FRANKNOTE

When the Bush administration announced proposed regulations today to raise fuel economy standards for cars and trucks to 31.6 miles per gallon by 2015, even some environmentalists applauded. But then they read the fine print.

Tucked deep into a 417-page "Notice of Proposed Rulemaking" was language by the Transportation Department stating that more stringent limits on tailpipe emissions embraced by California and 17 other states are "an obstacle to the accomplishment" of the new federal standards and are "expressly and impliedly preempted" by federal law.

California Attorney General Jerry Brown called it a "covert assault" on California's rules. Environmentalists said the language will be used by automakers in their legal challenges to two recent federal court rulings that sided with the states.

Years before Leonardo DiCaprio and Larry David were proudly driving Toyota Priuses to red-carpet events, Begley risked derision by taking public transportation to splashy movie premieres. If he had to drive, he took his electric car: In 1991 when his then-girlfriend Annette Bening won an Oscar nomination for "The Grifters," Begley drove her to the Shrine Auditorium in his electric car and then had to find an outlet to recharge it.

"She was a great sport about it," Begley, 58, remembers. "Maybe somewhere deep down she thought I was wacky."

Begley, known for his recurring roles on the TV series "St. Elsewhere," "Six Feet Under" and "Arrested Development," was in town recently to attend a local recycling promotion and talk about "Living Like Ed: A Guide to the Eco-Friendly Life" ( Buy it Here ), a new book that offers dozens of cool, money-saving suggestions on greening your house and sparing the earth.

Wholesale restaurant food prices rose 7.4% in 2007, the largest increase in three decades, according to the National Restaurant Association, an industry group. That's even bigger than the jump consumers are seeing at the supermarket, where grocery prices have gone up 5.3%, per the Consumer Price Index.

Tentative answer: Maybe you don't. Maybe it's not about abandoning God at all, and instead merely broadening your definition of the divine so as to encapsulate and swallow it all, every God, every dogma, every attempt to corner the market on belief and parse it and put it into cute little boxes and break us all up into angry tribes who stomp our feet and wave our little gilded books and launch screaming bloody wars over promised lands and chosen peoples and crucifixes and crusades and witches and pagans and gays.

In other words, maybe you abandon God by realizing it's all God, it's all divine, all hot, thrumming, vibrating connection in all places in all things at all times. And hence, to try and parse it and restrict it and beat it into submission and claim it for one people, one history, one country or church or authoritarian body, is actually the highest form of divine insult.

Or, you know, grand cosmic joke. Same thing, really.

I am passing this along as a friend passed it to me. This requires a little readjustment - a big readjustment - if this is your first exposure to it. After you realize what has been going on, though, you realize that your TV “news” and increasingly your single-source newspaper is more like entertainment-cum-diversion than actual information. (Yes, even NPR, though that seems to be by far the best broadcast journalism left in this country.) That’s why I stopped paying attention to the news as reported, even though I began my working life as a news reporter. If you want to understand the world, you can’t rely on TV or newspapers or newsmagazines or anything that is owned by corporations or depends on repeat business.

Go to books, the internet, and the actual world around you. Go to multiple sources with multiple conflicting agendas of their own - THEN add in “news’ from TV, radio, newspapers etc.

This is a lot of work, however, and few will do it. Be one of the few, or be manipulated; those are really your only choices.

Well, there is one other choice, one many of us choose at least intermittently, and that is to tune it all out and concentrate on our personal affairs. This line of conduct has its plusses and minuses too.

Frank

The CRX HF got an Environmental Protection Agency-estimated 57 mpg gallon in highway driving. Today, the most fuel-efficient non-hybrid Civic you can buy gets an EPA-estimated 34 mpg on the highway. Even today's Honda Civic Hybrid can't match it, achieving EPA-estimated highway mileage of just 45 mpg. The Toyota Prius, today's fuel mileage champ, gets 46 mpg on the highway.

Following the 1973 oil crisis and the U.S. government's imposition of a national 55 mph (88 km/h) limit, statistical analyses indicate highway safety worsened. And when Congress finally repealed federal speed limits in November 1995, to much caterwauling from the "speed-kills" crowd, with dire predictions of 6,400 increased deaths and a million additional injuries, the actual effect was diametrically opposite. Traffic deaths dropped to a record low by 1997, including in the 33 states that had immediately raised their speed limits. Meanwhile, Americans saved about 200 million person-hours in terms of less time spent on the road, with a reported net economic benefit of higher speed limits of $2 billion to $3 billion a year. A U.S. National Research Council panel pegged the cost of the 55-mph limit at about one billion person-hours per year.

Likewise, a study by the U.S. National Motorists Association found the safest period on Montana's Interstate highways was when there were no daytime speed limits or enforceable speed laws at all. When Montana implemented a new "safety program," imposing speed limits and enforcement, the state's fatal accident rate didn't just increase, it doubled, according to NMA statistics.

Other interesting findings of the Montana study were that vehicles traveling faster than average had the lowest accident rates, and there was no positive correlation between speed enforcement and accident rates on rural highways. If anything, the highways became less safe with enforcement.

You might want to read that last paragraph again, before clicking over to the full story. Interesting and more believable statistics as far as I'm concerned.
- Frank

... It was 1994 and she wanted to teach herself how to design a website. Since she lived on the prairie in southwest Kansas, where rolling tumbleweeds are sometimes the only dynamic feature of an endless flat horizon, she invented a farm that sold tumbleweeds ...

You can never tell what the next great business idea will be.
- Frank

But the 'Temples of Damanhur' are not the great legacy of some long-lost civilisation, they are the work of a 57-year-old former insurance broker from northern Italy who, inspired by a childhood vision, began digging into the rock.

Have you started your home improvement projects yet? Amazing!
- Frank

The severe drought tightening like a vise across the Southeast has threatened the water supply of cities large and small, sending politicians scrambling for solutions. But Orme, about 40 miles west of Chattanooga and 150 miles northwest of Atlanta, is a town where the worst-case scenario has already come to pass: The water has run out.

No person is an island, or so it's been said. But a recent survey suggests that, in this networked age, nearly 1 in 4 Americans wouldn't mind being left all by their lonesomes, as long as they were able to access the Internet.