I know a lesbian who wanted to own a Hummer. I pointed out to her that no self-respecting lesbian should want to own a car whose name was also slang for a blow job. She laughed.

Aww! Yay! And I remember the mine thing...and her standing on a rooftop in Argentina talking to the guy...also remember the very beginning of the series when she goes to talk to people in Spain...heh.

Sadly, TiVo does not seem to recognize "Destinos" as a valid title choice, and typing it in as a wishlist comes up with nothing. Sniff. It isn't called anything else, is it?

I figure I do my part by not owning a car. Saves society untold burdens. Everyone who calls themselves an environmentalist and still owns one, choosing to live in a place where they "have to" have one, sort of looks suspicious to me.

Speaking as a moderate environmentalist who owns a car... you know, there comes a point where I'm not willing to throw myself on my sword. I live a mile from my workplace downtown and a half mile from the grocery store, I walk when the weather's nice and there's enough light, or if I know I'm only going to buy milk or whatever, but environmentalism through guilt and suffering on average just irritates people in my experience.

Sadly, TiVo does not seem to recognize "Destinos" as a valid title choice, and typing it in as a wishlist comes up with nothing. Sniff. It isn't called anything else, is it?

I don't think so. Let me see what it shows up under for me.

It's "Destinos: An Introduction to Spanish" so I guess you must not get it. Sorry. You know, seriously, they just did the first of the recap episodes (the one about Spain). I'd be willing to download the rest to tape if you wanted - I'm grabbing them anyway.

New York and London would get awfully crowded if you had to live in a place where you didn't need a car to be a real environmentalist. IJS. (I did live without one for four years in Philly, commuting on foot, by bike, or on the trolley, but I took advantage of a consultant friend who let me borrow his car when he was traveling on business if I gave him rides to and from the airport. Without Lee's car, grocery shopping and having a social life would've been a challenge.)

More to the point would be pushing for increased fuel efficiency, and for more viable mass transit systems in places like Seattle. DH and I would love to cut back to one car, and to be able to commute to work via mass transit, but it's not really an option with the current skimpy system.

Ah, no, thanks, Katie, I don't think I'm desperate enough to bother someone else. It looks like they might show it on my PBS station at some other point (like in the fall) or something. We'll see. (I googled, and found out you can buy a DVD of the episodes! But it's $500!!!!)

(Hmm, and further searching reveals it's currently on "WETA Plus", which is a PBS station only available on digital cable. Somehow, that makes no sense to me...)

But Susan, you'll have light rail in 2009! Or possibly 2012, I can't remember now.

I have this whole theory about the difficulty of injecting mass transit ex post facto into a modern city, and it being well-nigh impossible, though that may be unfair to Portland. It's kind of interesting, living in Yakima - small city, obviously, but it had a trolley system once upon a time and you can still see some of the tracks and the overhead wires. Amazing the dinky places that used to have that kind of hard-wired public transportation.

That's what I meant, though, PMM. With everyone using cars, the pressure to create a usable public transportation service for the outskirts of a major city is much less. And it's not a matter of rich or poor, either; the best-served neighborhoods in New York are currently inhabited by "minorities" (I use the quotes because as a white Bronxite, I'm in a minority of 14% in my county, which bothers me not a bit.) There's subway stops every three blocks in the South Bronx, for example. And when the subways were built, starting 100 years ago next year, they went right through the poor neighborhoods first, like the Lower East Side.

I think it ties in to what Gar was saying. It's much more wasteful and inefficient for the municipality to maintain all those roads, policemen, troopers, snow removal, etc. than to run a few buses. But they won't because people don't have the inclination to ride a bus because they take an hour and a half to get downtown. So they don't ride the buses, and they get cut because nobody's riding them...vicious circle.

How can it take an hour and a half to go five miles? Are there no bus or diamond lanes? And if it's because the highway's too crowded, well, sorta proves the point.

Oh, and I was just using hyperbole in my OP. But you have to admit somebody with an environmental sticker on their SUV is somebody who deserves to be laughed at. And don't give me the kids line, there were five of us in my Dad's VW's and we all fit fine.

Ah, no, thanks, Katie, I don't think I'm desperate enough to bother someone else.

Yeah, I didn't think so, but I figured I'd offer. At least now you know all about the Happy Ending, though. (I seriously expected the old guy to expire on screen, but he did not.)

Oh, don't even get me STARTED on light rail. I think the project exists, not to give us actual transit, but to make sure the local talk show on our NPR affiliate never runs out of stuff to talk about.

But yeah, tough to add to an existing city, and to be fair, Seattle is tougher than most--basically two long, narrow, hilly spits of land, with a big fat lake between us and the Microsofty part of the suburbs, AND anything you build has to stand up to earthquakes.