YOU DON'T SAY. Iran may be helping Iraqis build bombs.

Commanders of a splinter group inside the Shiite Mahdi Army militia have told The Associated Press that there are as many as 4,000 members of their organization that were trained in Iran and that they have stockpiles of EFPs, a weapon that causes great uneasiness among U.S. forces here because they penetrate heavily armored vehicles.

CLEANING UP THE CULTURE? I follow the women's basketball competition for the play value. It appears, though, that a rather ill-advised remark about the tournament by a radio yakker might serve to marginalize excessive behavior in entertainment more generally.

"This is the end of the shock-jock era," said Richard Levick, chief executive of Levick Strategic Communications, a crisis communications firm in Washington, D.C. "When your advertisers start abandoning this form of entertainment, it's all over."

Or not.

All three instances of failed shock humor -- Richards's, Coulter's and Imus's -- led to condemnations and calls for sensitivity from a myriad of politicians and activists; Democratic Senator and Savior Barack Obama chastised Imus for his "divisive, hurtful and offensive" words, further suggesting that no one with "a public platform" should attempt to find humor in race-based stereotypes. The problem with this viewpoint is that the majority of Americans -- of all colors and classes -- have laughed at these hideous prejudices at some point; if you try to disassociate yourself from the hordes of hatemongers, your DVD collection better not include anything with Dave Chappelle, Chris Rock, Eddie Murphy, Sacha Baron Cohen, Mel Brooks, Trey Parker or Matt Stone.

Or it's an opportunity to generalize other grievances.

Whatever the motive, the push to censor blasphemy on campus in guise of "tolerance" is extremely bad policy. It is bad because it tramples on speech and expression, bad because it promotes a religious double standard, and bad because it is an invitation for other religious groups to seek the same protections. When Muslims claim the "right" to be free from insults to their faith, Christian conservatives won't be far behind.

I'll let Janet at SCSU Scholars deliver the summation.

Ladies, you are superb athletes. What you are learning bodes well for you for your entire life. Relish in your achievements! Ignore all those who will try to put a label on you. You are first class. Congratulations on your successes! Now, move forward and play even better and harder next year!

If the public culture becomes less coarse, let's call that a spillover benefit.

YUM. Morning, noon, or night in Vienna, that's an opportunity for dessert.

Pastries and sweets are as Viennese as the waltz and the foods for which Viennese cuisine is best known around the world. Culinary connoisseurs fill the city's 2,000 cafés, bakeries, restaurants or bistros nearly every hour of every day to savor life one bite at a time.

My mistake a few years ago was to book too little time in Vienna. I mentioned the bratwursts there and on the station in Frankfurt-Main, but not the desserts. Rest assured, dear readers, they make pretty good desserts at Panhans in Semmering too.

The idea is not to eat and leave. It's to stay a while.

On the other hand, hanging out with new colleagues talking about railway history on top of the Hirschenkogel was worth it. (The chaser was beer, not tortes! Ein prosit!)

BARGAIN HUNTING. Jim Stingl of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel covers Opening Day for the Milwaukee Braves Cleveland Indians:

Pushed out of its stadium by deep snow, the team played its roam opener against the Los Angeles Angels before an astonishingly large and mostly local crowd Tuesday at Miller Park. The Indians won 7-6.

And they were clearly the favorite of the two teams. Around here, we understand how snow can mess up your life. We northerners have to stick together.

Think about it. Neither team on the field was ours, but the lines at the will-call windows were 40 people long. And that was in the third inning.

It was an unusual convergence of online and telephone buyers showing up at will call, plus the robust walk-up crowd that wanted a piece of this surreal event.

In the coverage, do I hear an echo?

The game already was an hour old, and Laura Bemus of Elkhorn finally had made her way out of the traffic jam leading to the stadium lots and was waiting in another line with her two sons to get tickets.

But she wasn't complaining.

She was here for the bargain - $10 for any seat in the joint, all concentrated on the lower two levels. Major-league baseball at a minor-league price.

Not surprisingly, cost was the top reason people gave for showing up on a cold Tuesday night to watch two teams from that other baseball league. The heavy snow made it impossible for them to play at Jacobs Field in Cleveland, so our domed and toasty Miller Park was offered as an alternative.

"We just thought a major-league baseball game for 10 bucks, sounds good to me," John Behrens said. He and his brother, Mike, both Cubs fans, drove up from Libertyville, Ill., to enjoy seats in the fifth row near third base.

