Gershenfeld's experience with students and workshops from Ghana to South Boston confirms von Hippel's central point: In many cases, people want things they can't currently get and, given the tools to make them, will create new inventions. "The killer app for personal fabrication is fulfilling individual desires rather than meeting mass-market needs," he writes. (For more info, see his website here.) I admire Gershenfeld's enthusiasm, but he overstates the case for making stuff yourself. I already have the equipment and (rusty) skills to fabricate my own skirts, and by making them myself I could get exactly the right fabric and fit. But I don't. Making stuff yourself can be fun and satisfying, but it can also be time-consuming and frustrating. The theoretical question is who has the scarce knowledge. User innovation taps unique or unarticulated desires, but specialization allows expertise and gains from trade.

After writing the column on Von Hippel's work, I found coverage of user innovation popping up everywhere. Fortune published this piece on the "do-it-yourself economy," leading with a stay-at-home dad who's inventing an MP3 player that looks like a Pez dispenser. The neologism-crazy trend spotters at Trendwatching.com posted a nice roundup of examples.

Meanwhile, O'Reilly has launched a fat new magazine called MAKE, devoted to the goal "that all of us can learn to become makers, just as we might learn to cook or use woodworking tools." MediaBistro featured a profile of the new magazine. An excerpt:

It goes without saying that nearly every review of MAKE references the long-cancelled ABC show, MacGyver, and the magazine/mook itself is unable to resist the impulse. (In Michael Rattner's review of Victorinox's Swiss Army Cybertool, he writes, "I've used it to open my PowerBook for a memory upgrade, gain access to a stubborn remote control's battery compartment, slice through an untold number of letters and packages, remove a tiny ingrown hair and to escape certain death by drowning using the can opener as a hook to unlock the door to a room that was being filled with water. [Oh wait, never mind, that was a MacGyver re-run.]) And it was precisely that appeal that made me buy the magazine last week while browsing the shelves at a Barnes & Noble. I'm not that technically oriented, but I had enough fun taking apart major appliances as a kid to appreciate the idea of doing it usefully and purposefully as an adult. (Besides, you never know when you'll be forced to evade a couple of guys with AK-47s using only a box of matches, a stick of gum, and some aluminium foil.)

But the beauty of MAKE isn't so much the practicality of it, but the way it translates what is nominally a subculture for a general audience, in much the same way Wired (wittingly or un-) did as it adapted. While many of the projects therein require a modicum of technical knowledge, culturally, MAKE is about everyday hacking—which is of increasingly greater interest to a general audience as consumers place higher premiums on customization. Music mash-ups, TiVo programming, made-to-order Nikes are symptoms of larger demand for a wide of consumer choices.

On a more radical note, The Speculist interviews Adrian Bowyer, whose working on a self-reproducing rapid-prototyping machine.

And for all you would-be inventors, Jeff Taylor points me to this contest, noting that "SOMEONE has to take $125K off of MS and ISDA........"

NOTE: The time above has been moved forward to accommodate President Bush's press conference.

The Register report is here and free. The WSJ report, from which all the others are derived, is here. (This link should work for a few days.)

The story is on college dropouts, focusing on a Virginia man named Andy Blevins, who makes a decent living, including good benefits, as a supermarket produce buyer but feels insecure about the future. If you make it to the end of the article, you discover that Blevins, who got C's and D's when he attended college and disliked class, has decided to go back to school and pursue a new career. And what might that career be?

In the weeks afterward, his daydreaming about college and his conversations about it with his sister Leanna turned into serious research. He requested his transcripts from Radford and from Virginia Highlands Community College and figured out that he had about a year's worth of credits. He also talked to Leanna about how he could become an elementary school teacher. [Emphasis added.--vp] He always felt that he could relate to children, he said. The job would take up 180 days, not 280. Teachers do not usually get laid off or lose their pensions or have to take a big pay cut to find new work.

So the decision was made. On May 31, Andy Blevins says, he will return to Virginia Highlands, taking classes at night; the Gospel Gentlemen are no longer booking performances. After a year, he plans to take classes by video and on the Web that are offered at the community college but run by Old Dominion, a Norfolk, Va., university with a big group of working-class students.

"I don't like classes, but I've gotten so motivated to go back to school," Mr. Blevins said. "I don't want to, but, then again, I do."

Blevins sounds like a fine man, the kind of person who makes communities--and supermarkets--work. Too bad the Times won't honor him for his real accomplishments, including finding a demanding career he's good at. (Most of his buyer colleagues have college degrees.) Instead, he's portrayed as a victim and the "happy ending" is that he's going back to college so he can get a job he's totally unsuited for. A guy who hates school this much doesn't belong anywhere near a classroom, least of all in front of one.

