The Happiness Rankings

 Not Happy
  Folks up here were really unhappy recently when Canada lost both the Olympic Men's and Women's Hockey matches against the U.S. teams and then lost again to the U.S. in the Paralympic gold medal match. The boasting about the "Gold Medal Hat Trick" could be heard far beyond the border. 
   Searching for something about which we could gloat, I remembered that the World Happiness Report has just been released. Surely the citizens south of here have to be sadder than we are. Thinking that we must beat the Yanks at something, I went looking for the rankings.

We Lost Again
   The Americans are higher in the rankings than we are.


   I thought that maybe they are happier because they are warmer. That does not appear to be the reason since Finland, Iceland and Denmark are 1-2 and 3. 

     I hoped that maybe the rankings are American and rigged. But, the World Happiness Report is published by the University of Oxford, in the country where our King lives.

   It helps a little that we used to outrank the Americans and were happier. 

  Now, even the Israelis are much happier than we are. At least we beat Botswana and Zimbabwe, so the American President cannot call us a "shithole country."

   Two of the six names appearing in the Executive Summary are even Canadian, John F. Helliwell at UBC and Lara B. Aknin at Simon Fraser. Perhaps they did not fight hard enough for our team, since they are out in B.C., and may be sadder than the rest of us since they are worried about their property rights.

For a look at the report and rankings see: World Happiness Report. 

The Washington Post

 Bezos Begging

    At the end of February I cancelled my subscription to WaPo and Bezosbub probably didn't notice.  The remaining people who work at the Post did and for them I feel sorry. Here are the two latest offers I have received via email. For American readers, the CA$2 is about US$1.45.

Early Offer:

Later Offer:

A Solution: 
  In a Post "Post Mortem" a former employee notes:
"When Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post in 2013 and promised to find inventive ways to make journalism profitable in the digital age, he seemed like a godsend. He wasn’t...."

   The Post is again in the market for a new publisher, but saving this splendid national treasure requires more than that. The real need now is for a new owner, or a big endowment that would allow it to carry on as a nonprofit public service. Do we know anyone who could spare a billion or two to fund such a noble cause and assure his or her place in American history?"
  
   I do! While Bezos has been boating, his ex-wife, MacKenzie Scott has been giving. She has been generous with gifts and grants to a variety of institutions, but has only given away $26 billion of her $40 billion fortune. Giving well could be the best revenge if she gave a portion of her wealth to support the paper Bezos abandoned. 
(The quote is from "Post Mortem" by Robert G. Kaiser, NYRB, March 26, 2026.)
(Analogy alert: One definition of "Beelzebub" - "a fallen angel in Milton's Paradise Lost ranking next to Satan".)

London's Bicentennial (Snippet 8)

Transitory Frenzy - 1888

I don't have time to check and see if "transitory frenzy" is defined in the most recent Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Disorders. It probably is, just under a different name. Keep it in mind if you need a defence attorney. I also don't know if this fellow made it back to London or stayed in Winnemucca, Nevada. This article is from The Silver State on Feb. 27, 1888 which was in Winnemucca.

Book Promotion

 Advertising and Books

   Promoting a book is harder than publishing, or even writing one. According to Publishers Weekly, about four million of them were produced in 2025, which means that being an author is somewhat easier than becoming an astronaut. The hard part is getting a reader to choose your book from a pile of 4,000,000 of them.

   I thought of this while reading the March 2026 issue of The Atlantic, which I am pleased to promote. The articles in this issue are first-rate. Even the advertisements are good and are our subject for today. Some of them were full page promotions for books. 

One of These Ads Is Not Like the Others

   You may have been watching Sesame Street, rather than reading a book, and remember the song containing the words above. Your task is to look at the four book ads below and identify which one is different.

1.

2.

3.   

4. 

And The Answer Is?
   The most obvious answer is #3 since the ad is for six books rather than just one. The less obvious answer and the one I prefer is #4. 

