For anyone who likes to follow the news, it's been a strange week. From coverage of Charlie Sheen's personality meltdown to that of a genuine nuclear energy nightmare following the terrible earthquake and tsunami in Japan, the past seven days have forced the print and broadcast news outlets to display their chops or fail miserably. Extreme weather in the Far East as well as widespread flooding much closer to home kept the news media in "emergency" mode for several days on end. To be honest, I found it a little emotionally exhausting to try to keep up with everything.

The startling images of the devastation in Japan serve to remind us of this: No matter what we do to quell or prevent natural disasters, the Earth has other plans, set into motion eons before we arrived on the planet. Calamity is a relative term – in comparison to what has occurred in Sendai in the past week, our local flooding issues are trivial. Like the famous Dutch painting entitled "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus," most human suffering goes unnoticed while the rest of us are tending to our workaday lives. Obviously, it was painted long before the advent of mass media. Continued...