[eggplant43]

And what did you think of the article?

[Rep]

eggplant - Nice idea. I feel so often that I would like to "post & play" in what I consider the heavier threads, but do have time constraints. I think this thread will allow us to post a few comments and opinions without having to follow the thread continually, rebuffing and searching for even more stuff. TY.

[JewisHeritage]

Originally posted by Mulder:
eggplant--give someone else a chance for Godsakes!

Watch out Bruce .... Mulder just might rename this thread!

[Mulderator]

Originally posted by eggplant43:
And what did you think of the article?

I didn't read it! Too busy keeping Aca and mtbird happy!

[Mulderator]

Originally posted by JewisHeritage:



Watch out Bruce .... Mulder just might rename this thread!

Good idea. How about Mulderman's Top Ten:

10. Eggplant Propoganda.

9. Green Eggs and Spam.

8. Eggggstravaganza!

7. Eggotistical

6. Eggstrapolation.

5. Egads Eggplant!

4. Eggspecially Elusive Logic

3. Eggnostic.

2. Eggin Mulder On!

and the Number One Name:

1. Eggalitarian Review!

[Rep]

TY. I am in tears. Truely tears.

[eggplant43]

Glad you like it. I run across fascinating articles I'd like to post from titme to time, but they don't seem to warrant a thread of their own, so this is a way we can share articles we've liked without having to start a thread. I hope we'll see lots of participation from the Random Crew

[eggplant43]

1. Eggalitarian Review!

Brilliant!

[Rep]

What Goes Around in Florida . . .

Now Katherine Harris must really know how Al Gore and George W. Bush felt.

Ms. Harris, the former Florida secretary of state who was at the center of disputed election rulings in the 2000 presidential recount battle, has spent the last week waiting to find out if a judge is going to let her ballots be counted in a primary Tuesday for a Congressional seat.

The problem? Ms. Harris, at the time the state's chief election official, did not resign her post as required when she filed as a candidate for the Southwest Florida House district. She later quit retroactive to the right date, but her Republican primary opponent, John C. Hill, filed suit to have her name removed from the ballot.

A ruling had been expected before the primary, but has not been forthcoming, raising the possibility that Ms. Harris, the clear front runner in the contest, might see her ballots thrown out if the judge finds she is not a proper candidate. Lawyers for Ms. Harris argued in court a few weeks ago that it was a harmless mistake and she was not aware of the rule even though her office had distributed information that included notice of the need to resign one public office before running for another.

When confronted with Ms. Harris's reasoning the Leon County Circuit Court judge, P. Kevin Davey, asked, "She's not a crook, she's negligent?"

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/08/national/08POLI.html

[Mulderator]

Great article, Rep, although I question the credibility of the source!

PS (not you Rep, the source of the article!)

[Tipacanoe]

Neat idea man!

Goodbye Carmageddon

The perils and pleasures of ten years without a car.

This month, I think I'll have a party. I will commission a cake in the shape of a mangled vehicle. For I have something special to celebrate. Ten years ago I took one of the best decisions I have ever made. I got rid of my car.

I passed my driving test when I was eighteen and bought a decrepit Renault 8 for pounds50, principally because I was assured that a car of this make won the Monte Carlo rally some twenty years before. I scarcely knew what to do, but I had a licence to do it, and I soon began to terrorise the neighbourhood. An ugly gang of us - farmhands, mechanics and pump attendants - began organising illegal rallies. We would scream around the country roads in the dead of night, often spinning out of control, narrowly missing other cars. It was electrifying and terrifying. One of my friends rolled his car at eighty when I was his passenger. The machine was scrunched into a ball, but both of us walked from the wreckage unscathed. A society which allows adolescents to drive on public roads is a society which has no concern for human life.

Only when I became old enough to see the world from other people's point of view did I begin to slow down. As the horror of what I might have done began to grip me, I started driving less like a young man and more like a granny. I stuck resolutely to the speed limit, as a result of which I was often tailgated and abused.

Car ownership became ever harder to reconcile with the rest of my life. As I earnt very little, the car swallowed a great lump of my income. I discovered that it is impossible to purchase motor fuel ethically. Those oil companies not running ships aground on fragile coasts or trading with the Burmese junta are poisoning the Gulf of Mexico, prising open the Ecuadorean rainforests, or abetting the murders of trades unionists and tribal people in Colombia and Nigeria. I did not want to take part in this trade but, owning wheels, I had no choice.

So, in September 1989, I took my last car, a Ford Escort even more battered and decrepit than the old Renault 8, to meet its unmakers. I walked away from the scrapyard weighed down with apprehension. I had, I believed, become a second-class citizen, stuck in the slow lane of life as the rest of the world roared past me.