One can even teach baseball fans some new tricks.

In the top of the seventh inning, the crowd of 19,031 that nearly filled the two lower decks got a wave started and had Miller Park looking like Camp Randall Stadium for a Badgers football game.

First the wave went clockwise, then reversed to counter-clockwise. On the third time around, in brilliantly coordinated fashion, it went in slow motion, and the fourth time around went as though it was being fast-forwarded on a VCR.

"That locked me up a little bit," Cleveland manager Eric Wedge said. "I've never seen the slow wave before. That locked me up a little bit. Then they sped it up." Then he had to point out, "I was watching the game. But I did see that," he said, laughing.

(See also Paul Noonan's coverage.)

A BOOT STOMPING ON A HUMAN FACE?

(AFP/Getty photo by Natalia Kolesnikova)

Russian troops march during a rehearsal for the May 9th Victory Day parade in Balashikha near Moscow on Tuesday.

REMEMBERING KURT VONNEGUT.

Margaret Soltan of University Diaries prepares for a radio interview (subsequently annulled) honoring the recently deceased author.

I decided to take a sentimental old hippie approach to Vonnegut's death. I said that for people like me, in high school in 1969 when Slaughterhouse Five came out, it's a somewhat emotional occasion, since that novel is caught up with so many other things about that time...

Let me direct your attention to Mr Vonnegut's "Harrison Bergeron" (which originally appeared in Fantasy and Science Fiction, also known as the place to look for "Von Goom's Gambit," but I digress.)

TAX OFFSETS? I just finished my tax returns (to the accompaniment of a Democratic Saturday radio address complaining that the "alternative minimum tax" is ensnaring all sorts of families but precisely no millionaires: remember when the count of millionaires who paid no taxes served as a metric for the injustice of the tax code?) With the Internet, there might be some way for people to trade their allocation (use the simpleminded method defenders of controversial programs use: a taxpayer with a $10,000 tax bill paid only half a cent for that degenerate video) of the federal budget to others: for example, somebody could swap my share of the National Endowment for the Arts budget for his share of the Amtrak budget. Such a service could make for interesting policy analysis: which items would nobody be willing to accept others' allocation?

PROFESSIONALS STUDY LOGISTICS. Two former supply officers who were not all that well-regarded in the antebellum Army and who were initially overlooked in favor of more politically connected captains and colonels became the leadership team that quelled the Rebellion. In Book Review No. 6 I highly recommend Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War, particularly for readers who would like an overview of the Civil War that provides a balanced presentation of individuals, intrigues, campaigns, the trials that total war brings, and their triumphs and struggles after Lee and Johnston surrendered. The generals were together at Shiloh, Vicksburg, and Chattanooga and worked together on the coordinated campaign in Virginia and Georgia that gave rebel commanders more contemporaneous challenges than they had resources to meet. I've provided previous commentary on the western campaigns in a review of Nothing But Victory and see little reason to repeat previous material. I note a few snippets from Grant and Sherman. During the Georgia campaign, the Army of the Tennessee had a few problems with improvised explosive devices, which Gen^l Sherman dealt with by conscripting residents of towns thought to be harboring bomb-planters to go on bomb-clearing patrols. The book makes no mention of patrician pacifist abolition types in environs such as Boston being appalled by such practices in the service of their cause. That Army was so committed to scavenging off the land that as their boots wore out, many soldiers opted to march, and to fight, barefoot. Some even refused an issue of new boots on the eve of the Grand Review in Washington, D.C. that marked the end of major combat operations.

ON THE ACADEMIC JOB MARKET. Signifying Nothing's Chris Lawrence weighs in on dysfunction in political science.

Anyone who believes that “racist, sexist, and homophobic” attacks are solely motivated by a lack of civility—rather than being based on (quite likely falsely-held) beliefs about widespread non-merit-based decision-making in hiring, tenure, and promotion at most institutions and within APSA itself—is quite simply dangerously naïve.

Question: why is the president of the American Political Science Association following a comment thread at a weblog specializing in academic job rumors?

ON CUB WEEKEND, IT MIGHT AS WELL BE A NEUTRAL SITE. Miller Park becomes a neutral site during Cleveland's snow emergency.

The odd turn of events presented something of a logistical challenge for baseball, which has been rocked early in the season by wet and cold weather in the East. The Indians, it seems, have been hit the hardest and still have not been able to host a home opener after canceling an entire four-game series against the Seattle Mariners. And with more bad weather expected in Cleveland this week, the Indians knew they needed help.

