Savage choice. “I don’t understand being more afraid of John Ashcroft than Osama bin Laden,” advice columnist Dan Savage tells Reason’s Sara Rimensnyder (January). “Personally, I prefer Christian fundamentalists to Islamic fundamentalists.”
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Now will you pay attention? Johannesburg, South Africa, is considering turning its old gold-mine shafts into catacombs. “This year we will bury about 20,000 people,” cemetery official Alan Buff told NewScientist.com (December 3). “In 2010, unless someone develops a cure for AIDS, we expect that figure to be 70,000.” The mines would be converted into underground streets lined with tombs, reached from above by elevator.
From another city’s file. “Forty-three years of totalitarian dictatorship have left the city of Havana–one of the most beautiful in the world–suspended in a peculiar state halfway between preservation and destruction,” writes Theodore Dalrymple in City Journal (Summer). “I found the absence of the most grating aspects of commercialism aesthetically pleasing: McDonald’s restaurants (and their like) would ruin Havana as a townscape as comprehensively as time and neglect. And the comparative lack of traffic in Havana demonstrates how mixed a blessing the inexorable spread of the automobile has been for the quality of city life. Had Havana developed ‘normally,’ its narrow grid-pattern streets would by now be choking with traffic and pollution, a suffocating inferno like Guatemala City or San Jose, Costa Rica….The air is clean, and there is no honking of horns. You can hear yourself think and talk.”
