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“We ought to call ourselves the Partly Cloudy State instead of the Sunshine State,” Miami-based meteorologist Jim Lushine said.

(AP: “Five States Have More Sun Than Florida” [June 21, 2004])

There’s a new photo gallery in town.

Or on this site, at any rate.

Not a lot of new pictures (though some), but a new gallery structure (easy and intuitive) with new features like slideshow, search, and even print, which gives you links to digital-photo-printing services. Admittedly, the print option isn’t something you’re ever likely to want to use, but it’s nice to know it’s there. Isn’t it?

Just FYI.

And there’s more.

NYTimes:

Michael Moore’s anti-Bush “Fahrenheit 9/11″ became the highest-grossing documentary of all time on its first weekend in release, taking in $21.8 million as it packed theaters across the country this weekend.

(NYT: “The Political ‘Fahrenheit’ Sets Record at Box Office” by Sharon Waxman [June 28, 2004])

Roger Ebert:

Q. In Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11,” Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft is shown performing a song he composed, “Let the Eagle Soar.” Does this mean Ashcroft will earning songwriting royalties and indirectly profit from the film?

Jonathan Young,
Tampa, Fla.

A. Michael Moore tells the Answer Man: “Could be. Warner Records wants to release the soundtrack. I told the lawyers if he wants his fee, we should give it to him.”

(Note: Ebert’s “9/11: Just the facts?” is also an interesting read.)

(Chicago Sun-Times/Movie Answer Man: “Bowling for ‘Fahrenheit’: The 411″ by Roger Ebert [May 30, 2004])

Mark A. R. Kleiman:

“I fully intended not to see Fahrenheit 9/11, even though I criticized Disney for refusing to distribute it… [part of entry left out] So I’m completely at a loss when a reviewer for Fox calls Farenheit 9-11

‘a really brilliant piece of work, and a film that members of all political parties should see without fail … a tribute to patriotism, to the American sense of duty — and at the same time a indictment of stupidity and avarice.’

(Mark A. R. Kleiman: “WTF? Fox News Likes F9/11?” by Mark Kleiman [June 16, 2004]; the FN article in question is Fox News: “‘Fahrenheit 9/11′ Gets Standing Ovation” by Roger Friedman [June 15, 2004])

Time:

“A few years ago, Michael Moore spoke with then-Governor George W. Bush, who told the muckraker: “Behave yourself, will ya? Go find real work.”

…

“In one sense, Michael Moore took George W. Bush’s advice. He found ‘real work’ deconstructing the President’s Iraq mistakes. ‘Fahrenheit 9/11′ is Moore’s own War on Error.”

(Above quote drawn from the first and last sentences of the Time article; Time: “A First Look at Fahrenheit 9/11″ by Mary Corliss [May 17, 2004])

David Crosby:

“No human being of any political stripe can watch this film and be unmoved. It’s a brilliant film and it disturbed me very deeply.”

(Reuters: “Notable Quotes” [June 25, 2004])

It started out as being an incredibly decent thing, what Magahet did for all of us. We were mostly strangers to one another, and it wasn’t like we were about to go out of our ways in making introducciones and what-have-you, getting to know each other or anything like that. It wasn’t that we didn’t care, really, just that we didn’t have an in. We didn’t know where to start. Magahet knew everybody, which is what made it so convenient for him. The dinner was to be a kind of casual thing, “drop by if you want, not if you don’t” was essentially what he told everybody, of course tailoring the invitation to people’s personal tastes and so forth.

The general sense of things was, dinner at 8, entertainment afterwards. It wasn’t clear what kind of entertainment, but no one worried about a pitiful minor detail like that; we figured Magahet’d have something up his sleeve. I won’t say I exactly anticipated the dinner with bated breath, but I didn’t dread it, either. Walking home the night before I calculated in my head the exact sequence of events prior to the dinner, figuring out to the second what moment I’d like to arrive at the manor; figuring that 8:00pm on the nose would be too exactingly precise, as would 7:59:00 and 8:01:00 and even 8:05:00. I eventually settled on 8:02:45 as an ideal entry-time, not too late, not too precise, and probably not too early.