"This is a tough situation for Cleveland," [baseball commissioner and onetime Ford dealer Bud] Selig said in a telephone interview from Phoenix, where he was in town to attend the home opener for the Arizona Diamondbacks. "We knew yesterday we had some trouble; we didn't like the alternatives. So this morning, Paul Dolan called me very early from Cleveland and suggested Milwaukee."

Paul Noonan directs your attention to "Rick Vaughn Glasses Night" and Sean Hackbarth suggests in proper Milwaukee fashion that being able to watch major-league baseball at minor-league prices is a deal.

I suppose it's too much to ask for the calendar that went file taxes - Opening Day - Memorial Day - pennant race - Labor Day - World Series - Hallowe'en - Presidential election.

IDENTIFYING CLIMATE CHANGE. Aldo Leopold's daughter continues her father's work.

Nina Leopold Bradley walked nimbly along a trail to a weather-beaten cabin that figures prominently in modern environmental history.

Bradley is 89 years old, and using a pair of hiking poles, she pointed out places where she has recorded the arrival of spring for the last 30 years. Her father, the famed ecologist and pioneer of wildlife management Aldo Leopold, had done the same before her.

But spring's advance has been so dramatic that if Leopold were alive today, he'd have to rewrite parts of his seminal book, "A Sand County Almanac."

Identifying as anthropogenic any of the changes remains a challenge.

The higher temperatures coincide with rising levels of carbon dioxide, most of which is the result of burning fossil fuels.

But there are additional explanations for the Earth's warming. Some scientists believe the natural cycles of cooling and the current warming trend have been overlooked.

Edward Hopkins, assistant state climatologist, believes that these natural cycles and rising levels of carbon dioxide are both at work.

"Nobody wants to say that we just don't know," Hopkins said. "I am willing to say that we don't know completely."

Today the majority of scientists believe that an increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is the key reason for why the Earth has warmed so quickly in the past 50 years.

The article details a number of changes in seasonal rhythms, some of which, if continued, are scary. (It will take a few more snow days in April baseball to be evidence of a reverse trend, the way long-term observation works.)

IT EVEN LOOKS LIKE A BIG ELECTROLINER. Here's Destination: Freedom on the French speed test with a specially configured TGV.

While the United States struggles to keep its passenger rail system (AMTRAK) from being dismantled by the Bush administration and continues to pour hundreds of billions of dollars into an archaic highway system that no longer meets the needs of America in a global economy, here is what’s happening in Europe:

France has unveiled the world’s fastest high-speed train that broke all records by reaching a speed of 574.8 km/h (357.2 mph).

Last Monday, France announced it would try to surpass its own record of 17 years ago - 515.3 kph (320.2 mph). On Tuesday, they succeeded. A black V150 train rocketed along a stretch of the new high-speed line between Paris and the city of Strasbourg on France’s border with Germany.

The speed is comparable to that of a freight propeller airplane.

Bernard Collardey photo courtesy Destination Freedom.

And check out that trolley spark. (I'm informed the train drew all its power through one collector, in the best Indiana Railroad tradition.)

JM Frybourg photo posted by DoDo at European Tribune.

WE'RE CARING PEOPLE. So caring that we'll make your life miserable if you don't care in precisely the way we do.

The social-work school at Missouri State is now headed by an interim director, Etta M. Madden, who is an English professor.

The report says that the school's faculty members spend "way too much time meddling in each other's business and looking over each other's shoulders," and that they "bully" and "browbeat" not only the students but one another.

It was that observation more than any other, [(Southwest) Missouri State president Michael T.] Nietzel said, that persuaded him to release the report to the public. The report indicates that faculty members demean students with ideological differences. It also says that faculty members have sufficient experience in social work, but not much experience in the classroom.

Via SCSU Scholars' King Banaian, who has additional excerpts and annotations.

GETTING THE INCENTIVES RIGHT. Via Phi Beta Cons, another rage over the alleged neglect of the undergraduate.

Ninety-five percent of each college's score is based on measures of wealth, fame and admissions selectivity. As a result, college presidents looking to get ahead focus on marketing, fundraising and recruiting faculty with great research credentials instead of investing their resources in helping undergraduates learn and earn degrees.

This problem can't and shouldn't be fixed by government regulation. Independence and diversity make our higher-education sector strong, and that shouldn't change.

