Bulletin: Health Nazis take over luxury hotels. According to a Northern Illinois Tourism Council newsletter, at least one San Francisco hotel no longer leaves a chocolate on your pillow–it leaves a “beta-carotene antioxidant tablet” instead. “The rooms’ minibars are stocked with rice cakes, vegetable chili, organic wine.”
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“My own attitude is that being gay is like being left-handed,” says Northwestern historian Peter Hayes in Bowdoin (January). “It took hundreds of years for people to decide that being left-handed was not grounds for being forcibly reoriented. I belong to the first generation in the United States–I am left-handed–that didn’t have to learn to be right-handed in school. We forget that until the end of World War II, they made you change. That is sort of parallel to 19th-century attempts, and even 20th-century attempts to reorient all gay people. At a certain point it stops, one hopes. The history of the West…is a history of extending the claims of individual freedom to ever-wider groups. It is not an unbroken history; it is not a unilinear history, but it has been the overall trend since the 1750s. Now the problem gay people have is that the resistance is particularly intense.”
If we hate congestion so much, why aren’t we on the train? From Fact Sheet #1 (February) of the Metropolitan Planning Council’s Market-Based Transportation Solutions Project: “During the 1980s, the number of miles traveled by vehicles in the region increased by 33 percent, while the number of trips taken on public transit declined by 17 percent.”
Batting .180 after 20 months. According to Anna Kibat in Illinois Politics (February), the state auditor general examined a statistically valid random sample of child-support collection cases opened during October 1992 and found that as of June 1994, “only 18 percent of the cases sampled resulted in some provision to collect child support.”