   The book about Lincoln is published by W.W. Norton & Company. The Deserving is published by Bloomsbury. The six books in #3 are published by Princeton University Press.  It is usually the case that full page advertisements for books are paid for by publishing companies or university presses.

   The ad for Isabel, Anacaona & Columbus’s Demise: 1498–1502 Retold, by Andrew Rowen was likely paid for by Andrew Rowen. All Persons Press appears to be a publisher solely for Andrew Rowen publications. There is nothing wrong with this at all and I am glad to assist author Rowen by promoting the prequels to the work above: Encounters Unforeseen:1492 Retold and Columbus and Caonabó: 1493–1498 Retold.
   One of the reasons self-promotion is resorted to is, as I mentioned when I wrote about the Washington Post, that there are now few book reviewers around to go through the four million produced. I found very few reviews for the books of Mr. Rowen and know about them only because I read the full page advertisement in The Atlantic. 
   You now may be curious about the cost of a full page ad in a national magazine. That is difficult to determine and the rate provided for a person is likely less than the one quoted for a publisher. I will say, however, that the number is a big one.
   Mr. Rowen is apparently a Harvard Law graduate and a retiree from a New York city law firm. He seems to have had the means to spend a lot of time in the Caribbean doing research for his books and enough left over to promote them. He should not be blamed for that and I do hope he recovers his costs and carries on. 

Nature Dies In Darkness

    Events are being cancelled, some news is censored and other sensitive subjects are not broached. There is more silence than there was. People disappear and some things disappear, never having been seen. One of those things is The National Nature Assessment. 
   The assessment was announced on Earth Day in 2022. President Biden issued and executive order to undertake a thorough examination of the state of nature. The evaluation of the environment was to be done by a large number of experts and scientists, who were mostly volunteers. Research was undertaken and hundreds of pages written. A draft of the report was about to be submitted, but, The National Nature Assessment was cancelled by the Trump administration.

   The National Nature Assessment disappeared, but The Nature Record exists. The authors of the Assessment thought their work needed to be evaluated and made public. They did not want the data to disappear. 
   The 800+ pages of the draft is available for public comments and scientific review. "For a chapter-by-chapter journey through the state of nature in America," here is The Nature Record.  It can be read online or downloaded. If you fear that nature is not in good shape and don't want to read about it, skip to Chapter 4: "Bright Spots in Nature."

Samizdat:
   I usually write "Sources", but perhaps that word is now appropriate. For more background see:
   Catrin Einhorn produced two good reports for the New York Times:
1) "Trump Killed a Major Report on Nature. They’re Trying to Publish It Anyway: The first full draft of the assessment, on the state of America’s land, water and wildlife, was weeks from completion. The project leader called the study “too important to die.” NYT, Feb. 10, 2026.
  "The draft was almost ready for submission, due in less than a month. More than 150 scientists and other experts had collectively spent thousands of hours working on the report, a first-of-its-kind assessment of nature across the United States.
   But President Trump ended the effort, started under the Biden administration, by executive order. So, on Jan. 30, the project’s director, an environmental scientist named Phil Levin, sent an email telling members of his team that their work had been discontinued.
   But it wasn’t the only email he sent that day.
   “This work is too important to die,” Dr. Levin wrote in a separate email to the report’s authors, this one from his personal account. “The country needs what we are producing.”

2) "Nature Report, Killed by Trump, Is Released Independently: A draft assessment of the health of nature in the United States is grim but shot through with bright spots and possibility."
Catrin Einhorn, NYT - March 5, 2026
   "The report’s name has changed from the National Nature Assessment to the Nature Record, to reflect that it is a new, independent effort, but it builds off work that was already underway and most of the authors remain the same. Its scientific review will be conducted by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, the same organization that would have reviewed the report had it remained under the auspices of the federal government.    
   The first two chapters that will summarize the sprawling endeavor are not yet written, because the authors are waiting until after this round of feedback. But 13 other chapters are in place.
   The report explores not only actions that harm nature, but also how people are affected by nature and its loss, with chapters on human health, the economy and national security. And throughout, the report highlights solutions and nature’s ability to recover when given the chance."
  For an example of reports on various substacks see:
"Why the Trump Administration Couldn’t Kill the Nature Record: Science has a way of refusing to stay buried", Jeff Nesbit, The Contrarian, March 16, 2026.  