The way to drive higher education institutions to stop ignoring undergraduates in favor of pursuing research is to provide more information about their performance with undergraduates to the consumers who pay tuition bills: students and their parents.

By investing in new ways to gauge the quality of teaching and learning and by requiring taxpayer-subsidized colleges to disclose their performance to the public, the federal government can change the market dynamics in higher education, creating strong incentives for colleges to produce the caliber of undergraduates we need to compete in the global marketplace, incentives to make the rhetoric of being first in the world in higher education a reality.

The problem with the policy proposal, dear reader, is that it does nothing to address the positional arms race that is driving the popularity of the name colleges. As long as the alternative to the "you teach yourself, you have smart classmates, let me find a shorter proof of Fermat's Theorem" model of higher education (itself a mischaracterization of what goes on in the best universities) is a non-challenging degree program driven by an access-assessment-remediation-retention mindset, the oversubscribed Ivies, wannabes, and state flagships are going to have no reason to do things differently.

LOWLIVES. Don't you dare call it transgressiveness.

The East Troy Railroad Museum is scrambling to repair damage done by vandals over the weekend.

Four vintage railroad cars were broken into and covered with spray-painted graffiti. Some of the cars date back to 1907.

The preservation season is about to begin, with the museum commemorating the opening of the East Troy branch of The Milwaukee Electric Railway & Light in 1907.

FIRST WE'RE GOING TO CUT IT OFF. Vicksburg, Mississippi, which I visited a month ago (during that first false hint of summer, is it really snowing in Dixie today?) was the last rebel strong point on the Mississippi River. The mind boggles at the thought of the square-riggers of the New Orleans blockading squadron making their way upriver (even on their steam propellors) past Baton Rouge to take on Vicksburg, but they did, only to be frustrated. General Grant's intended to avoid dealing with the fortifications by digging a shortcut for the river. Some traces of it remain just south of the interstate on the Louisiana bank of the river.


The embankment in the background is the current Mississippi River levee. Soldiers and contraband laborers dug a canal, but the river decided it was a good place to deposit silt it had scoured elsewhere.

Instead, the army went further south intending to isolate Vicksburg first from the south and then from the east. A small fleet of gunboats and transports ran past the Vicksburg fortifications to support the landing. The Grand Gulf Military Park is on the site of a rebel fortification that diverted but ultimately didn't prevent the Army of the Tennessee from crossing the Mississippi River and isolating Vicksburg.


There are still traces of the parapet at Fort Cobun. The river has changed course since the battle.


The fort sites, which are also home to a collection of regional history, are worth the $3 fee to visit the grounds. Many more pictures here. Among the inventions deployed during the Rebellion is an armored train. This model is inside the visitor center and museum.


The Army of the Tennessee made a relatively unopposed crossing near Port Gibson and maneuvered to secure its rear before isolating Vicksburg. Coordination between Rebel general John C. Pemberton at Vicksburg and Joseph Johnston inland left much to be desired, with Johnston never quite committed either to reinforcing Vicksburg or to providing a corridor for Pemberton to retreat. An aggressive rebel commander took on the entire XVII Corps southwest of Raymond. Although the rebel unit was driven back, Grant and Sherman opted to go as far east as Jackson to secure their rear before turning to Vicksburg. There is now a walking trail around the battlefield. The right of way of an Illinois Central branch is approximately the route of approach from Port Gibson to Raymond.


In Raymond, a classic courthouse and Confederate monument.


I'll take up the siege of Vicksburg in a subsequent post. My focus tonight is on cutting off the garrison at Vicksburg. Naval operations on tributaries of the Mississippi were crucial to the preparations. Another invention of the rebels was the maritime improvised explosive device (later called a sea mine), one of which sank USS Cairo on the Yazoo River. Some years later, preservationists raised her, and this part-original, part-reconstructed (although the reconstructed parts do not place any load on the original parts) is in the Vicksburg Battlefield Park proper, and cleverly placed where the road turns back from traversing the outer, attacking lines, to the inner, defensive lines.


There's at least one other Civil War ironclad that might be a candidate for recovery. CSS Tennessee is submerged in shallow water near Savannah.

MONOPOLY.

The recent release of Monopoly: The World's Most Famous Game (not yet an acquisition, but it's a candidate for this years book challenge) attracts reviews. Reason's Nick Gillespie has a short, generally favorable review.

