With a new baby in the house, sleeping at night is a bit of a moot point.

Actually I do tend to check the headlines out on the internet search engines so I’m not totally in the dark.

One of things that came out in our book club discussion was that all the baby-boomers in the room had recurrent childhood nightmares about the atomic bomb and/or the Russians invading. This is from having to do air raid drills, worry about the nearest bomb shelter, being just old enough to understand some of what was going on during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and reading books like FAILSAFE, ON THE BEACH, ALAS BABYLON, and so on.

I only listen to NPR news and rarely watch much TV.

I have been a fan of NPR (national public radio) for years. I do think that lots of things can be listened to with less ill effect than the gory pictures on television. Back in the 1970s in family student housing at BYU, I encouraged other moms to listen, and they acted like I was crazy. I don’t know how much of it was that KBYU is not an NPR affiliate; I had to listen to the University of Utah station. At least I got my husband hooked.

I never even heard about what Britney did.

I know what Britney did, because they mentioned it on the ABC News Shuffle podcast. I don’t watch television news, but I dowload the podcasts for ABC News This Week, ABC News Shuffle, McLaughlin Report, Washington Week with Gwen Ifill. I listen to them in that order, and may or may not get through all of them, but never miss George Stephanopoulos. I tried some others but they did not seem as insighful/interesting.

We had a talk about this topic at our RS book club. We had read NUMBER THE STARS by Lois Lowry and discussed about what age it was appropriate to teach about the holocaust, a conversation that expand to include current scary news events. It turns out that some of us listen to NPR, and as archaic as it seems, newspapers also seem to be a good source of news for those hoping to avoid sensationalism.

I never even heard about what Britney did. I haven’t heard any dog-bite news stories in years. And I have no idea what the current offering of commercials is.

Yes, I am smug. And yes, I am insufferable. But a little less so today than yesterday.