In the past month, I have had occasion to make two longish trips (Miami-Michigan and NY-Michigan), one in a diesel Jetta and the other in a gasoline Passat, both very similar machines other than the diesel-gasoline engine difference.

The diesel averaged 48 mpg; the gas-powered car averaged 30. So the total cost of driving, say, 1000 miles in each, with gas at $4.23/gallon and diesel at $5.23/gallon (not the prices I actually paid, but let's just say) would be:

Diesel, 20.83 gallons * 5.23 = $108.94

Gas, 33.33 gallons * 4.23 = $140.99

So there you have it: diesel is still cheaper. With gas at $4.23, the price of diesel would have to rise above $6.76 for the diesel to cost more to operate. And that's highway driving: in the city, the diesel still gets 35-40 mpg, while the gas efficiency plummets to 20. (I prefer to bike.)

By the way, it's worth pointing out that in Europe (or Spain at least), they calculate fuel efficiency in terms of liters consumed per hundred kilometers, rather than kilometers per liter. I think that is a useful yardstick, and I'd like to see mileage in the US stated in terms of gallons per thousand miles. I think it might make some people sit up and take notice if they knew that a SUV used, say, 125 gallons per 1000 miles while a Prius (or a Jetta Diesel) used only 20. But that's another topic.

Must we explain jokes?

Read old copies of Punch if you want to see random (but true) examples of "only hilarious to the British." RB's parody is not so much of the British cartoons themselves as it is of American inability to understand them. ("Loo" -- hee hee!) The hedgehog is, as Hitchcock would have said, a MacGuffin.

For "Hugo", check out (for example) Garfield. Or better yet: http://garfieldminusgarfield.net/

Dean's 50-state strategy is, has been, will be great for the party. If I've understood things correctly, Clinton's advisors have been trash-talking Dean all along and dumping him as chair of the DNC would have been their first move. Great sign that Obama plans to keep him on board.

If "Occam's Razor" were literally correct --

Inflation, as measured the way it was in the '80s, and before, is at least 7 percentage points higher; and has been over the last 10 years.

-- then current prices would be 2.5 times what they were in 1998. That might be true of gasoline, diesel, maybe a couple of other things; but is it generally true for everything you buy in a year?

Go back a bit farther in US history and you'll get to the time, before the 12th Amendment was adopted, when the Electoral College elected the VP as the runner-up to the winning Presidential candidate.

That didn't work out so well in the election of 1800, which put TJ's nemesis Aaron Burr in the number 2 slot. Burr has gone down in history as the only sitting Vice President who actually aimed at and killed the guy he shot (that being his dueling partner Hamilton, the face on the $10 bill).

Burr was acquitted of murder in 1804, and three years later was acquitted of treason for his mysterious maneuvers in the Louisiana territory with his personal militia; all the same, history has not looked kindly on him.

In the end, the VP ought to work with the President, not against her. (Wishful pronoun thinking, there; one of these days, just not today.) If the presidential candidates can't make that call, maybe they shouldn't be elected, don't you think?

If the Dem. convention were to choose the Veep this year, odds are they would go with HRC as a runner-up prize: shades of Burr and Jefferson. Anyone who thinks VP Clinton would work well with Pres. Obama, please raise your hand.

I'm deeply allergic to conspiration-thinking (9-11 "truth" movement etc) but it is hard not to look at the rush to judgment in this case and conclude that: 1) the fix is in, and 2) the most obvious reason the govt is going all-out to convict and, if possible, execute these five now is to get rid of the witnesses/victims of the administration's torture program before a new administration enters.

About these guys being the "masterminds" of 9-11: from what I have previously read, in Salon and the Nation, about KSM, he is more likely to be a delusional paranoid megalomaniac than a "mastermind" of anything. In the course of CIA torture sessions, he took credit/blame for so many attacks that he would have to be a supervillain of comic-book proportions if he were telling even half truths.

Of course, if you get your news from the TV, all you hear is the administration's line, which enlessly parrots the "confessions" given under torture -- so what can you expect?

Best cartoon so far this year.

... no wonder the airlines don't serve them anymore

It is pretty clear from past comments by the brilliant legal scholar Antonin Scalia that he spends way too much time watching "24" -- and identifying with the Kiefer Sutherland character.

Frak (not "frack") -- if you care about how the BSG producers spell it, anyway.

Centurion (not "Centurian") -- if you care about how anybody spells it.

And, PS, Kara Thrace was not told that she would bring about the destruction of humanity or anything of the sort. She was told -- by the Hybrid, with a mad smile on her face -- that she was "the harbinger of death." The mystery of that phrase was explained a couple of episodes back: Kara Thrace's actions led to the destruction of the Cylon resurrection hub, so she was the harbinger of death -- for Cylons, not for humans. (This is a twist on one of the oldest oracle stories around, when the Delphic oracle told some ancient Greek general that if he went into battle, a great empire would fall; he went into battle, and his own empire fell. In Kara's case, it was just the opposite: she did bring death -- but to Cylons, not humans.)