But my whole schedule was thrown into disarray when I got distracted watching a spider spinning a web in the lowlands, only beginning to realize what time it was as the sun set, reddening the capillaries in my face. Intentional lateness I didn’t mind as much as accidental lateness, which, whether anyone knew it or not, was going to be the spirit of my own late entry.

But no sense in not going.

Running and stumbling up the walkway to Magahet’s place, I realized how truly late I was, and how everyone else (doubtless) had already arrived. What was fortunate was that there was one seat left for me. Not the seat I’d had in mind, but an empty seat and so I took it. I was situated across the table from Yserone, whose name I didn’t know was Yserone until picking up on some cross-talk, intersecting conversations that sallied up and down the table.

I apologized for being late (to everyone in general but to Magahet in particular), and then commended Magahet for doing such an incredibly decent thing, having this dinner. Everyone agreed, yes, it was an incredibly decent thing of him to do. We didn’t quite do three cheers or anything, but did probably the equivalent for our group, all of us agreeing how decent it was of Magahet.

My major ulterior motive in this, naturally, was to distract from my lateness by introducing something so ostensibly selfless. My other ulterior motive being to make a positive impression on Yserone, who I’d immediately taken a liking to. She maybe wasn’t anything particularly special as looks went, but had an uncannily lambent expression. I thought: this is a face you can read by; this is a face you can use to look for things under sofas and tables. She was quiet, mostly, but had a deft way of using her fork to point at whomever she happened to be talking to, when she happened to be talking, rotating the utensil without any obvious effort (or even movement on her own part). One time she splattered Oubastet with a bit of sauce, but mostly she kept her indications clean.

What everybody else knew but which took a while for me to realize was that Yserone had no legs. More accurately, she’d had legs at one point in time but lost them, though not in the simple unemotional matter that you might lose, say, a pair of keys. This I didn’t initially know, but as details went it was a relatively minor one in my mind, Yserone’s lack of legs not mattering much to me.

“By the way, Havelock,” Magahet said down the table in my direction, “did you know that Yserone has no legs?”

I admitted that I did not, though I couldn’t see why he’d singled me out in particular.

“Well,” Magahet said, “everyone else was here when Yserone came in. They saw her wheeled in here, disfigured and legless.”

I couldn’t see what the big deal was, I said.

“Well,” Magahet said, maybe well on his way to becoming besotted though who could say, “don’t you think it’s funny?”

Silence broke out like the plague. People set down their silverware and turned uneasily to face Magahet. It was an awkward moment. One person managed a forced laugh, cutting it off when she realize that no one else was going to jump on and make it any less awkward. Which only made things more awkward generally.

“No,” I said, taking issue with Magahet’s treatment of the matter.

All of a sudden—it certainly wasn’t gradual—Magahut’s act of graciousness dissolved away into a cheap spectacle, and for no reason in particular. It was disheartening: the food was without question very good; the company was decent, every one more or less pleased to be making acquaintance with the various strangers around the table; and the table-setting, if not exactly out of this world, was at least competent and, taking the stuffed armadillo into account, at least mildly humorous—all of this and yet Magahet breaks the magic by taking a quick jab at one of his guests, at her expense. The least he could have done, you figured, was refer to Yserone indirectly via a supposedly anonymous anecdote so that everyone could go on pretending it didn’t pertain to anyone present at the table.

And here’s Magahet, saying don’t you think it’s funny that Yserone doesn’t have any legs?

There was simply no salvaging the night. We all left. Because it seemed like the right thing to do—on many different levels—I wheeled Yserone to her house, both of us silent for most of the walk.

“I’m sorry about that back there,” I offered.
“That’s okay,” she shrugged mildly. “There’s something, I feel like maybe I should tell you. Not because it matters, really, but I just feel like it’s something— well, something I should tell you. I don’t even know why.”
“Okay.”
“It’s about my legs.”
“You don’t have to say this now, if you don’t want to.”
“No, I think I should.”
“Okay, then.”
“I lost my legs in an accident,” she said.