The author of "The Game Makers" and an executive who worked at Parker Brothers among other game companies, [Philip] Orbanes' narrative is filled with fascinating characters. Elizabeth Magie Phillips, for example, created The Landlord's Game and saw it as a way of winning folks over to the crank ideas of single-tax enthusiast Henry George. Then there's Columbia economist Rexford Guy Tugwell, who used Phillips' game as a teaching tool and who, as a member of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal "Brains Trust" pushed "for a full state-administered economy" during the Depression. And the unemployed plumber and "ordinary American" Charles B. Darrow who created - and wisely patented - Monopoly in the form we've all come to know and love.

Financier J.P. Morgan is in the tale, too: He provided the model for the game's mascot, originally known as Rich Uncle Moneybags and later dubbed "Mr. Monopoly."

He includes the obligatory praise of plentitude.

Today, Monopoly is going as strong as ever, partly because it continues to evolve in response to - and anticipation of - consumer demand. There are now versions that range far beyond the familiar streets of Atlantic City, from The Simpsons' mythical Springfield to those on the computer screen.

"Capitalism," writes Orbanes, "has many virtues, and one of the most notable is choice. For Monopoly and its maker [now Hasbro], choice has become a passion." As important, he notes, the game "is a bountiful giver of enjoyment." No wonder, then, that its future looks as rich as its past.

There certainly are lots of versions of Monopoly available today. A longer review by The American Interest's David Parlett calls out some of the limitations of corporate-sponsored product histories.

Modern board games, in contrast, arise not through evolution but by a known originator’s act of invention, a one-off product of “intelligent design” in a relatively brief period of time. They are published and subject to trade protection such as copyright. Although abstract games are still produced, they are a minority taste; modern board games are mostly thematic, overtly representational, even theatrical. Johan Huizinga, in his classic 1938 study Homo Ludens, defines play as either a contest for something, as in the play of a game, or a representation of something, as in the performance of a play. In this latter case, there is a natural tendency for much if not most of the play to take place above the board in the form of transactions and agreements with other players. Such games involve more talking, and are naturally regarded as more sociable.

From a creative point of view the most remarkable feature of Monopoly is that it actually falls into both categories, something Huizinga did not anticipate. It is now well known to have originated in a precursor called The Landlord’s Game, which sprang apparently fully-formed from the brain of a Maryland Quaker called Lizzie Magie and was patented by her in 1904. Well known, that is, to all but the compilers of Hasbro’s Monopoly web page. That page still insists on crediting Monopoly to an out-of-work heating engineer named Charles Darrow, and on dating its origin to the years of the Depression immediately preceding Monopoly’s first publication under that name by Parker Brothers in 1935.

This leaves an explanatory gap of some three decades, which, in the first century of mass communication, probably equates to about three centuries of traditional game evolution. During that period several versions of the game were published under different titles and by different nominal “inventors”, including Lizzie Magie herself. But the real point of interest lies in the fact that most of the game’s development over that time took place in colleges and private dwellings, by players using homemade boards, transmitting the game’s essential rules by word of mouth, and modifying components and elements of play as the fancy took or inspiration seized them.

Ah yes, unanticipated and unintended consequences, even in a product originally conceived (a la Social Justice Legos?) as an instrument of social transformation.

To understand why, we need to note that our inventive Quaker, far from devoting a game to the praise of Mammon, actually devised it as a moral tale showing how unfair rents could be charged by unscrupulous landlords, for which, if there is any justice in the world, they will—in the game world, at least—rightly fetch up in jail. The object of the game, as she stated in her renewed patent of 1924,

is not only to afford amusement to the players, but to illustrate to them how under the present or prevailing system of land tenure, the landlord has an advantage over other enterprises and how the single tax would discourage land speculation.

In this she was not merely following, but purposefully promoting, the tenets of economist Henry George, creator of the single-tax theory, who was convinced that property speculation formed the basis of society’s economic and social problems.

Although as she developed her concept, she unwittingly created a model of competitive capitalism that illustrates the difficulty of creating a monopoly.

I believe the answer lies in the complete originality of Lizzie’s mechanisms of play. The distinguishing mark of her prowess at game design lay in a technical invention that far outweighed her ability to appeal to a mass audience or desire to gratify popular taste.

