When I was growing up, just starting my career in radio, that gender divide was just as alarming back then as it is now.
Its founder was John Pintard, who was alarmed back in 1804 at how rapidly the city was changing -- and destroying its past, a lament that has echoed down the centuries.
Honeybees and yellow jacket wasps can send chemical alarms back to their nests and many other insects can start coming after you to attack.
There are moments of dry-as-dust comedy, as when one member of a bomb-making team asks another how he's going to get up in the morning: after all, he's not getting his alarm clock back.
Somebody at GM apparently left Detroit, flew to Los Angeles, witnessed all the Benzes and BMWs and Lexuses on I-5, and rang the alarm bell back home in the Rust Belt.
James Hansen is not quite so famous: he's the outspoken NASA climate scientist who sounded the global warming alarm way back in 1988.
Then put the alarm clock/phone back.
All apartments are to have cherry wood veneer cabinets, intrusion alarms wired back to a concierge desk, audio-video intercom, garbage disposals, granite kitchen counter tops and stainless steel appliances.
They can even mimic man-made sounds such as telephone ringtones and car alarms, and back in the late 1960s they confused householders who had bought the latest consumer accessory – the trimphone – whose chirping tone lent itself to avian impersonation.
