...I'd like for Sen. Landrieu, Sen. Snowe, Rep. Cao, etc.--basically any politician who DOESN'T count Limbaugh, O'Reilly, Beck, Hannity, Savage, etc. among their constituents--to tell those gasbags in so many words, "Piss off. You don't live in my district. I don't represent or answer to you. I represent and answer to my constituents."

Wait...so a senator lobbies to get expanded Medicaid funding for her state (which, BTW, has one of the highest rates of people without health insurance, a completely overwhelmed hospital system in the state's largest city thanks to Katrina's destruction of Charity, and one of the lowest scores on overall measures of citizen health)...and she's a whore? Mr. Beck and Mr. Limbaugh, lobbying for the interests of your constituents is what senators are supposed to do!

She didn't even break party lines for this! Mary Landrieu is, in case you've forgotten (easy to do, considering how conservative she is on many of the issues), technically a Democrat!

What's with all these 12-year-old giggly teenyboppers lusting over a fictional vampire who's kind of an asshole?

I mean, when I was their age, I just wanted to bang the petty-criminal surfer dude with surgically implanted gills who was on "SeaQuest DSV," like every other normal, red-blooded American girl.

...from all the publicity photos of men's basketball teams in tuxes? Those have been around for a long, long time--I seem to recall back in the 1980s seeing the I.U. Hoosiers and Purdue Boilermakers posing like that for those freebie game-schedule calendars local shops would hang up behind the cash registers.

Oh, and to the poster who said that it's only Southern schools who call their women's athletic teams "Lady [Mascot]s"...that's pretty universal. The Lady Hoosiers (Indiana University). The Lady Boilermakers (Purdue). The Lady Cardinals (Ball State). The Lady Wolverines (Michigan). The Lady Badgers (Wisconsin). The Lady Cornhuskers (Nebraska). And so on and so on. None of these schools are south of the Mason-Dixon line.

Since men's and women's basketball seasons overlap, it would create a hell of a lot of confusion if both the men's and women's teams from the same college had the exact same name. Nothing sinister about it.

Obviously you do not use public transit frequently.

City buses have poles and straps that standing-room passengers hold onto that keeps them from falling over. They also do not have nearly as many seats as, say, a school bus or a Greyhound because of the relatively high percentage of passengers who need to bring wheelchairs, those foldable grocery carts, and yes, strollers onto the bus. (Funny, unlike apparently on the sidewalks of Park Slope, strollers really DO get in the way on buses, yet in my hundreds of bus trips around New Orleans, I've yet to hear a single person complain about them.)

The buses with the most stops and starts and which are in the heaviest traffic are the most likely to have a lot of standing-room passengers because, surprise, surprise, they are on the busiest routes. Imagine depending on a particular bus to take you to work, then not being allowed to get on because it was already full up one day.

I think every single transit passenger would LOVE for the bus company to add more buses to the busiest routes, but that takes a lot of money and until that time, people will cram in them like sardines.

...where by state law, no one under 21 was allowed in any bar, and restaurants with bars had to have the bar in a separate room (usually kept separate with a swinging, saloon-style door).

Even though I'm now in a state that does not have such restrictions, I wouldn't be taking my (hypothetical) children to a bar. People need to have some common sense--children do not belong in an establishment whose primary business is serving beverages they legally cannot drink. It's not really beneficial for the kid to hang out with a bunch of drunk people, it's annoying for the patrons who come to a bar to get away from kids for an evening, and it denies the kid one more thing to look forward to when he grows up.

But if you're ever in Indianapolis, you can be pretty much guaranteed a child-free evening at a restaurant, even at a chain family restaurant like Chili's or TGI Fridays...just ask to be seated in the bar!

The thing is (and Ralph already touched on this)...what you're talking about has really only been the case for the past 60 years. Before that, people who worked in the cities, by and large, lived in the cities.

I don't think that cities are made richer or more creative or vibrant or whatever for being the sole provence of young, single, childless, artists/ writers/ musicians in their 20s. Actually, such a city sounds as completely insufferably smug and pretentious as the worst Stepford-like suburbs. I'm of the belief that the young childless artists and the hipster parents (and the old people, and the gays, and etc. etc. etc.) could all peacefully co-exist if they'd all just live and let live, show common courtesy to each other, and remember that NONE of them owns the entire neighborhood.

By the way, I'm 29, single, childless, and a struggling writer who moved to a city at the age of 23.

Whoever wrote that these are new and unneccessary features on strollers is an idiot.

The old-fashioned baby buggies had both. The big wheels are to get over uneven streets and through snow, mud, etc., and the suspension system is to keep the kid from being jiggled so much while out for a walk.

Those are pretty practical features, especially if you live in a city where you do most of your errands on foot.