“At an amusement park,” she said, looking down at the ground bashfully.
“Really?”
“It’s… It’s not something I tell most people.”

“It was two months ago. But—” she trailed off, giving off a faint but definitely discernible glow from her face, readily apparent under the suffocating blanket of the night sky.
“Yes?”
“It’s not the first time.”
“Not the first time what?”
“It’s not the first time I lost my legs.”

“They grow back, you see.”

“The problem is, I’m forever losing them.”

“I always forget they’re there, when I have them.”

“And I do stupid things with them.”
“I see.”
“So.”
“But…”
“Yes?”
“They’ll grow back?”
“Yes.”
“Does that bother you?”
“For some reason, not as much as it should.”
“Good.”
“Well then.”

• Green Rights. A new charter is up for vote in France that would make the right to live in a healthy environment a constitutional issue. By the look of things, it’s one of those deals where compromise has slightly mangled the original intention of both parties—the Green Party saying it’s disappointed with the final charter and others balking at the potential imposition—but at least it’s a start. The most glaring disagreement is over a provision that would give the state permission (essentially) to intervene in an action that’s deemed “to pose a ’serious and irreversible’ threat to the environment.” Detractors are worried that the courts will become involved in “every little thing” (my words, not theirs) somebody happens to think threatens the the environment. In the world imagined by these people, the global economy would grind to a halt under such an impossible burden. In the real world, interpretation notwithstanding, serious and irreversible threats are kinda important. (Guardian: “French split over green charter” by Kim Willsher [May 27, 2004])
• Yeah? Well sustain this. An experiment in “sustainable living” is set to go forward near Lisbon (Portugal). The 1 billion euro project (approx $1.2 billion USD) will take 10 years to finish, cover 5,300 hectares (approx 20 mi²), and be home to 30,000 people. It’s an interesting, warm-hearted, feel-good sort of thing they’re doing, reminding everyone how sustainability’s not, you know, impossible. What would be maybe even better, though, would be a project—say, a 10,000 hectare plot of land—to show what the end result of current trends would be. It would be nice (though nice really isn’t the right word) if people could see what’s going to happen if they keep buying things like there’s literally no tomorrow and throwing them away almost as rapidly; nice if they could see what’s gonna happen if they keep blow drying and airconditioning and stereoblasting and tv-watching and lighting ad infinitum. (BBC: “Lisbon to try sustainable living” by Alex Kirby [May 28, 2004])
• Worried At The Top. In case you haven’t heard, Ron Oxburgh, chairman of Shell, said in an interview that “[n]o one can be comfortable at the prospect of continuing to pump out the amounts of carbon dioxide that we are at present.” This, from the head of Shell. Go read the interview. (Guardian: “‘I’m really very worried for the planet’” by David Adam [June 17, 2004])

…is gone. Sorry, and thanks for playing.

I made a pretty valiant effort to read Peter Conrad’s Modern Times, Modern Places. It seemed like a good idea at the time; a book about all the wonderful things of the 20th Century, what’s not to like? Movies, literature, philosophy, war… seriously, what’s not to like? And plus, it was on sale dirt-cheap at Border’s. Win-win all around, right?

Not exactly.

I’m not going to try a review, since that wouldn’t be fair. After all, I didn’t finish more than 100 pages of the thing (which happens to be numerous hundreds of pages long). Maybe there’s an absolutely brilliant bit on pages 565 through 595, I couldn’t say. What I can say is that the parts I read weren’t any good.

They were well-written, kind of. My guess would be that Conrad’s a fairly proficient technical writer. He touches a million different subjects, linking them superficially together. And the introduction (or prologue or whatever it was called) was halfway decent, actually making me think I’d like reading the book. What Conrad does, however, isn’t so much a synthesis as a survey. A long-winded, short-sighted survey of all the wonderful powerful products of the 20th Century. He links them together, but in highly superficial, basically meaningless ways.

