James Fallows

... but boy, am I a sucker for the TV ad campaign they're running nonstop now. Of course I love the "Romance of Flying" ad, below, featuring the melodic stylings of Percy Faith:


Yet if anything, the "Age of the Great Trains" ad is even more pleasing. While it doesn't have any airplanes, its backup music is a version of "Mr. Sandman" by the indie group and long-time YouTube favorite Pomplamoose that I don't get tired of hearing. (Recent NPR interview with Pomplamoose here.) Half the airtime on Pomplamoose videos seem to feature the drummer / instrumentalist Jack Conte, who is very talented but is not really that great to watch. Fortunately the other half is of the singer Nataly Dawn, whose multi-frame shots on the screen usually show her singing all parts of a multi-track harmony at once, as below. (And Conte below her, so you see what I'm talking about. Before anyone points it out: yes, yes, I realize that if we produced music videos in my household, people would similarly be wishing that my wife got most of the airtime.)





Pomplamoose singing Mr. Sandman on YouTube here, from which the clip above is taken.  the "trains" ad, with them on backup, here and below.

The combination of a 50-year-old original recording (Percy) and a retro cover put out last year (Pomplamoose) works nicely, at least to my taste. Too obviously derivative of the Don Draper-era? I don't care. Sometimes I am skeptical of the power of ads to change my attitude toward a company -- I mean, except for wonderful display ads in high-end magazines and in their associated serious yet trendy high-end web sites. But these do a lot to change my attitude.

Previous discussion has covered whether Arizona's new immigration law is more Chinese in its inspiration, or in fact more French. Here, which includes links to earlier items. Now, thanks to Robert Mintz, whom I've known since we both survived the smoggy SoCal of the 1960s (and a simultaneous note from Joseph Hearst), literary evidence on the French side.

It's a passage from a 1930s-era essay by James Thurber, called "Wild Bird Hickcock and His Friends." Thurber loved reading French pulp-novel versions of American Westerns, and he described one of them thus:

There were, in my lost and lamented collection, a hundred other fine things, which I have forgotten, but there is one that will forever remain with me. It occured in a book in which, as I remember it, Billy the Kid, alias Billy the Boy, was the central figure. At any rate, two strangers had turned up in a small Western town and their actions had aroused the suspicions of a group of respectable citizens, who forthwith called on the sheriff to complain about the newcomers. The sheriff listened gravely for a while, got up and buckled on his gun belt, and said, "Alors, je vais demander ses cartes d'identité!'' There are few things, in any literature, that have ever given me a greater thrill than coming across that line.

Thurber's essay does not seem to be available online, but this passage shows up in many places.

French rocker Johnny Hallyday (right), as a cowboy:



To wax serious for a moment, although I would bet anything that the new AZ law will be thrown out by some court along the way, evidence suggests that for now it is more popular than not with the US public. The larger point is that immigration is about the only topic that is more complicated -- both as a political matter and as a question of substance -- than dealing with health care. The American economy is geared to having a large quasi-legal or illegal immigrant presence; many Americans like the economic results but don't like the economic, social, legal, etc consequences. Since the US is not going to deport millions upon millions of immigrants, any conceivable deal requires BOTH a promise to restrict future illegal flow and something short of mass roundups and eviction for those already here. But practically no one believes the "this time we really mean it" promises about future border control. And so on.

To sympathize with the AZ officials, they're responding to a genuine national dilemma. Still, their law sounds French. The new face of the 48th state: Hallyday again, about to ask for cartes d'identité.

I mentioned yesterday that if Southern California could deal with its  horrendous smog problems of the 1950s and 1960s, then perhaps there was hope for Beijing and other big Chinese cities too. A reader originally from Mexico City -- which, when I visited in the 1980s, rivaled today's Beijing or even Linfen (Shanxi province) for grimness of air -- says that his home town also offers a positive example:

I'd point you to this article from the Washington Post about Mexico City (where I'm sure you've been), which has made dramatic improvements in cutting pollution.
 
