According to the news a week or two ago, Priuses are now available off the lot, without a backlog, and Toyota has expressed surprise and disappointment that they aren't selling faster. That's why I expressed dismay.

I think it's telling that the only hybrid produced by an American company is a Ford, using the obsolete first edition Prius engine. American automakers have abandoned the concept of innovation in search of higher quarterly earnings.

Fact: I've driven my Prius 108,000 miles in three years.

Fact: Living near the Canadian border in a northern city, I've averaged slightly better than 50 mpg during that entire time, including driving in temperatures colder than 30 degrees below zero Fahrenheit.

Fact: I received my $1500 extended warranty back last week because my car had required ZERO in work except oil changes and tire rotations by the time we hit 100,000 miles.

Fact: I've camped in my car, which fits all my food, clothing, photography equipment, tent and camping materials for a week with room for my air mattress and sleeping bag for nights when it's too rainy to tent camp.

Fact: There is no other car in the world that would allow me to do all this while getting this kind of mileage and the amount of emissions the Prius has.

Fact: Sometimes companies like to make a profit.

Fact: Despite wanting to make a profit, Toyota has done a great deal, including subsidizing the cost of the Prius, to give this car the best chance it could in the wasteful American market.

I bought my Prius (which is HUGE compared to the Ford Aspire I'd had before it) because it was comfortable, drove well, and felt like the right thing to do. If I ever buy an SUV out of fear, I guess the terrorists really will have won.

I was actually talking about highway terrorists. I've been driving since 1974, when we had the at-the-time smallest car on the road, a Ford Pinto. Then we moved up to a Chevy Citation. I've got a long history of riding small cars on increasingly aggressive American highways. So far I've never been the driver in an accident, and so far I've never regretted my decision. And so far, the only people I knew who were killed in accidents were in SUVs. When it comes right down to it, statistics aren't all that genuinely predictive of what is likely to happen to us as individuals. Being a careful, defensive driver is much more likely to ensure your safety than driving a gas guzzler.

>>it will probably have lots of horsepower and go from 0-60 in 6 seconds. And that have no effect on the gas mileage, because if all it takes is 40 HP to travel at 80 MPH, that is all the gas it will consume, whether the peak HP is 300 or 90.

Poppycock.

I grew up in Chicago, and the first time I drove on my own I witnessed a fatal accident. My cousin died in a car crash in 1982. So I guess there were at least a few dangers associated with highways even back then.

--apparently more of a geezer than I knew

c5kolb, I hope you get a star for that post.

>The two major causes of high gas consumption at cruising speed are wind drag and pumping losses.

Yep. You're talking cruising speed now, and are quite correct. But before you were talking about acceleration. The faster drivers accelerate from a stop, the poorer their gas mileage.

>the frictional heating of the brakes is directly equivalent to wasted gasoline.

You're exactly right about this on normal cars. Hybrids use this energy to recharge the battery--that's why hybrids don't need to be charged conventionally.

Please don't fly in any small planes to Hibbing, Minnesota. Bad things seem to happen to people who tell the truth.

I wonder how much unhappiness is due to, as a couple of other posters noted, a difficult upbringing in which you learn strategies for dealing with people that turn out to not have such good survival value in the world at large. Even our relationship to money has its underpinnings in our childhood.

Best movie to watch if you want to stop smoking is Dead Again, when Kenneth Branaugh's character gives Andy Garcia's character, a man dying of emphysema, a cigarette. Garcia sticks it in his tracheotomy and breathes deeply. He hands the pack back to Branaugh who says to keep it--he just quit. When my teenagers watched that movie, their eyes grew huge with horror. They never started.

>>She was ill for a little while, but now she's fine. That's all anyone needs to know.

I'm a mother (and I hope a darned good one) with three children in their 20s. And as a mother, I would be very upset if a young woman moved into my daughter or son's apartment with her mother, claiming a mysterious malady. Of course roommates bring guests, and sometimes those guests stay a week or even longer. But this is AFTER their roommates have had a chance to get to know them a while. Also, as the sister of a convicted felon who has children in their mid-20s, and the daughter of a psychopath, I know how dangerous mothers and their children can be. Although this is not a likely scenario, as Cary notes, it IS a possible one. Whether we're dealing with a real and tragic illness or something trumped up and sinister or something wholly innocuous, these people have no right to move into someone else's home without being up front about what's going on. Period.

You'd be perpetuating racist attitudes by not allowing him to sublet. Only your landlord can perpetuate his own racist attitudes.

Does your name happen to be Holly Golightly?

I think it would be more likely Ron's mother than either Ron or Hermione who dies. That would hit Harry plenty hard. JKR came up with pretty much the whole plot while she was a young mother, and I just don't think she'd make one of the principal children die.