It would be difficult for him to do anything else, given that he rarely dwells on one particular work of art (significant historical figure, architectural structure, etc.) for more than two sentences. This style lets you know that Conrad is very intelligent, but it also gives the reader the impression of being led through a museum by someone with a severe case of ADD (in a very generic sense).

E.g., “Here’s a painting… oh, here’s another one. Look, they’re both red. Here’s a sculpture. Oh… over here’s something else. Now look at that, see the fine detail in the… here’s another painting… here’s… let’s just skip ahead to the dinosaurs… wait a minute, here’s the, see that window? It’s very skilfully crafted… here’s another…”

You cover a large amount of intellectual territory, but don’t really learn anything. And anything you do learn is learned purely by accident.

Which is why I gave up on the book after page 100 (or slightly before; I didn’t pay that much attention).

Maybe you’d like it. I couldn’t say for sure.

“Wer zweisprachig aufwächst, dessen Gehirn ist bis ins hohe Alter leistungsfähiger. Bei Menschen, die in ihrer frühen Jugend zwei Sprachen gelernt haben, sind viele Gehirnleistungen besser als bei Personen mit nur einer Muttersprache, haben Wissenschaftler der Universität York (Großbritannien) herausgefunden.

“The tests of people who grew up speaking English and either Tamil or French suggested that having to juggle two languages keeps the brain elastic and may help prevent some of the mental slowing caused by age, the researchers said.

“‘Language is always good — more language is always better,’ she said.”

(MSNBC / Reuters: “Being bilingual may keep your mind young” [June 14, 2004] and Wissenschaft.de: “Zweisprachigkeit macht das Hirn fit” by Oliver Schmid [June 14, 2004])

I never really liked or hated Garfield, and I have to say that, yes, I have felt a strange ambivalence towards the lazy cat. Turns out, that’s what Jim Davis was gunning for all along: ambivalence. Interesting to think that a toon success story (in a sense) could be so thoroughly pre-planned.

(Slate: “Garfield: Why we hate the Mouse but not the cartoon copycat.” by Chris Suellentrop [June 11, 2004]; originally via Pandagon)

A web page called “10 Super Foods You Should NEVER Eat” has been making its rounds in various blogs. It lists, as you might guess from the title, 10 foods you shouldn’t eat. #1 is Quaker 100% Natural Oats & Honey Granola, on account of all the sugar and fat (more than a McDonald’s hamburger), #2 is Bugles, and so on. It’s kinda interesting. But also arbitrary-seeming (it is a top 10 list, after all) and somewhat suspicious. Suspicious to the extent that I got to wonderin’ about the questionably-named organization (Center For Science in The Public Interest, sounding an awful lot like some industry-fronted group) and gave it a quick look-see. The short of it is, CSPI is semi-legit, though not so much S as PI, with at times potentially dubious forays into science. I found some sites (like the affectionately-titled CSPIscam) which weren’t exactly non-partisan but that provided reasonably substantiatable quotes, etc., to make you at least blink before accepting CSPI ‘facts’ face-value. Which brings to light that you should never blindly and immediately accept anything into your brain as absolute fact, even if it’s as innocuous as, say, a top-10 list of foods you should never eat.

So. Now you know.

Even though you probably did before. But in any case.

(Also, along the way in this minor ‘investigation,’ I discovered the neat Activist Cash site, which, while admittedly archconservative, has a good database of various organizations’ sources of cash and of their various connections, e.g., that the Turner Foundation is the top contributor to Greenpeace, or that Casey Kasem is an Advisory Board member of EarthSave International. Etc. FYI.)

(Nutrition Action Health Letter: “10 Super Foods You Should NEVER Eat”; anti-CSPI sites include the sketchy but extensively referenced “The Center for Science in the Public Interest: Not Scientific and Not in the Public Interest” by David J. Hanson, Ph.D, and the aforementioned CSPIscam, which takes quotes out of context (probably) but is at least straightforward about its bias [”Are we biased? You bet.”].)

Two things of note.