Taxonomically, Monopoly classifies as a race game, belonging therefore to the same broad category as backgammon and Parcheesi, as distinct (for example) from the war-game category of chess and checkers. Abstract race games go back to deep antiquity; examples found in ancient Egyptian tombs are older even than backgammon. Thematic race games are historically younger, though still pretty old. They include, for example, the Chinese game of Mandarin Promotions (Tang Dynasty) and the Royal Game of Goose from 16th-century Europe. As Orbanes points out, the vast majority of “early modern” (19th-century) board games follow the Game of Goose pattern in being race games with some sort of pictorial theme, be it fox and hounds, or treasure islands, or the Game of Life itself (Milton Bradley, 1861).

What Lizzie Magie came up with were at least two ideas for which I know no antecedents. The first, as Orbanes points out, was the transformation of a linear track running from start to home into a continuous loop. You might expect to win such a race by being the first to complete a given number of laps or circuits, which of course still amounts to being the first to reach Home. In Landlord 1909, however, you win by having accumulated the most resources after a given number of laps, and in Landlord 1924 and Monopoly you do so by being the last player left when everyone else has dropped out through exhaustion—of financial resources, that is.

Second, and more significant, was the unparalleled novelty of being able to own a space in such a way as to extract resources from any other player who lands on it. In traditional race games a piece that lands on a space occupied by an adversary sends the current occupant back to start, or, in the case of Goose, to that just quitted by the interloper. In these games, occupancy of a space always ran the risk of being ousted by an incoming opponent. In Landlord/Monopoly, however, the reverse is the case. Two pieces can occupy the same space without interaction. But this clever new rule enables you to buy a space and, acting as an absentee landlord, extract resources from any opponent who subsequently lands on it. This is a totally new concept in the evolution of race games.

That the game does not have to have an end raises the possibility that many games will not end. So, also, can it be with business competition, whether as taught in the textbook or as observed in industries without strong scale economies or network externalities. With sufficiently many players, the pattern of initial ownership of railroads, utilities, and properties can be one in which no player acquires a monopoly in the first few trips around the board, and no proposed trades of properties (Boardwalk for Kentucky, Mediterranean, and $100) are mutually satisfactory. The resulting infinite loop is loosely a competitive equilibrium, although the game loses realism in that no housing gets built.

ALL THEY DID WAS BREAK AN EVIL EMPIRE. A USA Today report on the rules of engagement for professional fighting at hockey games, or is it fighting in professional hockey games, notes

But the frontier justice strikes René Fasel, president of the International Ice Hockey Federation in Switzerland, as "Neanderthal" or even "criminal" behavior.

"One of the most cherished events in American sports history is the 1980 'Miracle On Ice,' a game without even a hint of a fight. Did anyone miss fighting in that game?" he says. "Would the American victory had been more emphatic had Mike Eruzione scored a knockout decision over Sergei Makarov and sent him bloodied to the locker room?"

The professionals, however, see some entertainment value in what the league rules, bordering on anachronism, refer to "fisticuffs."

For my purposes, the hockey season ended Saturday evening, when Michigan State decided the national title in the final minute.

Then Justin Abdelkader, surrounded by two Eagles, snuck in to poke in pass with 19 seconds left. Boyle was on the ice watching his dream crumble. It was thelatest that a championship game has ever been decided in regulation.

BC had been worn down and probably didn't even know it.

Give Boston College coach Jerry York props for the hockey equivalent of resigning in a losing position after Michigan State scored an empty-net goal in the final two seconds.

"There was no sense, just let it roll," said York, who suffered his second consecutive national championship game loss. "The gloves and the sticks were on the ice. No sense in putting it all back. We weren't going to score three goals in (that amount of time)."

That despite being defeated for the second straight year, both times after starting the season a favorite.

A SHORT FIRST QUARTER REPORT. I'm a little behind the proper pace for this year's Fifty Book Challenge.

1. Scaling Down: Living Large in a Smaller Space, 17 February 2007.
2. Still Stuck in Traffic: Coping with Peak-Hour Traffic Congestion, 3 March 2007.
3. The Fallen Colossus, 4 March 2007.
4. The Merchant of Power, 5 March 2007.
5. The Godfather's Revenge, 25 March 2007.

The prolonged winter has stunted my bookworm's growth.

Oooooo

Cross-posted at the European Tribune and the Fifty Book Challenge.

PEGGING THOSE CONTROLLERS. An Occasional Train Blog by the European Tribune's DoDo has much more on the French TGV speed test, including two different videos and a lengthy conversation. Hey, the test train is two cab units and two middle units! Trolley sparks are as much a part of the TGV experience as they were on our interurbans.