Autonomous Automobiles

 And VERY BIG Rigs

What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
  The juxtaposition of the titles of the two articles on the left above, next to the picture of a driverless truck on a major highway is interesting. Among the problems noticed now with driverless taxis is the one mentioned in the top article. If you are alone in a car without a driver, a pedestrian can essentially keep the vehicle from moving. More from that article:
   "In January, Doug Fulop was riding home from a night out in San Francisco when a man crossed the street in front of his car, doubled back and began screaming at him. The man punched the car’s windows and tried lifting up the vehicle. He then yelled that he wanted to kill Mr. Fulop and the other two passengers for giving money to a robot.
   A taxi driver would have simply driven away. But Mr. Fulop’s vehicle had no driver — it was a self-driving Waymo. “We felt helpless,” said Mr. Fulop, 37, who works in the tech industry.
   Self-driving cars are designed to stop moving if a person is nearby. People can take advantage of that function to harass and threaten their passengers. In 2024, a San Francisco man tried covering the sensors of a self-driving car that had stopped, effectively disabling it, while passengers were inside. Another video from that year showed three women screaming as a group of vandals tagged their autonomous taxi with spray paint.
   Handing the keys to a robot has added bizarre and, at times, worrisome new quirks to car travel. Passengers have shared videos of their autonomous cars getting stuck driving in circles or becoming lost in a parking garage. Last week, a video showed a Waymo in Austin, Texas, that had stopped under a railroad crossing gate just short of the tracks before a train sped past. There were no riders in the car, Waymo said."

    One wonders what "worrisome new quirks" will be found when more big semis are moving very fast on our freeways. One already noticed is "phantom braking -- the problem of autonomous systems, particularly those driven solely by cameras, “seeing” nonexistent obstacles, leading them to stop abruptly and potentially cause an accident. And given the size and the weight of the trucks, the impact of such collisions could be quite severe."
   You are likely thinking this a problem you do not have to worry about, but in the "progressive" state of Texas, the future has arrived. 
   "The operator, Aurora Innovation, said it was the first fully autonomous commercial trucking operation of its kind on U.S. highways. The company’s runs between Dallas and Houston on the I-45 corridor quickly racked up 1,200 miles on the road for customers including FedEx and Uber Freight.

There’s no question that finally putting driverless semi trucks into regular interstate runs will be a turning point for the industry....

   A consensus is emerging that fully autonomous Class 8 trucking on major highways will arrive in 2027, with multiple companies prepared to roll out fleets, mostly in Texas, beginning later this year. (Trucks are classified from 1 to 8 and 8 is the biggest.)"
   It's coming because it is cheaper. Drivers cost money and are limited in the number of hours and miles they can drive without stopping. A truck without a driver can keep on barreling through.

  Over in Sweden, driverless trucks are being used in mining operations and in remote places without much traffic. A company there, Einride, has created a cabless rig that is already being used to move cargo around in Tennessee.

Sources: 
  The titles of both articles are provided above and both were in the NYT on March 17, 2026. Erin Griffin authored the first and Jim Motavalli, the one about the trucks. 

   

   

London's Bicentennial (Snippet 7)

 Wine of Cardui - Probably the Only Wine in London in 1902
   Straight from Chattanooga, this elixir was used to treat "women's diseases".

This ad. is found in The Madison Daily Leader (South Dakota), on June 28, 1902. I am not sure if Miss Markell existed, but you can find plenty about the Wine of Cardui. And, there are empty bottles for sale on Amazon and ebay..