Author James Howard Kunstler will be in town tomorrow, giving a free lecture at the Muriel Richardson Auditorium at the WAG (300 Memorial), from 7:00-8:30pm. The lecture is titled The Long Emergancy: Surving the Converging Catastrophes of the 21st Century.

For a good indication of what Kunstler will have to say, see his website at http://www.kunstler.com/














EDIT: This lecture comes on a week that light sweet crude was trading for a hair under $70 a barrell, and on a day that unleaded gasoline is selling at most Winnipeg gas stations for $1.09. Obviously, Winnipeggers are not "feeling the pinch at the pumps" anywhere near as bad as the media and their soundbytes from the general public say: Trucks, SUV's and cars are still used (in greater numbers than ever) to get people (often a single passenger) to work, the supermarket, the day-care, the soccer field, the shopping mall, and to one of the city's popular summertime pedestrian zones. People still drive and burn gas for no reason, too: Car-worshipping on Portage Avenue has apparently started up on the Lord's Day for another season. If Winnipeggers truely are "getting pinched", they sure are not showing it. Not yet, anyway.

Oil almost broke the $70 barrier earlier this week because of a shortage in Nigeria, and because of a story about Iran published in the New Yorker. If stories in the New Yorker (I just read it for the cartoons) jack oil prices up to record levels, imagine what a natural disaster, a terrorist attack, or a war will do. Unleaded is selling for $1.09 in Winnipeg, but it's only April: May Long Weekend --the traditional start of Canadian summer driving season, when prices jump-- is still over a month away. I have a feeling that come August, we'll be looking back at $1.09 with fondness.