As someone who grew up in Mexico City during the worst of it, I definitely remember being at school and not being allowed to play outside because the pollution was so bad. But even though car ownership in the city probably increased and traffic has probably remained the same or worse, my visits in recent years back home do bear out the dramatic improvements that the city has made. You're in a better position than me to judge how China's cities compare resource-wise to Mexico City but I think it's heartening that the change was able to happen in Mexico in relatively not that long -- maybe about 10 or 15 years. With the right tools -- and a likely more forceful government -- it seems possible to me that China's cities can experience the same.

Mexico City, in its heyday:



And a reader who now lives in Suzhou, Jiangsu province, adds:

When I arrived in Shanghai in 2004, my first thought as we drove along the highway leaving Shanghai Pudong Int'l was: this looks like the Southern California of my childhood. I was born in 1952, so I remember the smog alert days when schools kept kids indoors for recess.

It gives me hope, too, especially when I imagine a time ten years from now when all the electric mopeds are joined by electric cars, and solar, wind, and nuclear alternatives really start to cut in to the share of electricity generated by coal. The Chinese leadership has the cash to finance the necessary changes, and they know that continued growth--and thus, their hold on power--depends on it. So yes, I am hopeful.

The point here is not Polyannaism about China. The country's environmental problems are, in my view, the major threat to its continued development and the major challenge its growth poses for the world. But it's worth recognizing that other societies have faced this problem - albeit at different stages of development -- and done something about it. It's all in keeping with the Chinese government's environmental "white paper" I quoted before the Olympics: "The environmental situation is still grave in China though with some positive development."

I realize that as a web-site topic, the new Arizona immigration law is about running its course -- even before its effects in the real world kick in. But before we say good bye to it (previously  here and here and here and here), two more reader reactions, on the shared theme of unintended consequences. First, about which people will find the "show me your papers" request trickiest to deal with:

The truly entertaining bit about the new papers-please regime in Arizona is that it's actually harder for Americans to demonstrate that they're legally in the US than it is for anyone else: to a zeroth-order approximation, no American has a passport (the most recent figure I've seen is 25%) or citizenship card, let alone carries it with them.  Driver's licenses and social security cards don't demonstrate anything about the holder's legal presence.  In contrast, someone who is illegally in Arizona and might well already have an illicit social security card has little downside to acquiring knockoffs of whatever documents the local authorities want: I predict Arizona's next booming industry will be forgery.

Now, from a reader who says it's not quite right to compare the new Arizona to Communist China:

I empathize with your misgivings over legislation that would allow law enforcement officers the right to demand identity papers from whomever they meet in the street. Meaning that an individual must have on him or her/ self her national ID card or a passport (for a foreigner). That is the case of France where I live.  The French must always have their National ID card on them - for the police can demand to see it at any and all times. 

Foreigners, in principle, must always have a piece of ID on them - like a passport. I never carry this with me - in 14 years of living here, I've never had my passport on me except when I've been on my way to the airport and going abroad.  But I'm white and look (sometimes sound) French of Gaullish stock. The police, in the vast majority of cases, stop and demand ID papers from youngish (under 40) males of African or Arab descent, be they French nationals or no.

It is not a well-looked upon practice of the police, but the French aren't adamant enough against it to seek its abolition. As far as I understand, such identity checks have been a long staple of police work in France going back to the Revolutionary/Napoleonic era wherein the State underwent a reinforcement of its prerogatives over the citizenry.

The immigration bill will, paradoxically/ironically, make the libertarian/Goldwaterian Arizona resemble France which is prone to double up on control measures despite its laxist ways in enforcing "rules" (ie, concerning smoking, driving, paying taxes, etc...).

If the Democrats had any sense of panache, they would point out that in conservative politics the only thing more wounding that saying someone's system is like the Communists' is saying that it has that certain je ne sais quoi.

