I would like to make a rule that Senators and Congressmen have to make at least one of their trips to their home district every year by driving it. There is no way to see the country like you can going through it in a car.

Anybody remember Charles Kuralt's great "On The Road" series? Back when CBS news was watchable? Every place in America has a hundred stories. A "Best of" series is only available in used form on VHS, which is too bad.

The closest "Sonic" where I live is almost to Sacramento, but there's one only a short distance from my daughter's college so I've gotten to eat at one a number of times. The carhops actually wore roller skates!

Of course, back in my callow youth, it was the local A&W. I remember the little trays that hung on your car window.

Our local A&W converted to some Greek food thing a few years back, and it's a long drive to the next one. Too bad. There was nothing like a root beer in a frosted glass mug, with little bits of frozen root beer floating in it.

I could see entire hills covered with windmills when I worked at Mojave. They show up in the background sometimes in photos of Rutan's planes. I wonder if anyone has done research on bird problems with the "eggbeater" style of windmill versus the conventional kind.

Every Midwestern farm in the old days used to have one or more windmill, for pumping well water mostly. Some still do. The age of electricity arrived, and the government decided to pay to string wires for rural electrical power, something that would have been very expensive otherwise. Sometimes I wonder what might have happened with home wind generators if that hadn't been done.