On a related note, here's a column I wrote on why the best female students no longer become teachers. Bottom line: "In hiring teachers, we get what we pay for: average quality at average wages."

Where is the outrage?

Apple Computer sued 19-year-old journalist Nicholas Ciarelli in January for disclosing trade secrets on his Apple news website Think Secret. A typical Think Secret annoyance: The site correctly predicted the appearance of the Mac Mini, a small, low-cost Macintosh computer, two weeks before the product was officially announced.

Ciarelli is accused of doing exactly what reporters all over America are supposed to be doing: finding and publishing information that institutions don't want to reveal. Do you think the Pentagon would have released additional details about football hero Pat Tillman's death by friendly fire in Afghanistan unless pressed by Washington Post reporters? No, I don't think so either. To think that a 19-year-old man should face trial for engaging in behavior that is the cornerstone of our democracy is sickening.

Where are the always-vocal guardians of the First Amendment? Where is the American Civil Liberties Union? Where is the American Society of Newspaper Editors? Where, for that matter, is Harvard's Nieman Foundation? They have publicly supported the higher profile case of The New York Times's Judith Miller and Time magazine's Matt Cooper, who have been ordered to reveal the sources of their reporting on the contentious Valerie Plame case. But I found not a word about Ciarelli -- a Harvard undergraduate and a beat reporter for the Harvard Crimson -- on the Nieman Watchdog website.

Maybe it's time for the Niemans to stop playing footsie with the butchers of Beijing and start standing up to the control freaks of Cupertino. The Ciarelli case ''really hasn't come to our attention in any significant way at all," Nieman curator Robert Giles says.

It gets worse. Read the whole thing.

My guess is almost none. After all, nobody got hurt. While many Americans believe it's wrong to shock and humiliate Muslim prisoners by violating their religious taboos, very, very few Americans--mostly Muslims, of course--would themselves be horrified by the mere idea of flushing a Koran. And that, I think, is the real bias of the Newsweek report. American reporters, whether secular or religious, simply don't feel instinctive rage at the idea of Koran desecration and, hence, don't expect such reports to generate riots. Diversifying reporting staffs to include more red state types couldn't change that bias. By Western standards, it is, after all, completely idiotic--not to mention highly immoral--to kill people over the treatment of an inanimate object, however disrepectful the symbolism. The American idea of a "culture war" is an entirely verbal debate over whether it should be constitutional to impose a small fine on someone who burns the American flag or whether art like Piss Christ should get federal subsidies. We don't actually believe in killing people over these things. And, of course, few Americans, least of all religious Americans, think the Koran is terribly special.

With its Western biases, Newsweek thought it was writing about allegations of prisoner abuse, a human rights issue. Its overseas audience had a different reading. The differences between us and them really are bigger than the differences between us and us.

7. If you've been noticing more and more unfamiliar bylines in the paper, it's no accident. Additional sections, the demands of The Times's Web site and its television operation, and generalized economic pressures have spread finite staff resources across the requirements of a much wider mission, and have increased the paper's dependence on freelance writers.

Now, I've got nothing against freelance writers; I've been one myself, and tomorrow morning I'll become one again. It's a respectable way to make a living (even if a fiscally preposterous one). Though Times freelancers agree to abide by the paper's ethical rules and professional standards, there's no way someone who's working for The Times today, some other publication tomorrow and yet another on Tuesday can possibly absorb and live by The Times's complex code as fully as staff members. Unrevealed conflicts, violations of Times-specific reporting rules and a variety of other problems have repeatedly found their way to my office over the past 18 months.

The economic pressures on all newspapers are real, of course, and no modern newspaper can thrive unless it commits resources to new forms of distribution. I'm sure The Times devotes a larger share of its revenue to reporting than any other paper in the nation. But the price of stretching a staff too thin, and of patching the weak spots with day labor, could be much, much more expensive.

Damn straight I don't "live by The Times's complex code," since I have my own personal integrity--and brand--to worry about. I do, of course, abide by the provisions of my contract. Those provisions are not identical to those by which staffers are governed; if they were, I would have to quit, since I subsidize my writing with speaking. But Okrent is right about one thing: The Times does get my labor, and the labor of its other freelancers, dirt cheap (with no raises!). We also generally pay our own expenses. The upside is that we get to be independent thinkers and don't drown in a giant, semi-functional bureaucracy.