Here was the typical view out my window in Beijing through the first half of 2008, leading up to the Olympics, as highlighted maybe a million times on this site:




This picture thanks to reader Robert Bott, who sends a link to an LA Times archive of "smog in LA" pictures that show how the Southland looked before the big cleanup of roughly the 1970s onward.

The fumy shot above is before my time, but I certainly remember conditions sort of like it in the 1960s. For instance, one high school tennis tournament in Pomona when it seemed hard even to see across the net (the serves came out of nowhere) and it burned your throat simply to breathe.

Why is this good news for Beijing? Well, because it shows that in fact things can be cleaned up. This is the same lesson as taught by the improvement in London air quality from Dickens's time to now, or in Chicago's environment, or Tokyo's. And why is it not so consoling? Because it took decades for LA and California -- and they were already rich when they were starting. They also were not just on the cusp, as Beijing and the rest of China are, of a huge boom in automobile ownership and the movement of the peasantry into mechanized urban life. So maybe the proper sentiment is not so much "good news" as "good luck!" -- as explained during the Olympic year here.

I will leave to Andrew Sullivan, who has the advantage of being an actual Englishman, the live-blogging duties for the Brown-Cameron-Clegg debate. But from having watched and written about a zillion of these things in American politics (eg here and here and here and here), let me make two quick points while seeing the BBCAmerica live stream:

1. This really is different from a US presidential debate, because (based on my half hour's exposure) it really is about policies and arguments. Or if you prefer, slogans -- but in any case, the speakers are mainly addressing each other, rather than (as is often sane for US candidates) performing in sequential solos to the camera. The timeless -- and accurate -- lore of US political debates is that they're not about policies. They are about the public's getting a sense of the person and deciding how they feel about him or her. That may be good and it may be bad, but it's how things are. The Brits so far may not really be advancing the overall level of public knowledge, but they're acting as if policy differences are the point of the exchange, rather than scoring one of the "You're no Jack Kennedy" "There you go again"-type dramatic moments on which US debates have often turned.

2. Gordon Brown is really, really terrible as a public figure. Every time he wags his head scoldingly "No, No" when the opponents are speaking, he must lose another 500 votes. No policy judgment here. Just saying that -- based on this sample, plus these past few days' "bigot" disaster -- this is someone with neither aptitude nor (apparently) training as a TV-era public figure. The more that the general election becomes "presidential," the harder it is to imagine that people will choose to have him around for a few more years as the main figure to listen to in the news.

That is all. Over to Andrew.

UPDATE: Brown's final words, which were also the final words of the debate, were a quite attention-getting "a week from now, I will be out of office" (in not exactly that form). It was an emotional roll of the dice but -- I say based on zero knowledge of the dynamics of the British electorate -- likely at best to add a note of pathos rather than to draw much support.

In general my policy is: if Andrew Sullivan has mentioned something on his site, there is no need for anyone else to refer to it, since the word has already been spread far and wide.

An exception, out of enthusiasm, for his recent allusion to and clip from the British series The Thick of It. British humor is distinguished by being genuinely crueler than the watered-down Yank version. Compare the Ricky Gervais and Steve Carell versions of The Office and you immediately see the difference. The Thick of It is like a West Wing in which everyone ends up humiliated and embarrassed and stripped of pretense -- and if you don't think the result is funny, you have a more elevated soul than I do (or most of the population of the UK). The film In The Loop, by the same director and some of the same actors, was another not-quite-as-vicious version. This is Thick of It:



The absolutely humiliating real-life sequence of Gordon Brown unctuously chatting up a constituent and then haughtily dismissing her once in the car (but still miked up) is almost too perfect a sample of a Thick of It moment. Find this series and watch it. (My wife and I originally did thanks to our recent-grad friend Sophie, who came across it while working in London).