1. If you tried to access this site in the reasonably recent past and failed, good for you. There were “technical difficulties,” which were vastly compounded by human stupidity (mine). The technical difficulties have passed; the stupidity, sadly, has not.
2. A reminder that the recently-penned story, In Reality (about a reality show run amok), is making a limited appearance here in the interests of simulating scarcity where none exists. I.e., it’s going to be gone in a few days, so read it while you can.

As it turns up, the Good Booking campaign I mentioned earlier has a website. The eponymous site can be found here. At, I guess not too surprisingly, www.goodbooking.com. Where you can also find the highly amusing survey results¹ (amusing both for its content and, well, let’s say style).

Notes:
¹ …the survey itself having been conducted by a reputable firm (NOP Research Group) and so not entirely baseless, as far as meaningless surveys go.

Avifauna in the News:

(1) Outside of Medina, North Dakota, 27,000 white pelicans mysteriously disappear from Chase Lake National Wildlife Refuge; (2) along a strip of road in western England, a buzzard (which, for AmE speakers, is a hawk) terrorizes passing motorists and cyclists; and (3) in London, researchers found, ducks are noisier than their countryside brethren, most likely owing to the need to be heard over the many airplanes, trains, and police sirens found in the city.

UPDATE on (2): the dive-bombing bird, much to the dismay of many, including one of the cyclists who was attacked, is no more.

(AP: “Pelican disappearance drawing widespread interest; still unsolved” [June 15, 2004]; Reuters: “Angry Buzzard Terrorizes English Country Road” [June 11, 2004]); Reuters: “If It Quacks Like a City Duck, It’s a City Duck” [June 9, 2004]; Reuters: “Dive-Bombing Buzzard Flies Last Mission” [June 18, 2004])

Glorious. The PVC shower curtain that says what it’s made of, in bold blue lettering:

From the curtain:

“PVC isn’t too well considered. In fact, its poor reputation began after it first appeared in 1931…”

And since I’m talking about shower curtains (albeit for no good reason), I might as well point you in the direction of this beauty, which you can buy for only slightly over 32 Euros:

(which, though it doesn’t look like it, is in fact a shower curtain.)

(via MoCoLoco: “PVC Shower Curtain” [June 11, 2004]; MoCoLoco, a weblog for “modern contemporary design,” admittedly isn’t like something you’d want to check out on any sort of regular schedule, but from time to time oddly quirky things [like this PVC shower curtain, for instance] crop up to provide seconds of amusement. E.g., the same entry has another shower curtain, but with a hole in it to keep an eye trained on the goings-on of the bathroom while you shower [it’s called the “Panoptical Bath Curtain,” a not-so-clever {and definitely not-so-subtle} in-reference to the Panopticon, get it?])

I realize that the following is going to strike an incredibly small percentage of people as in any way humorous (and is going to strike most people as, at best, worthless), but I’m going to post it anyway, in the hopes of humoring those people. My apologies in advance to everyone else.

amphiboly, amphibology.

In rhetoric, a figure of speech signifying ambiguity that arises ‘from uncertain construction of a sentence or clause, of which the individual words are unequivocal’ (OED). For example, the road sign Slow Children, meaning ‘Slow down, Children in the vicinity’, could perversely be taken to refer to the walking pace or the learning speed of children in the vicinity.

The New Fowler’s Modern English Usage, 3rd Edition

In what’s apparently some sort of publicity scam in England, Penguin (the publisher, not the animal) has launched a campaign in which a “sexy model” will roam the streets, looking for men (> 16 years) who happen to be reading the book-of-the-month. This so-called “Good Booking Girl” (honestly) will reward the male reader with £1,000.

(June’s BOTM is Nick Hornby’s 31 Songs, FYI.)

The article also mentions an awkwardly funny poll that sounds like it would be a source of almost endless amusement (stating, e.g., that “85 percent of women said a man could increase his chances of getting a date by talking about a favourite book”), but which I haven’t yet been able to track down.

Ah well.

