Word: happeners
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...days, we Iowans have been comparing notes, sharing stories of water-soaked basements, flooded-out cars, water bursting out of manhole covers. We've been reminiscing, not fondly, about the flood of 1993 - when Des Moines lost its water supply for days (something we've been assured won't happen again, thanks to beefed-up flood prevention measures...
...unselfconscious you get when you have to find one lousy bar of wi-fi in the next two minutes or you're going to get fired. (A website called ThinkGeek.com sells a T shirt with a battery-powered wi-fi detector that displays the ambient signal strength wherever you happen to be standing. It's supercool, though if I'm too cheap to pay for broadband, I'm definitely too cheap to spend $30 on a T shirt...
...parking shortages as well as greenhouse-gas emissions, dozens of U.S. cities decided to give them a shot. Nonprofits in places like Boulder, Colo.; Charlottesville, Va.; and Gainesville, Fla., launched fleets of communal bikes that people could borrow for free and leave around town for the next rider to happen upon. No locks, no deposits and, pretty soon, no bikes. Theft and vandalism quickly wiped out many of these freewheeling initiatives. This month, however, Washington is rolling out America's first high-tech bike-sharing program. The so-called SmartBikes come with key-card locking systems and tracking devices...
...that to happen, public transportation has to solve its big chicken-and-egg problem. Most people don't want to use trains, buses or bikes unless they're really convenient, but most cities aren't willing to spend enough to make these services convenient until enough people start using them. One way Washington is trying to encourage widespread use of SmartBikes is by not requiring helmets, let alone providing them. "It's not a good idea to share helmets because you have sanitary issues and sweat issues," says Paul DeMaio, founder of MetroBike, a consulting firm that advises cities...
...time when that alone would have been enough to keep the 19-year-old star of the movie Hairspray out of the fan magazines and off the posters decorating grade-schoolers' bedroom walls. But that time may at last be ending. The national obesity epidemic did not happen in a vacuum. It occurred in an era in which fashion models have got thinner and thinner, the tolerance for even a little flab has grown lower and lower, and the rates of eating disorders like anorexia have climbed higher and higher. In that environment, children and adolescents trying to develop...