UPDATE: I knew there was a scene from Season 1 of Thick of It that was exactly like Gordon Brown's current disaster. Someone has just put it up on YouTube. Can Brown have been the only person in the politically-involved UK not to have watched this show?

Following previous evidence that the two places are becoming one here and here and here. (Maybe plate-tectonic movement will eventually shift Arizona until it's off the coast of Zhejiang province? That would solve one adjoining-country immigration problem for Arizona, but perhaps open up another.) A reader who lived for years in Hangzhou reports that at the upcoming Shanghai World Expo, the city whose patterns of daily life will stand for the North American continent as a whole will be... Phoenix! The reader points to this Wikipedia entry:

In the [Expo's] Urban Dwellers pavilion, video clips narrate the exemplary stories of six real families. The continents are represented by their home cities of Paris (Europe), São Paulo (Latin America), Phoenix, Arizona (North America), Lijiang City (Asia), Melbourne (Oceania), and Ouagadougou (Africa). The circumstances of life of the six families are presented in five chapters concentrating on the issues of home, work, relationship, education, and health.

Artist's conception of the Urban Dwellers site, with sky colors taken from real life:


The reader adds:

Wonder what the "real family" will look like!  hehe.  I'll be there to check it out in person next month.  I'll make sure to bring my papers with me that day!

I'll be there too next month, and the combined Chinese/Arizona forcefield will make me extra sure to have my "papers" close at hand.
___
For the record: I have absolutely nothing against Arizona, where I have been on countless happy visits, starting with annual Boy Scout camping trips from age 11 onward. But I am proud to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Jeb Bush and Lindsey Graham in saying that this is an embarrassing, un-American law.

Once we learned that the TSA was investing heavily to equip airports around the country with hundreds of new "full-body" scanners, also known as Advanced Imaging Technology, or AIT, machines, what news item did we know, sooner or later, was bound to appear?

How about the flat-out judgment of the person in charge of airline security in Israel that the whole idea is preposterous and another illustration of easily-thwarted, Maginot Line-style, tech-heavy "security theater" thinking. As this person, Rafi Sela, told Canadian authorities last week (according to the Vancouver Sun):


In his own words:

"I don't know why everybody is running to buy these expensive and useless machines. I can overcome the body scanners with enough explosives to bring down a Boeing 747," Rafi Sela told parliamentarians probing the state of aviation safety in Canada.

"That's why we haven't put them in our airport," Sela said, referring to Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion International Airport, which has some of the toughest security in the world.

Sela, former chief security officer of the Israel Airport Authority and a 30-year veteran in airport security and defence technology, helped design the security at Ben Gurion.

So we face the timeless question of figuring out how to weigh competing claims. On the one hand, we have "this will work!" reassurances from an agency whose ability to make common-sense decisions we observe each time we go to the airport, backed by government contractors with a big new procurement order to defend -- and both of them arguing that this new technology will really solve a criminal/ terrorist/ human-network problem. On the other hand, we have the guy in charge of Israel's airport security, saying that reliance on machines is a mirage, that the real answer lies in intelligence and savvy, that capital-heavy, static tech solutions simply invite clever opponents to work around them, and so on. And to boot, Mr. Security, Bruce Schneier, is on the same side.

TSA + defense contractor + security theater, vs Israeli expert + Schneier + common sense. Hmmm, I don't know what to believe.

In response to this item, discussing the judgment calls that Chinese security forces make when asking for a foreigner's "papers," and what lessons their practice may hold for Arizona policemen planning to enforce the state's new immigration law, an American academic who asks not to be named sends this account:

A quick follow-up to the second emailer's comment that Chinese authorities are "looking for people with subversive ideas or tendencies, not people who are simply present illegally." This was not my experience in Tianjin, a large but less-known city near Beijing.

While I was visiting my wife (who was living in Tianjin continuously for a year), the police dropped by unannounced several times to spot check that everyone in the apartment had registered their passport at the local police station (required by law within 24 hours of arrival).