(Reuters: “Penguin’s sexy model to lure men to books” [June 7, 2004])

(2001) Gregor Jordan - Joaquin Phoenix, Ed Harris, Scott Glenn, Anna Paquin, Elizabeth McGovern, etc.

Synopsis: Joaquin Phoenix is Ray Elwood, a shifty soldier stationed in Germany towards the end of the cold war. Elwood has his fingers deep in various black-market cookie jars and is doing fairly well for himself, particularly under the not-so-watchful eye of Col. Berman (Harris), who’s basically incompetent and insecure; towards the beginning of the film, he yells at Elwood and then immediately apologizes for his relatively mild outburst. Things become muddled when, through an absurd yet pointed confluence of events, Elwood and his ‘partners-in-crime’ stumble across two unattended truckloads of brand new weapons, what weapons Elwood immediately decides they should sell. Complexities abound when a new face shows up on base, sergeant Lee (Glenn), who’s highly suspicious of Elwood and his ilk. Then there’s Lee’s daughter, Robyn (Paquin), who complicates matters further, as does the (vaguely incompetent) political maneuvering of Berman and his wife.

Review: Not as provocative, funny, or tense as it could have been, this is still a pretty good movie that has some interesting things going on. The problem, maybe, being that there are too many things going on; that the movie isn’t entirely sure what it wants to do. The movie’s main point (according to the director)—that what happens to an army that’s not actively engaged in fighting a war is that the soldiers will find other, more personal, wars to fight—is somewhat muted by all the things that are going on in the movie, in fact. This movie wants to be darkly funny, it wants to be a serious drama, it wants to be a biting satire, it wants to have relevance, and so forth. And from time to time, it strays from the path, so to speak. It gets distracted by some minor element that it happens to find interesting. (Obviously the movie itself doesn’t have any say in this, but hopefully you know what I mean.) It wants to be funny, but not too funny. It wants to be dark, but not too dark. It wants to be pungent, but not too pungent. Etc. To the credit of those who made this movie, it’s a decent movie: the acting’s probably as good as it can be, the plot works (most times), the resolution isn’t horrible. The best way to sum up is to say that when it works, it’s a good flick, and when it doesn’t, it’s not bad, it’s simply somewhere between okay and mediocre. Paths of Glory and Full Metal Jacket it ain’t. For that matter, it’s no Good Morning, Vietnam, either. But it’s decent.

Rating: [•••¾] out of [•••••]

• Somewhere, a headline-writer has earned her wings. So, the low-carb cult, yes it’s been beaten into the ground much in the same manner as a long-deceased equine. But the carbs of this diet aren’t the ones you’re thinking of, and it can’t really be called a diet. Nonetheless, a low-hydrocarbon “diet,” trimming energy use in key areas (transportation, residential heating & cooling, and industry), could actually allow for massive $$$ savings in things like paper and household appliances and lighting. Not a massively interesting article by itself, but you have to credit them for the unique hook. (Science Daily / Cornell University: “Low-carb Energy Diet, Using 33 Percent Less Hydrocarbons, Would Trim U.S. Consumer Fuel Costs By $438 Billion, Cornell Ecologists Claim” [May 25, 2004])
• I always wondered. Michael Quinion (of World Wide Words fame) explains (in an excerpt from his soon-to-be-published book) why we say silly things like “dressed to the nines” and the “bee’s knees.” Almost as interesting for the myths it debunks as it is for the facts of where these phrases actually come from. (Daily Telegraph: “How the bee got his knees” by Michael Quinion [May 31, 2004])
• Higher Status = Longer Life. Sort of. Maybe. While other factors certainly come into play, Michael Marmot claims (with 30 years of research behind his claim) that status—your position in a social hierarchy—has a definite impact on the quality of your health. Curiously, however, it’s actual status—where you stand in relation to other people—more than your income that helps to determine your health and general well-being, e.g.:
  

  “And just a small difference in social status can have a big effect on health, he says. For example, people with doctorates live longer than those with Master’s degrees.”

