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Byrd himself exemplified that change, moving from membership in the Ku Klux Klan as a young West Virginian to a supporter of civil rights measures as a seasoned statesman.

The comment no doubt gave a lot of other people pause as it did me. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I would have thought longer and deeper about the thesis had the footage of Byrd not been followed by a live studio shot about the oil spill.  On the set was one of the new news-hotties stretching her long legs from a tall chair facing the camera, chatting with Phillipe Cousteau Jr, grandson of the revered Jacques Cousteau.

Yes, Senator Byrd lived a long life. Long enough to die on a day when “news” comes from a nitwit in snakeskin high heels schmoozing a low-wattage, high-ancestry bullshitter about one of the worst environmental disasters on record.

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“Mr. Haney fought and won a 13-year legal battle against a man who said he had given him the idea for Trivial Pursuit when Mr. Haney picked him up hitchhiking. He won another suit against an author who claimed that Mr. Haney had taken questions from his books, something Mr. Haney readily acknowledged.

The judge’s reasoning: “You can’t steal trivia.”

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Proof:

–It really doesn’t matter that I can’t divide fractions.

–Running the quarter-mile in less than 60 seconds just one time was enough.

—The daily newspaper’s big front-page correction on my city council story is buried in a microfiche drawer in a basement. Far away.

–People forget bad perms.

–I never wonder if a man likes me.

These realizations, and easy access to Google, make me smart enough.

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We wait until a lot of cars blow up (Corvair, Pinto) or take off on their own (Toyota) or roll over (early SUVs) before we regulate ‘em. We get all pissy toward people (Ralph Nader in the ’60s) who try to help us stay safe (seat belts).

We’re weak-kneed when it comes to regulating things that any fool can see are dangerous, such as texting and talking on cells while driving. Some states with new laws against the latter are just handing out warnings to folks who work out of their cars, like on-the-road salespeople. Oh, please. Unless you’re a mobile day-trader, there is no job that won’t allow you to pull over for 4 minutes and make a call.

Now, according to Susan Saulny in  The New York Times, there’s a lot of meth cooking going on in back seats. Of moving cars.

What better way to stay under the radar, so to speak? You buy such small amounts of pseudoephedrine that no alarms go off at the store, and you cook it in the car, where nosy neighbors don’t get suspicious and turn you in. As long as you keep within the speed limits, wear your seatbelts and are not on the phone, the stretched-too-thin cops might miss the fact that you and your smurfer buddies are making–and indulging–in product. And then tossing the resulting trash out the window.

That meth-littering is the main point of the NYT story. And my only hope is that here in the Pacific Northwest, at least, people will nip this activity in the bud.  In this part of the world we are on trash like, well, flies on trash.

In Portland especially, we sort it. Boy, do we sort it. Our coffee grounds are composting before we set the mug down; our old tires are sneakers. I bought a sun hat the other day thinking it was straw. Wrong, it was made of recycled phone books. People here are terrified of losing daily newspapers, not because they read ‘em, but because they can be turned into bricks and then sports stadiums. (I made that last thing up, but it’s almost the truth.)

If there’s a new kind of trash in town, we’ll find a way to spin it into something else. And, in a couple of years, we’ll have a law on the books that forbids cooking in the back seat. Of course, by then it will have moved to light-rail cars.

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“Natural Elements” by Richard Mason (Knopf, 2008) –

The impulse to read this novel slowly to savor it belies its plot: A mother and daughter in contemporary London, each adjusting in her own way to the older woman’s move to a nursing home. Mason has a bold, uncanny ability to hijack the brainwaves of a driven middle-aged daughter; a mother with a complex past and other well-shaped characters, including the elder woman’s unlikely friends, from a devoted South African cabbie to a nerdish young librarian.

(For book reviews with more words, see my archive at The Seattle Times, where I worked for some years. I freelance for the paper as a reviewer and over the years have been assigned some terrific books.)

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