Perhaps the economy of scale will produce a potential, affordable fuel-cell by 2020. So, too, may science cure cancer and the common cold, develop cold fusion and an efficient, quiet, super-sonic transport, atomic energy, perpetual motion, monorails, and cheap desalinization. But my bet is, the Honda FCX theatrics notwithstanding, the automobile fuel cell will be a member of that bevy of broken dreams for decades to come, if not forever.

Because of this insidious boycott against the legacy of the Colonel, I plan on eating at KFC as often as possible. They offer a dandy buffet for about seven bucks. It features not only all the batter-fried chicken skin you can swallow, but also their famous mashed taters, gravy and a host of other Epicurean delights. PETA's rationale that KFC's "crude and ineffective electric stunning and throat-slitting of chickens" is inhumane will only lead me to order more Extra Crispy.

Frankly, that electric stunning bit strikes me as an awful lot of unnecessary work. When I was a kid we would just slap Henny Penny on a stump and whack her head off with a hatchet. It's fairly interesting work, as the decapitated fowl nearly always makes a mad, spurting, flapping dash of 30 or 40 feet before succumbing to the noggin-ectomy procedure. Nature is a teacher, and the lesson learned from acephalous poultry is that you really don't need a brain to run around like a dang-fool idiot making a spectacle of yourself.

I'm certain the PETA people can relate.

Readers aren't the only ones who benefit from this type of transparency, says Jonathan Dube, publisher of CyberJournalist.net. Dube considers the U.S. Department of Defense's Web site (defenselink.mil) a "journalist's gold mine" of speeches, briefings--and transcripts of every media interview given by top DoD officials. The site is a prime venue for what he calls interview voyeurism--journalists can not only spy on the techniques of their colleagues, but pluck quotes for their own stories since the interviews are public record.

You can't say I'm scientifically dishonest or in breach of good scientific conduct unless you point the finger and say this is the smoking gun. It's like saying you committed murder but we won't tell you who you killed. It's impossible for me to defend myself.

I never once came out and talked about retirement. I can't even remember when the question was asked first. My response then was, 'This is 12 years, at some point it's going to happen. I'm closer to retirement than I was five years ago.' And from that statement it just took off.

I feel like the last two years I've played as good a football as I've played my 11 years here. I've always said my formula for returning is how I play, the injuries that so far I've been able to overcome ... or if it gets to a point where a business decision (is made) from the Packers' standpoint ...

If any of those things occur, then my decision, or the Packers' decision, will be made clear. But right now, I'm playing great. This team has a chance (to win the Super Bowl) and I'm having fun. So that's how I'm going to leave it.

Spending on the Federal Aviation Administration, air safety, Amtrak subsidies, the Coast Guard and other annually funded transportation programs grew by more than 50 percent between 1997 and today, for example. But it would grow by only 7.3 percent between now and 2007.

Mr. Bush doesn't bring his dramas and mess with him. He doesn't bring a sack of dysfunction on his back when he enters a room. He keeps his woes, his emotions, his private life to himself. An example of what I'm getting at. He recently fired his Treasury secretary and his chief economic adviser. He wasn't happy with them; he wanted someone else; they didn't leave; he fired them. Boom. Next. If he feels personal bitterness, anger, or arrogance toward them, we don't know.

This is wonderful. If it had been LBJ or Richard Nixon firing Paul O'Neill, we'd all still be talking about the personal elements in the marriage gone bad. Or we'd be talking about whether "the boss is in love" with someone else, as Nixon's old hands used to say when Nixon became enthralled with the thinking of someone. Sometimes he fell in love with this intellectual, sometimes he soured on that adviser. He fell in love with Pat Moynihan, and John Connally. And then the love died. It was a regular "Peyton Place" in that White House. And Bill Clinton's White House was, it hardly needs be said, another hothouse, though of a different kind.

But with Mr. Bush things aren't a big emotional drama. He seems stable. This is a relief. You get the impression he's like what he of course was, a businessman. When things work, good; when they don't, change. It's not personal. It doesn't have to be messy. It's not Shakespearean.

Which is good. The world is quite dramatic enough. It's good especially at this time to be led not by the emotionally labile but the grounded and sturdy. They can see Mr. Bush is grounded. They're glad.

Because he's not complicated and perhaps not even especially interesting as a person. We just love that.

YOU MAY HAVE MISSED IT in all the Raelian cloning news, but Channel 4 of British television began the New Year with a broadcast about a Chinese performance artist who eats a baby's corpse. Described by executives of Channel 4 as a "thought-provoking film about extreme art in China," the documentary features a man named Zhu Yu, who displays photographs in which he washes a stillborn child in a sink and then consumes it. Just for luck, the program, called "Beijing Swings," also features a man drinking the wine used to preserve an amputated penis and follows hard upon Channel 4's showing last month of a live-action autopsy. Insisting he could not "find any law which prevents us from eating people," Zhu Yu suggests, "I took advantage of the space between morality and the law and based my work on it."

A few years ago, the London Daily Telegraph reported that "doctors at the state-run Shenzhen Health Centre for Women and Children hand out bottles of thumb-sized aborted babies to be made into meat cakes or soup with pork and ginger. Zou Qin, a doctor at the Luo Hu Clinic in Shenzhen, said the fetuses were 'nutritious' and that she had eaten one hundred herself in the last six months. 'We don't carry out abortions just to eat fetuses,' said Qin. '[But they would be] wasted if not eaten.'"

Once upon a time, we built hedge after hedge of protection around the deep things about life and death a culture must maintain. The hedges themselves are not all that important, but when they fall they weaken our defenses--however much those people who knock them down insist they are only clearing away a single hedge.