  Granted, it’s a devilishly complex correlation to try to match up, and I’m sure there are any number of different interpretations of the results. But it’s an interesting thought. (NewScientist: “Higher status leads to a longer life” by Shaoni Bhattacharya [June 8, 2004])

• Sneaky Doors Threaten Humans. For the record, I’ve always been wary of revolving doors. (BoGlo: “After death, many injuries, Japan wary of revolving doors” by Peggy Hernandez [June 12, 2004])

• Blinded By The Internet. Apparently, some kiddies are frightened of the internet because they believe it “could put them at risk from bomb-making, blackmail, HIV, asylum seekers, aliens and blindness.” (Guardian: “Schools urged to smash internet myths” by David Batty [June 7, 2004])
• Phantom Fat. Obesity researcher Dr. Jeffrey Friedman thinks the craze about Americans getting fatter and fatter is bunk. Not totally, mind you; the “massively obese,” he says, are getting fatter. And yes, there’s some increase in weight—an average of 7 to 10 pounds across the spectrum—but on the whole, people are not getting as radically fat as the media would have you believe. He puts it like this:
  

  “Imagine the average I.Q. was 100 and that 5 percent of the population had an I.Q. of 140 or greater and were considered to be geniuses. Now let’s say that education improves and the average I.Q. increases to 107 and 10 percent of the population has an I.Q. of above 140.

  “You could present the data in two ways… You could say that the average I.Q. is up seven points or you could say that because of improved education the number of geniuses has doubled.

  “The whole obesity debate is equivalent to drawing conclusions about national education programs by saying that the number of geniuses has doubled.”

  Sure, there’s some disagreement on this point. But when the opposing side uses such nuanced reasoning as “[e]veryone notices that there are more overweight people now,” (an actual quote, by the way) you ought to be at least somewhat inclined to give Dr. Friedman some consideration.

  (NYT: “I Beg To Differ” by Gina Kolata [June 8, 2004] - fair-use text copy of article here)

• Traffic Facts. Bogotá, Colombia has a problem. But it’s not so much a problem-dilemma as it is a problem-mystery: the streets of this metropolis of 7+ million inhabitants and 1+ million cars are strangely (mysteriously, you might say) free of traffic jams. Once again, science has the answer. It looks like the answer lies in the agressive, daredevil driving style assumed by motorists in the city. Maybe. (The Nature article says that the drivers are “simply more aggressive than their counterparts in London, New York and other huge metropolises,” but this could very easily be a vague and baseless assertion, as I couldn’t find any mention of New York or London in skimming the original journal article.) (Nature: “Bold motorists clear roads” by Michael Hopkin [June 8, 2004]; Olmos, L. E. & Muñoz, J. D.. Int. J. Mod. Phys C, arXiv preprint, http://arXiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0406065 [2004])

Remember that big ol’ blackout in 2003, the one that left 50-some-million people without power in North America? Where a more or less catastrophic collapse of transmission lines led to those neat shot-from-space photographs with a cancerous-seeming black growth in the northeast quadrant of the U.S. (and into parts of Canada)?

You know, when the power plants stopped spitting out juice?

Well, it turns out—and I know this is going to come as a shock to you—that the pollutants in the air (the ones you’d expect to see from power plants) were seriously curbed.

In a blackout!

Imagine that.

(Now, in fairness to the fine researchers who took on this project, this investigation did turn up some potentially useful information. Since, for instance, we apparently don’t actually know how much of air pollution is from automobiles vs. power plants, or how [exactly] power plants effect air quality. Also, it looks like what these scientists found could be helpful in improving models that let us track the movement of atmospheric pollution, which has to be a good thing. But I don’t think that a correlation between a blackout and cleaner air should come as a surprise to anyone, unless they happen to think we’ve already reached 100% clean power generation [in which case they’re quite possibly beyond hope].)

(New Scientist: “Blackout gave cities a breath of fresh air” by Jenny Hogan [May 29, 2004]; also, the Harvard Electricity Policy Group has a fairly comprehensive resource on the 2003 Blackout)