Excerpt from Ray Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451", copyright 1950 AD....

[Guy Montag accompanies Clarisse McClellan to her home along the moving sidewalk]

"I sometimes think drivers don't know what grass is, or flowers, because they never see them slowly," she said. "If you showed a driver a green blur, Oh yes! he'd say, that's grass! A pink blur! That's a rose garden! White blurs are houses. Brown blurs are cows. My uncle drove slowly on a highway once. He drove forty miles an hour and they jailed him for two days. Isn't that funny, and sad, too? ...My uncle was arrested another time - did I tell you? - for being a pedestrian."

- The New York Times says "Frightening in its implications... Mr. Bradbury's account of this insane world, which bears many alarming resemblances to our own, is fascinating."

- Success Machine says "Its not safe to ride my bike in Toronto. It's not safe to drive a small car on freeways with 18-wheelers. How can our transportation system survive an oil shortage if smaller cars and lower speeds cannot be accomodated safely or legally?"

Introducing the Hybrid Recumbant Vehicle:

Fuel economy = 200+ mpg
Cargo capacity = 150 kg max.
Empty weight = 40 kg
Top speed = 30 miles/hr
Range = 250 miles
Propulsion = hybrid peddle- or gas engine-powered
Options: two-seater version available

All it's missing is a lightweight plastic/canvas enclosure to protect from rain, snow, or spray from the road ...and an adequate economic climate to own the road.

This vehicle outperforms every other vehicle on the road in terms of vehicle cost, fuel economy, range, greenhouse gas & smog-forming emissions, and can get me to my destination faster than public transportation. It takes me about 1 hour to get to work via subway & bus. My place of work is nowhere near 30 miles from where I live. If I had a scooter that had a top speed of 30 mph I would get there faster. That's the truth.

And yet I would be arrested if I tried to drive this on the highway, simply because it can't keep up with the other traffic.

Let's hope that, like the people in Fahrenheit 451, people in the future don't also live in a world thrown into darkness...

[Guy Montag enters his unlit house]

"Without turning on the light he imagined how this room would look. His wife stretched out on the bed, uncovered and cold, like a body displayed on the lid of a tomb, her eyes fixed to the ceiling by invisible threads of steel, immovable. And in her ears the little Seashells, the thimble radios tamped tight, and an electronic ocean of sound, of music and talk and music and talk coming in, coming in on the shore of her unsleeping mind. The room was indeed empty. Every night the waves came in and bore her off on their great tides of sound, floating her, wide-eyed, toward morning. There had been no night in the last two years that Mildred had not swum that sea, had not gladly gone down in it for the third time....."

..."How long you figure before we save up and get the fourth wall torn out and a fourth wall-TV put in? It's only two thousand dollars." [she says]

"That's one-third of my yearly pay." [he says]

"It's only two thousand dollars," she replied. "And I should think you'd consider me sometimes. If we had a fourth wall, why it'd be just like this room wasn't ours at all, but all kinds of exotic people's rooms. We could do without a few things."

"We're already doing without a few things to pay for the third wall. It was put in only two months ago remember?"

Sick.