled my entire bowl of Farina as I jumped out of my seat to grab the Tivo’s remote. I quickly rewound to the beginning of the piece to make certain I hadn’t misheard it.

"Digging that sand hole to China may be a rite of passage for many kids," the reporter, Natalie Morales, began, "but there are risks. In some cases it can collapse and bury your child alive."

I replayed that statement several times, certain that I would hear Ms Morales add "Just kidding!" at the end. I didn’t.

This was bad. This was serious. A major American news organization, once a trusted source of information (though never for me, of course), was apparently now an advocate of the Chicken Little School of Journalism. I could almost hear my mother shouting "You’ll poke your eye out!"

The story had been slipped into a half-hour usually devoted to serious news instead of airing with the lighter pieces later in the show. I never stick around for that fluff, so god knows just how long NBC has been trying to scare people to death this way. There were apparently several reports in this vein aired during the week leading up to the 4th of July. So if any viewers thought they could avoid obscene gas prices by enjoying a little vacation closer to home this year, NBC was doing its best to ruin that for them, too.

The story was about accidents in which someone (usually a child) is digging in the sand at a beach when the sand around them collapses, burying them. But even in their opening statement the network displayed its shoddy research. "Digging that sand hole to China…" indeed. Every kid knows you don’t dig a hole to China at the beach. You dig to China in your backyard. At the beach, you dig to…well, you don’t dig to anywhere. You just dig.

The report consisted of a personal anecdote from a former victim, a few statistics from some guy in a lab coat, and a segment with a lifeguard in which he demonstrated how these accidents happen and what to do when it happens to your kid. Because, Ms. Morales suggested, it will assuredly happen to your child. And soon.

But the personal anecdote turned out to be ten years old . And the lifeguard (well, he wasn’t actually called a ‘lifeguard’–he was part of something called a ‘beach patrol’) had to be at least 75 years old. He seemed to be quite happy to show Ms. Morales just how her child could nearly perish in one of these sand holes before a brave lifegu–I mean, beach patroller–came to the rescue.

But it was the statistics that were quoted that gave me pause. According to the lab coat guy, he had documented 62 cases of sand hole accidents over ten years, 38 of them fatal. Of course, Ms Morales did at one point imply there were probably more than that, saying "…many accidents go unreported… ” But just how anyone would even know of the existence of other accidents if they were unreported is beyond me.

So let’s consider just those 62 cases over ten years and put it in perspective. NBC says sand holes trap people of all ages, but I’ll just stick to kids 14 and under. There are about 46 million of them in the US. So if the sand grabs 6.2 a year–oh, hell, let’s be generous and call it 7–that means the odds are over 6 million to 1 it’ll happen to your kid. Know what’s more likely to get your little Johnny? Malnutrition . Oh, yes, your child has to get past odds of only 4.6 million to 1 to survive that hazard. An even greater danger for Johnny? A hernia . The odds are 943,000 to 1 on that.

And since the odds that Johnny will die of "Complications of medical and surgical care" are only 905,000 to 1, that means that if he does fall in a sand hole, he’s over fifty times more likely to die from the medical care he receives than from the accident itself.

But here’s the topper. The odds are only 57,000 to one that Johnny will drown. So forget what NBC tells you, and let the boy play in the sand.

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"Coffee consumption not associated with higher death rate"
— The Canadian Press 06/16/08

"Our findings provide support for a relationship between coffee consumption and higher blood pressure."
–The Effect of Chronic Coffee Drinking on Blood Pressure, American Heart Association, 1999

"Based on the literature reviewed, it is apparent that moderate daily filtered, coffee intake is not associated with any adverse effects on cardiovascular outcome."
–Department of Medical Genetics, Rikshospitalet University Hospital, Oslo, Norway, 2005

"In summary, these findings provide evidence of an association of … coffee consumption with pancreatic cancer incidence that is independent of age and cigarette smoking."
–School of Public Health, University of Minnesota, 1997

"The evidence clearly shows that levels of caffeine consumed by most people have largely positive effects on behavior."
–Center for Occupational and Health Psychology, School of Psychology, Cardiff University, UK, 2002

"…Caffeine’s cardiovascular effects could contribute to an increased risk of cardiovascular disease."
–Department of Psychiatry, Duke University Medical Center, 1989

"Contrary to common belief, the published literature provides little evidence that coffee and/or caffeine in typical dosages increases the risk of infarction, sudden death or arrhythmia."
–Cardiology Division, Moffitt-Long Hospitals, University of California, 1994

"…Consumption of coffee appears to be positively associated with an increased risk of thromboembolic stroke in hypertensive men in older middle-age."
–Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, 2003

"These data suggest that long-term coffee consumption is associated with a statistically significantly lower risk for type 2 diabetes."
–Annals of Internal Medicine, 2004

Ain’t science grand?

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Google "awesome" and you’ll find it used to describe e-greeting cards, music videos, online arcade games, Powerpoint backgrounds, photos of some man’s cat with various objects piled on it, a children’s website featuring Maurice the Mountain Goat, tuxedos, some guy’s seminars about Middle Eastern politics, wooden fish bait, tree snakes, and a New Zealand Fishing Charter company.

Thousands of websites use the word in their titles. Over 15,000 items for sale on eBay use it in their descriptions, including (last time I checked) electric guitar boxer shorts, a bunch of G.I. Joe comic books, a Buckminster Fuller stamp, an American Idol key chain, and some cheese. And I don’t think I’ve ever had a conversation with anyone under 25 30 who failed to use the word at least once. It’s the Swiss Army knife of an entire generation’s vocabulary.

But none of the above – not even Maurice – can truly be called awesome. To deserve that word something shouldn’t simply inspire admiration, adulation, or astonishment. It has to evoke awe , a primal emotional mix of reverence, wonder, and dread . Fear is the key, the thing that separates it from all of the other tepid responses we have to stuff we see every day. If something doesn’t scare you a little, maybe even a lot, it’s not awesome. The photo of the Grand Canyon you use as your desktop wallpaper at work may be quite stunning, but that’s as far as it goes. I doubt you gasp in a small paroxism of fear everytime you turn on your computer. But if you were to visit the real Grand Canyon, step up right to the edge (although I doubt the worry warts in the National Park Service would allow it) and peer down into its depths…well, there you go. Awesome.

That fear component makes the word special and distinguishes it from more mundane adjectives. And once upon a time we needed a word like that. There were still things that delighted and frightened us. God, for instance, used to be awesome, but he doesn’t seem to inspire fear much anymore, so I suppose he should be downgraded to just fabulous. Lots of things found in Nature used to be considered awesome. Science has pretty much ruined that, except for the occasional tornado or earthquake.

In it’s original sense the word was often used to describe things so overwhelming they were beyond human judgement. But now the word has become nothing more than a synonym for excellent . As an example, I’ve substituted excellent for awesome in the following Biblical passage (Job 37):

"…Stand still and consider the wondrous works of God…men cannot look at the light when it is bright in the skies, When the wind has passed and cleared them…He comes from the north as golden splendor; with God is excellent majesty…"

I guess that’s what we’ve come to – King James replaced by Bill and Ted.

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