I'm gonna make a guess as to why the plane Patrick Smith was flying to Prince Edward Island was full of non-English speaking tourists from Japan.

They're all fans of "Anne of Green Gables"??

Being a Malaysian, I've often thought it funny how Americans find the Smart ForTwo to be as odd as an Alien Spacecraft. From Dan Brown to Travel Channel program hosts. And now that it has actually landed on American shores, the oddity perception persists. I guess Asians have never really had a problem with driving tiny cars, because we have always had them on our roads. That and the fact that we don't earn quite as much as North Americans, makes it quite normal for us to buy them. On the other hand, I guess Americans instinctively deem them to be unsafe and too small for ordinary use, due to the tradition for big cars with big engines.

The idea that human activities needed to be balanced and moderated was already well-established by the 1940s. As early as the 18th Century, botanists in Mauritius, Jamaica and Cape Town were noting the problems arising from excessive forestry and overly intensive cultivation of sugar in the Caribbean.

I guess we're just more willing to accept risks, and assume that fundamentally, products are always going to be somewhat harmful and businesses greedy enough to take plenty of risks. It takes events of some awful magnitude, like the melamine milk thing, to make us pause a little, but only for a while.

Another thing that Asians seem to see in a completely different light is privacy and civil rights. As a Malaysian, I already have one of those identity cards that so many Americans and Europeans decry as state tyranny. It has a chip containing my fingerprints, digital photo, race, date of birth and address on it, and matches up with a big online database. All of us have been fingerprinted since 12, and younger kids are now fingerprinted even earlier. And they're already talking about adding DNA signatures to our records.

Citibank is a Godzilla in the Malaysian banking industry, too. This is where I live. Under Malaysian banking laws, foreign banks owned by foreign governments are generally restricted from operating as a full bank, although special dispensation can be given for political or diplomatic reasons. So, the Bank of China was given special privileges to open a branch here. If the legal scenario from Malaysia were to be repeated across the globe, then Citi and Bank of America (which has a smaller operation than Citi in this country) will be forced to shed much of their business, as suggested in this article.

There isn't any realistic alternative to Tina Fey for Sarah Palin. Even if the flick reads as a drama, the role should still be played SNL-style.

Glenn Close for Hillary.

Jamie Foxx for B. Obama.

No ideas for the rest...

Hello, Fiat technology is very much a part of both the Ferarri and Alfa Romeo marques, which are a part of the family that wounded Chrysler will soon join. Chrysler's muscle cars were but mere pretenders to the real GTOs from Northern Italy. To pick on the 500 as a symbol for all that Fiat and the Italian auto industry stands for is an utterly brainless form of bullying. It is brainless because many, if not most, of us know that the story of Italian - and Fiat - automaking is so much richer than just that little car with an engine in the boot. BTW, I just saw a sparkling, well-kept example of the 500 yesterday, and it's a lot nicer than this article might make you imagine it to be.

Way back in the mid-80s, noted sociologist Pierre Bourdieu tackled the subject of the housing market in France. Striking conclusions: 1) that governments had a huge amount of power in shaping the housing market, whether they admitted to or not and 2) at the time, the government made a large shift away from supporting renters towards home ownership, cutting the choices for a lot of people who should have been renters and not buyers at the time.

Considering this was France - a far more 'socialist' country than the U.S. (albeit at the height of Thatcher's influence worldwide) - you can imagine how much worse the situation is in America for people who should not be buying a house but are tipped into doing it because of policy bias. It's nothing new. Young people who have just started work should probably not be buying a house at a lower income level and with less savings in hand. There should probably be more flats or apartments in the market. But leave it to the free market and provide too little protection for the little buyers, and you end up with widespread misery. In this case, the free market has tended to create fewer - not more and better - choices for consumers.