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Politics : The Donkey's Inn -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Patricia Trinchero who wrote (3653)	4/16/2002 2:29:25 AM
From: Mephisto	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 15516

Look forward to hearing from you! Thanks! I know how to clean up the Dutch iris. I am unsure about the Siberians. How's your garden? The weather here has been awful: cold and rainy. The weeks grow though!

To: Patricia Trinchero who wrote (3653)	4/17/2002 12:27:28 AM
From: Mephisto	Respond to of 15516

Road hogs Los Angeles dispatch A monstrous breed of automobile stalks the highways of LA, but one activist is determined to make it extinct, writes Duncan Campbell The Guardian Tuesday April 16, 2002 One of the great banes of life in California is the Sport Utility Vehicle, the SUV, the enormous four-wheel-drive cars that are also becoming increasingly popular in Britain and elsewhere in Europe. They take up an enormous amount of space on the road. They clog up parking places. They use an enormous amount of petrol and do an enormous amount of damage to the environment. Because they are marketed as a safe family car - that is, safe, as in killing other people in a crash rather than yourself - their popularity has grown. Most car manufacturers now look to them as a big moneymaker. Sometimes it seems as though every freeway is populated entirely by people in SUVs talking into their cellphones. There has been some opposition. Websites devoted to attacking the SUV have been set up. Last year, Earth Liberation activists in Eugene, Oregon set fire to a dealership there and destroyed $1m (about £700,000) worth of SUVs. But now a more subtle approach has been initiated with dramatic results. Over recent months, SUV drivers in Los Angeles have found a small printed card stuck on their windscreens. It reads thus: "Road-hogging, gas-guzzling, air-fouling vulgarian! Clearly you have an extremely small penis or you wouldn't drive such a monstrosity. For the adequately endowed, there are hybrids or electrics. 310 798 1817." If you dial the number, a voice says: "Piggy, piggy, piggy. If you can afford one of those huge new SUVs you can afford something that doesn't suck all the air out of the planet and spit it back black ... It's really creepy that you drive that thing and I just wanted to let you know." The author of the note and the owner of the telephone number turns out to be one Amy Alkon, a journalist who writes a syndicated advice column (advicegoddess.com, which shows Ms Alkon kissing a frog). Fed up with all the SUVs in our streets, Alkon wanted to promote the idea that they were deeply uncool. Last week, she published the results of her wheeze in LA's New Times. Since she had given the number of her voice mail (see above - and she said she is happy to have it published), she has had hundreds and hundreds of calls. Some are just what you might expect from a typical SUV driver: "Hello, psycho! ... You're a freak ... Shove all those cute little cards up your ass ... I will file a police report against you ... I'm gonna go to the police department right now." But there have also been some sweet, contrite messages from people who say that they have decided to give up their SUVs. "I had one call from someone who said: 'You're right - I'm getting rid of my big thing'," said Ms Alkon. But she has also had one from a man who told her that if he caught her "he would rape me - even if I was ugly." But she had no regrets. "It's been so much fun," said Ms Alkon, who comes originally from the suburbs of Detroit and is 38 - "I'm the only woman in Los Angeles who will tell you her age." She said that she checked her voice mail 20 times a day and there were always around five responses. Many were from people who wanted copies of the card so that they could do the same thing themselves. Similar campaigns are now starting elsewhere. Ms Alkon, who used to work for the Daily News in New York, said that she hoped to spread the idea internationally that it was terminally uncool to drive an SUV in the same way that the notion that it was terminally cool for teenagers to wear baggy pants somehow spread across the planet. "I want people to think when they see someone in an SUV - 'What a jerk!'" Who knows, a combination of the cards and a world oil shortage could see the roads liberated by the end of the year. (Just for the record, the Guardian company car in LA is a modest '99 Toyota Corolla.) Email duncan.campbell@guardian.co.uk