On one visit, I had registered, and on another, I hid in the bedroom. The process for registering took about 3 hours, and it was clear that the station bureaucrats were not used to doing it. So it seemed to be an individual tic of an aggressive police officer rather than a system-wide policy. But that just points up the problem of granting such wide authority under Chinese and Arizona law: when you make enforcement discretionary, you're ensuring that enforcement will be uneven, subjective, unpredictable, and thus open to abuse.

And now, from a reader in Texas:

Houston's local talk radio shows are now warning that all those Mexicans will now be fleeing AZ and movin' to Houston.

I wrote back to ask: Were the talk shows using this as a reason to oppose the Arizona law? Or instead to emulate it in Texas? The answer was what I expected (but it's worth being sure):

It was definitely made as an inspiration to follow it.

As a matter of jurisprudence, party politics, economics, inter-American relations, and social comity, this story is going to be unfolding for quite a long time.

In response to this item two days ago, several eagle-eyed readers noticed that there perhaps there was the slightest teensy difference between the likely workings of Arizona's new immigration law and the realities of daily life inside Communist China.

You got me! I was actually trying to make a small joke -- and half mockingly, but half seriously too, point out that American life was about to acquire an element familiar in much of the rest of the world, the authorities' request to "show me your papers." And that the comparison holds despite the zillion obvious differences between the two situations. (China is a country hard to get into, and where it's easy to spot foreigners once they're inside. The US is a country easy to get into, and where it's hard to spot foreigners once they're inside. Etc.)

Now two comments: one from a reader who gets the item's intent and goes on to propose a brilliant practical solution; and another from a reader who wants to point out the China/Arizona differences but still argues that Arizona's law is a bad idea.

You compared the situation Hispanics in Arizona are soon to face, with the advent of the new immigration law there, with daily life for foreigners in China, being required to have proof of immigration status available on demand. Here in Japan, as you know, we foreigners are also required to carry our passports or registration cards, though I've been stopped and asked to produce mine only twice in the fifteen years I've lived here.

I feel certain that your sardonic point - that liberty-worshipping Americans will soon be able to look up to China as a comparatively more enlightened society with regard to civil liberties - will be widely misunderstood. The responses will likely fall into two main categories: 1) People who think you're saying that it's perfectly reasonable to expect all civilians to be prepared to prove their immigration status on demand, especially since it's only Hispanics that really need to worry about it - these people will either congratulate you for agreeing with them or be furious with you for saying such a thing; and 2) People who detect the irony in your last paragraph but patiently explain that the Chinese authorities would be more assiduous about examining foreigners' papers if illegal immigration were really a concern there. 

Of course, in most places in China (and almost everywhere in Japan), marching around demanding to see proof of immigration status would be a very inefficient way of finding illegal immigrants, since it's so difficult to get in and stay in the country from just about wherever everyone else in the world is from, but the same technique would be much more efficient in a border state like Arizona.

What I hope will happen is that the Arizona law is enforced with the same single-mindedness of the TSA's approach to airport security. Once all Arizonans are required to present their papers daily to every law enforcement officer that crosses their path, will people wonder whether this cost is worth the "benefit" of a society that is free of undocumented foreigners? Will Arizonans who feel that they are "obviously" not illegal aliens begin, I don't know, sporting American flag lapel pins at all times, or wearing a sign around their neck saying "I AM AN AMERICAN"? It won't work, of course, because such accessories will quickly become popular with bona fide illegal immigrants as well. Maybe Arizona could pass a new law requiring American flag lapel-pin suppliers to verify the immigration status of anyone who buys one, or maybe we'll have to carry a special permit that entitles us to wear lapel pins or signs around our neck. It sounds pretty awful, but that's the price of liberty.

