Here’s another article on why we should be glad gas is so expensive. Or why we shouldn’t feel so bad, something. For example:
If gas remains at $4 per gal. for a year or more, expect as many as 1,000 fewer fatalities a month, according to professor Michael Morrisey at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and associate professor David Grabowski at Harvard Medical School, who calculated that estimate for TIME. That means annual deaths could be cut by almost one-third — a public-health triumph.
So much for the terrorist fist bump. Glad we’re over that.

UPDATE: It’s worse than we thought.

(Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan)
Bill Gates decides to download software from Microsoft and does not have a good day.
From: Bill Gates
Sent: Wednesday, January 15, 2003 10:05 AM
To: Jim Allchin
Cc: Chris Jones (WINDOWS); Bharat Shah (NT); Joe Peterson; Will Poole; Brian Valentine; Anoop Gupta (RESEARCH)
Subject: Windows Usability Systematic degradation flame
I decided to download (Moviemaker) and buy the Digital Plus pack … so I went to Microsoft.com. They have a download place so I went there.
The first 5 times I used the site it timed out while trying to bring up the download page. Then after an 8 second delay I got it to come up.
This site is so slow it is unusable.
It wasn’t in the top 5 so I expanded the other 45.
These 45 names are totally confusing. These names make stuff like: C:\Documents and Settings\billg\My Documents\My Pictures seem clear.
They are not filtered by the system … and so many of the things are strange.
I tried scoping to Media stuff. Still no moviemaker. I typed in movie. Nothing. I typed in movie maker. Nothing.
So I gave up and sent mail to Amir saying - where is this Moviemaker download? Does it exist?
So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated.
From this TIME article about a contemporary movement in churches to encourage conjugal bliss among their (married, of course; heterosexual, one assumes) congregation:
One participant expressed a yearning to see her husband dressed as a police officer. The Good Book offers no specifics on that, so Stacy Spencer allowed that it was up to the woman, “as long as you’re not lusting after a particular officer. Jesus talked about spiritual adultery, and that could be spiritual adultery. But if it’s just a generic cop, go for it.”
The old “generic cop” pastoral counseling trick. Works every time.

I think this is a great idea. I want to turn my entire lawn into a vegetable garden too.
And my garage into a movie theater.
And my kitchen into a kitchen. And my bathroom…
The problem, as Haeg sees it, is that the “hyper-manicured lawn” is looking increasingly out of date. In the 1950s, when suburbia first began to sprawl, a perfectly trimmed front yard embodied the post-war prosperity Americans aspired to. Today, amid rising fuel costs, food safety scares and growing environmental awareness, a chemically treated and verdant but nutritionally barren lawn seems wasteful, he says.