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Earlier: The deception of happiness (third item here)

From the New York Times :

BAGHDAD — It is still so extraordinary to see boats traveling any distance on the Tigris River, which has become a smelly, shrunken, deserted, refuse-strewn ghost of its former splendor, that dozens of curious employees of a nearby power plant applauded and cheered when Firas Shihab Ahmed, a chemical engineer at the Iraqi Ministry of the Environment, reached over the side of his boat and filled an amber glass bottle … and marked it as his 14th sample of the day. … Though troubled by what she sees as the environmental depredations of the invasion—including a smoking junkyard on the banks of the Tigris just outside the concrete blast walls of the American-controlled "green zone"— American environmental advocate  Anna Bachmann conceded that the mighty waterway of sixth-grade textbooks on Mesopotamia had not existed for a long time. A series of dams upstream have reduced the flow in the Tigris to less than half of its historical strength, and raw sewage roars in from open pipes. … The river also has an abandoned feel, in part because one of Saddam Hussein's many personal whimsies was to have river views unencumbered by boats.

From the Wall Street Journal:

LONG BEACH, Calif. — As the U.S. Olympic swim trials wrap up here, among the new stars are two prefabricated, above-ground pools. Located in a parking lot adjacent to the Long Beach Convention Center, the two 50-meter pools—one for competition and an adjoining warm-up model—were erected just over a month ago and will be dismantled and shipped elsewhere by mid-August. And having served their primary purpose, they now are a successful case study for communities hoping to host world-class sporting events without building expensive permanent venues that can sit nearly empty years after the crowds and TV cameras go home. [article unavailable online]

• Few events shaped American economics as much as the rise of mass consumption in the 20th century, when Americans began buying cars, refrigerators, and jugs of laundry detergent by the millions. But now the Tide is turning. Procter & Gamble, which has been selling Tide to a mass market since 1949, now insists that "every one of our brands is targeted." Other companies are also "shifting emphasis from selling to the vast, anonymous crowd to selling to millions of particular consumers," wrote Business Week in a recent cover story called "The Vanishing Mass Market." McDonald's has cut its budget for network TV ads in half to spend more on in-store channels or specialty magazines that reach customers of a certain age, sex, or ethnicity. Today, advertisers must reach customers through "hundreds of narrowcast cable TV and radio channels, thousands of specialized magazines, and millions of computer terminals, video-game consoles, personal digital assistants, and cell-phone screens," Business Week says, adding that the challenge is "figuring out the right way to send the right message to the right person at the right time." Article
  Related: Is it good news that American viewers and readers "see only what they want to see, hear only what they want to hear, read only what they want to read"? asks the New York Times

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