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In the two months since our site's redesign, I've mentioned more than a few times that the "categories" feature of our previous layout would someday be restored. Now it is in fact back. My thanks to our web/tech team. This means that, for instance, if you wanted to see all postings about the Icelandic volcano eruption earlier this month, you'd click on the "volcano" category, here. Full list of categories at lower right side of this page.

This past weekend, because of a tech error of unknown origin, the "comments" feature of this site was turned on. The reason I consider that an error, and asked to have it turned off again, is explained after the jump, which is a recapitulation of a point I originally made in (yes!) the comments section of Ta-Nehisi Coates's site. A good comments section -- and TNC's is great -- requires attention, tending, and discipline; and I am so often away from the Internet, and so short on "real" writing time even when connected, that I don't want to take on that responsibility. These past few days are an example. Because of travel and other headaches, I have been mainly offline through the 48 hours since putting up this previous item, likening Arizona's new civil-liberties policy to China's. You can't supervise a comment section that way.

While I did want the comment function to be turned off, I did not intend that the comments already posted should be removed. But because of another tech error, they apparently have been. My intention was to answer them. I do realize that it's not in keeping with the Web Spirit of Transparency to remove things once they have appeared. In any case, this is a periodic reminder of the rationale behind the no-comment policy. I will, in a few minutes, try to answer some of the mail I've received about that Arizona item. Thanks for your interest and attention.

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If my forebears were from Mexico, Honduras, Peru, I would have one way of imagining how the new Arizona immigration law might affect me. How could a policeman be sure, on sight, that I hadn't just sneaked across the Sonoran desert from Mexico? Why shouldn't he ask for my papers, just to find out?

Although my forebears are instead from Scotland, England, Germany, I can still imagine a little of what it would be like. I just have to think back to being in China.

The situations are different in one obvious way. In contrast to law-enforcement officers in Arizona, the Chinese authorities didn't have to waste time wondering whether I was a citizen. One glance told them where I stood. (I understand that there are some Caucasian-looking Chinese citizens, but they are scarce.) The only judgment call was whether they should bother to check whether, well, my "papers were in order," in the phrase we all know from WW II movies.

If they had checked very often, I would have been in trouble. In theory, foreigners are always supposed to carry their passports (as Chinese citizens are supposed to carry their identity cards). In practice, I almost never did. When checking in for a flight or registering at a hotel in China, sure: Without a passport, you couldn't do either thing. But when at "home" in Shanghai or Beijing my wife and I kept our passports in our apartment's safe. The theoretical risk of being asked for documents was outweighed by the truly dire potential consequences of our passports getting lost or stolen.

Once, this policy led to minor embarrassment.* Once, it nearly got us into a serious jam.

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1) Usually when I mention an item in a new issue of The Atlantic, I make sure to add "subscribe!" Half schtick, half serious - and the remaining half serious too. This month, I'll say for variety: check out the newsstand version of our May issue. It's a long book, which I have read obsessively this past week. It is truly a magnificent work.

The China Daily will always be my favorite newspaper. But after the jump, for reasons of taste (mild profanity), is one more reminder of why The Onion will always be in contention. I think the story really captures the essence of the US-China rivalry, especially as seen by the rest of the world.

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Back in February I mentioned how great it was that Bob Schapiro and his team had received two NY Emmy nominations for the "On the Frontlines: Doing Business in China" series that Bob had worked on and invested in for years. We ran many segments from the series on this site last summer. They are all in the "Doing Business in China" category of posts, and as soon as the "category" function is restored to our site, I'll be able to link to them as a group. For now, take my word for it that they were surprisingly enlightening and informative inside looks at  factories, offices, department stores, peasant markets, and all the other aspects of China's economic life that are so often discussed in the abstract in the rest of the world.

This past weekend, the series was the winner in one of its categories! After the jump, the official list of all members of Bob Schapiro's team. I am not a completely disinterested observer, having been the on-camera co-host of the series (with Emily Chang) and then joining the NYT's Joe Nocera for "what it all means" discussions after each segment. But Bob Schapiro, Dovar Chen, and others had done so much filming and interviewing before I got involved that I can dispassionately give congratulations to them.

