As mentioned on 1 and 2 January, Iceland’s brief history of a landform is steeped in violence—crashing continental plates and lava-spewing hotspots. It figures that the island is not all that stable inside or out.

When I entered college, the concept of continental drift was soundly rejected. In grad school, the idea wasn’t so crazy after all, and by the time I graduated, everyone knew the essentials of plate tectonics.

My sister is so fascinated by the word octogenarian that this last June she gave me a trip to Belize for my 80th birthday. She went along, of course, to a resort where she and her daughter had stayed a couple of years ago. She had an ulterior motive: there had been this hunky bartender and she wanted to see if he was still there. He wasn’t.