But I soon began to notice several unexpected effects. I realised that I had been carrying a car load of anxiety around, worrying about breakdowns, break-ins, finding a parking space or failing an MoT. I started to become more patient and less aggressive: the car had colonised my soul, shutting me off from other people, forcing me to see them only as obstacles. I began to wake up, noticing the little things I had never seen before, smelling the world, meeting people every time I travelled. And every day I found myself becoming stronger and fitter. Using an over-powered invalid carriage to get around, I had slowly been turning into an invalid.

Cycling long distances was, at first, an appalling prospect, but gradually I began to venture further afield. Now, as long as I can get my bike onto a train or a bus, almost everywhere in Britain has, once more, become accessible to me. If you add up all the time it takes to earn the money to run a car, drivers achieve an average speed of just eleven miles per hour. As I ride at an average of 14, and pay next to nothing, my bicycle is faster than your car.

But I must pay for my decision not to destroy the planet in other ways. Forced to use a public transport system which is both the world's most expensive and the developed world's least efficient, I have come to see that the government, despite its protestations, simply doesn't care about the 32 per cent of British households without access to a car. Refusing, so far, to legislate, it remains officially committed both to reducing car use and to increasing car ownership. It resolves this absurdity, every time, in favour of Middle England. Sometimes I can stand the indignities of public transport no longer, and try to hitch-hike instead.

Having taken the advice of Viz magazine's Top Tips ("Hitch-hikers: improve your chances of getting a lift by not dressing up as a hunt saboteur and waving half a cardboard box at passing motorists") I stand in a layby hoping to exploit private transport's preposterous over-capacity. I find myself enduring a sort of psychological stoning, as drivers hurl their hostility and contempt at me: no one, they are thinking, stands by the side of the road today unless he is a scrounger, an idler or a rapist. When someone finally takes pity on me, I find myself, to my disgust, pathetically grateful. I want to explain that, far from being a favour, a lift is the least that drivers owe to non-drivers. It's everyone's planet, and they are freeloading on my decision not to mess it up. But I am never quite brave enough to do so.

When there are no alternatives, I will hire a car or a van: this happens about five or six times a year. I don't enjoy it, but at least I can choose the model which suits my purpose best, and if something goes wrong, it's someone else's problem.

But, above all, losing my car has encouraged me to reduce my need to travel. I used to drive for hours just to go walking in the countryside, with the result that I came back more stressed than I was before. Forced to explore nearer to home, I have found scores of wonderful and secret places. I have had to stop shopping in superstores. Buying my food from local shops, a co-operative wholesaler and an organic box scheme, I've found myself, once again, becoming both healthier and wealthier. I have begun to feel that I belong to my town and its surroundings and that they, in a small way, now belong to me.

None of this has completely dispelled the impression that I am, officially, a second class citizen. I no longer participate in the cannibal feast, but I still have to pay for it. Vehicles, according to the British Lung Foundation, cost the country some pounds46 billion a year, while motoring taxes reap just one third of this amount. Cars sprawl across the pavement outside my house, and their alarms wake me in the middle of the night. As a pedestrian and a cyclist I am far more vulnerable than those who endanger me. Cars choke me while I'm waiting for the bus, and they force that bus to become as inefficient as they are. I will suffer just as much as drivers will if the global climate change they are hastening brings the Gulf Stream to a halt. But despite all this I remain a free man, while millions of others are held captive by their cars.

Losing my car would have been much harder had I not been able-bodied, or if I worked far from home or had children. Some parents in my neighbourhood go to extraordinary lengths not to be forced into cars: one family of five rides a tandem with two toddler seats and a trailer. But individuals simply cannot solve structural, institutional problems, and the car will continue to rule our lives until the government intervenes. Why is it that doing what we know to be right is always so hard, while doing what we know to be wrong is so much easier?

By George Monbiot.
Published in the Guardian 15th September 1999.

[eggplant43]

Great article, and so timely. At first I thought this was you, describing your decision. But some of the facts didn't jibe with your Canadian residence, and the I saw that you were posting an article, not writing one. This man is truly a citizen of the planet.

[Tipacanoe]

***********Edited by Moderator***********

[Mulderator]

Sorry, Tipecanoe, but that article you posted is a bit too inflammatory. While I actually have no strong opinions on birth control or abortion either way, I know that issue causes significant emotional response from people on both sides and that article is more of an "abortion pill advertisement" than it is an "article". I just don't think this is the place for it.

For those unaware, Tipe had posted an article regarding the use of contraceptives within 72 hours after pregnancy (commonly known as the "morning after" pill). If you want the article, e-mail Tippecanoe directly.

[Tipacanoe]

OK U Da boss. But no wonder nobody knows about EC when attempts to get the message out are censored like this!