If you're interested in seeing this now-award-winning series in the comfort of your own home, just click this box this corrected link, which allows you to see clips and offers a discount. Makes the perfect Mother's Day gift too.

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It seems that the evocative plane-versus-volcanos graph I mentioned yesterday was not exactly correct. An update today indicates that the estimate of how much CO2 the Iceland volcano was putting out was low by, ummmm, a factor of ten. The revised graph:

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I don't know what the European aviation authorities will do tomorrow, but here are two interesting developments:

The British weather office is reporting "no significant ash above FL350." FL350, or Flight Level 350, is about 35,000 feet. (For another time: why it's not exactly 35,000 feet.) Not sure how they can be confident of this, but it's significant especially for planes flying over Europe en route some place else. The latest map, containing the altitude info. Click for larger.


So, who knows what tomorrow brings. That's it on this topic from me for a while. Back to "real" work. Thanks to Krishna Kumar, watching these developments at the same time I was.

1) A reader begs to differ with the USGS ash fall map mentioned here:

The USGS map that you post shows the 1980 Mt. St. Helens ash plume as floating East across Washington and Idaho, and essentially stopping at the Montana border.  As someone who was a 16-year old high school student in Missoula, MT, at the time, I'd like to say that this is inaccurate. 

Missoula and the areas around it were deluged by between .5 and 1 inch of fine ash, which covered everything.  The entire town ground to a halt, because nobody knew what was in the ash, and because the air pollution readings (Missoula is one of those mountain towns that suffers from frequently poor air-quality due to temperature inversions) were exceeding the highest levels on the charts by a factor of ten.  Even the local schools closed (and this is Montana - you don't close school for any normal "weather" conditions).  I can remember literally hosing off the street outside my house with my siblings, all wearing surgical masks, which the local hospitals were giving out to those brave/foolhardy enough to venture out into the eerie and silent city.  

2) Another dares raise the question: what are the CO2 implications of this whole volcano/ aviation mess? Since like me he is an aviation buff, he has mixed feelings about the results shown by InformationIsBeautiful, here:



3) Reader George Bazhenov, in Russia, answers this item with the reassuring news that the Nigerian spammers are still doing fine:

I read your subject article with interest because some time ago my spam box looked very much like yours but now it shows a lot of spam in English. I have no explanation of this. By the way, most Russian-language letters shown on the screenshot that you published offer inexpensive mail distribution, i. e., more spam.

Secondly, the Nigerians are now operating in Russia - two of my friends who do not speak English have recently asked me to translate letters from Nigeria which they received via email.

A useful fact sheet from the USGS on the wonders of volcanic ash. (Thanks to reader MG in Hawaii.) Graphic of the ash fall from the Mount St. Helens eruption thirty years ago, and likely ash patterns of past eruptions in the western United States:


On effects of the ash as it drifts down:

Volcanic ash can cause internal-combustion engines to stall by clogging air filters and also damage the moving parts of vehicles and machinery, including bearings and gears. Engines of jet aircraft have suddenly failed after flying through clouds of even thinly dispersed ash....Cars driving faster than 5 miles per hour on ash-covered roads stir up thick clouds of ash, reducing visibility and causing accidents.

Ash also clogs filters used in air-ventilation systems to the point that airflow often stops completely, causing equipment to overheat. Such filters may even collapse from the added weight of ash, allowing ash to invade buildings and damage computers and other equipment cooled by circulating outside air. Agriculture can also be affected by volcanic ash fall. Crop damage can range from negligible to severe, depending on the thickness of ash, type and maturity of plants, and timing of subsequent rainfall. For farm animals, especially grazing livestock, ash fall can lead to health effects, including dehydration, starvation, and poisoning.