The following is from the Introduction to the book, "Timeline," by Michael Crichton. I like this quotation, because I believe it clearly puts our current lives and technology into perspective.

If you were to say to a physicist in 1899 that in 1999, a hundred years later, moving images would be transmitted into homes all over the world from satellites in the sky; that bombs of unimaginable power would threaten the species; that antibiotics would abolish infectious disease but that disease would fight back; that women would have the vote, and pills to control reproduction; that millions of people would take to the air every hour in aircraft capable of taking off and landing without human touch; that you could cross the Atlantic at two thousand miles an hour; that humankind would travel to the moon, and then lose interest; that microscopes would be able to see individual atoms; that people would carry telephones weighing a few ounces, and speak anywhere in the world without wires; or that most of these miracles depended on devices the size of a postage stamp, which utilized a new theory called quantum mechanics -- if you said all this, the physicist would almost certainly pronounce you mad.

I didn't write this - it's by an "old friend" of mine -- meaning we're friends, but haven't communicated in years. Even then, "friends" may be stretching it. "Acquaintence" is probably more accurate.

Anyway, this is by James Lileks, a syndicated journalist and author from Minneapolis, Minnesota. I've enjoyed reading this so many times, I wanted it to be the first article in this new area.

I hope you enjoy it as well.

It's cold where I live. Very cold. Cold as Prince Charles on his wedding night. When I start the car in the morning it makes a sound of a hibernating bear awakened by a proctological exam. The car creaks in a way that suggests it will actually explode into thousands of tiny car-shards if I hit a pothole.

It's worse where I used to live. I grew up in North Dakota, where the winters do two things: A) dissuade people from moving there, and B) kill the people who were born there. Consequently, the population has dropped over the course of the last few decades. It currently stands at 600,000 people, and about 4,000,000 fingers. It's so cold everyone does math in Base Eight.

My father says, ominously, that there is nowhere to put any new snow. This is frightening, since the definition of North Dakota is "room for snow." Fargoans will start boxing it up and mailing it south with bogus, impossible-to-trace return addresses (such as "Fargo, South Dakota.") Last time I went up to the homeland, the forecast called for more snow, patches of snow followed by steady snow, with occasional snow.

Oh, and overnight wind chills of 50 to 70 below. I don't know why they bother to tell us that. Fifty below, seventy below: there's no difference. It if was 70 below the night before, no one goes out when it's 50 below to experience the warming trend. Just tell us there's wind, because it's the wind that does you in. There is nothing in North Dakota to impede the frosty blasts from Canada. Someone spits in Winnipeg, it pings off your car window in Fargo.

The Windchill measures the effect of wind on exposed flesh, but no one up here has exposed any flesh in months. We shower in our woolens. You might as well have a temperature reading for raw flayed muscle tissue splashed with rubbing alcohol. The TV weathermen would duly report that, too: "The wind will make it evaporate quicker, and of course the lack of fatty epidermis will make it feel like it's 150 below! So if you're flayed and soaked with alcohol, bundle up!"

But it has an effect, particularly if you're driving into it. When we left, Minneapolis was a temperate 3 degrees, and Fargo was ten below at high noon, with a gauzy shroud of snow floating on the freeway. You prepare for getting stuck: candles to melt snow for drinking water, candy bars for energy, a cell phone to order pizza (tip the driver well enough, and he may tell someone you're stranded). In the old days, when a cowboy stuck in a blizzard and his horse died, he cut it open and crawled inside for warmth. So I also bring along a horse on long winter trips, just in case. Not that I would ever cut it open - but all I would have to do is brandish the knife and announce I was going to slay the beast for my personal benefit, and there would be 50 PETA demonstrators in wheezy Volvos.

I could catch a ride home to Minnesota. Or, as they call it in North Dakota: the tropics.