Perhaps you felt the latest slap in the face? Much of the past week, a plane has flown over Albuquerque towing an air-borne billboard. Imagine: burning precious fossil fuel while generating noise just to get you to look up and — if you are shockingly impressionable — to run into a local business, even though that business wants to irritate you for their own profit. Let’s go! You’d better hope this ideal is deeply unprofitable, because if somebody goes into that noxious place and says, “gee, I saw your sign and came right in,” we can expect more and more and more of this obnoxious advertising. Oh, well, it does distract us from all those damn helicopters. mjh

(… and the quiet.)