But, assuming he knew me to be a reliable source in the past, he wouldn't be completely negligent simply to take my word for it and report that a blimp was in the Dallas sky, or at least that some people had seen one. And the story would in fact be true. There was indeed a blimp over American Airlines Center on Friday night, as the game telecast confirmed.

But suppose I told the same journalist that I saw a flying saucer from outer space hovering in the same place. A mainstream reporter won't believe me at all. Unless he heard the same thing from a lot of other people, he probably wouldn't even look into the story and debunk my tale with the blimp explanation. He'd just think I was delusional.

Much--though by no means all--journalistic bias lies in reporters' assessments of what's likely to be true. Those assessments are based in part on experience with sources and in part on how the reporter understands the world. What do you believe about political motivations? What do you believe about the way the economy works? What do you believe about the likely behavior of U.S. soldiers in combat, or of business executives, or of the clergy, or of Republicans, or of Jews? What do you believe about human nature in general? About political institutions? About the corrupting influence of money? About the power of ideology? About the relative importance of genetics versus culture, nature versus nurture? About the prevalence or sustainability of discrimination? About the influence of violence on TV? About the effectiveness of conspiracies?

Journalists make such judgment calls all the time. So, in fact, does everyone. We can't make sense of the world, or evaluate new information, without some mental model of how things work.That's why audiences gravitate toward media that share their worldviews, and it's why journalists can be fair or accurate, but we can never be unbiased unless we treat every source, and every claim, as equally credible. Like most mainstream American reporters, I'm reluctant to believe in UFOs, apparitions of the Virgin Mary, Jewish plots, or a radio transmitter in George Bush's jacket. Call me biased, but these widely believed phenomena simply don't comport with either my life experience or with my mental model of how the world works.

Prices capture the relative value people put on intangibles. The price system lets individuals make trade-offs among goods, without having to articulate a "good reason" for their preferences. It rewards value you cannot easily count.

Some critics find that wasteful. "Addiction to a strict and unremitting valuation of all things in terms of price and profit" leaves executives "unfit to appreciate those technological facts that can be formulated only in terms of tangible mechanical performance," Thorstein Veblen wrote in 1921 in "The Engineers and the Price System."

On a trip to the supermarket today, I came across a good example of how the "same" product can take on different values, even to the same consumer (in this case, me). I bought a 12-pack of 12-ounce Diet Coke, a staple item in the Postrel refrigerator, for $2.98; that's about 2.1 cents per ounce or 24.8 cents per can. Since I run though a lot of Diet Coke cans, especially when I'm writing, I generally know where the good deals are and try to pay no more than $3 for a 12-pack.

Yet I also purchased a six-pack of .5-liter (16.9-ounce) bottles for $2.78: 2.7 cents an ounce or 46.3 cents a bottle. Unlike the "staple" cans for home consumption, I'll take these bottles with me in my purse or the car. I do generally treat a single bottle, regardless of its size, as one serving, but I like to be able to close the container to avoid spills.

Finally, I bought a cold 20-ounce bottle of Diet Coke for $1.08, or 5.2 cents an ounce, and drank it immediately. If I'd had the change, I might have bought a 12-ounce can of even colder Diet Coke from a vending machine for 50 cents, or 4.2 cents an ounce.

I can explain all these differences, but they aren't exactly "rational" in the engineering sense (even assuming you accept the rationality of drinking a dozen or so Diet Cokes a day). I doubt that Veblen would approve of these wildly different prices. But Friedrich Hayek would understand.

Q: Everyone in our business is agonizing about what will happen to journalism because of blogs and the Internet. I don't want to be cruel, but it seems to me that opinion columnists in newspapers are the most vulnerable to incursions from the Internet. If you have 8 million blogs with people expressing their opinions, why would you want to go to the newspaper?

A: There certainly is lots more competition, but it's interesting that on the Times web site the op-ed columnists are usually among the top e-mailed articles of the day. I believe also that our Web pages are among the most visited. The cliche is that there is so much information out there that people are looking for someone to interpret it for them. Now there are plenty of blogs that will do the interpretation for you, but I think that the more sources there are, the more people want to find some common ground.

I was a freelance magazine writer for 10 years and I hated The New York Times because I would spend two months writing what I considered the definitive article on something and put all this effort into it and it would be in a national magazine, and then an article on the subject would be in The New York Times and it would get all this attention because that was the bulletin board people looked at. I think people still want that bulletin board. Also, I've noticed since I started the column that there are many blogs that start debates based on the columns and the old media.

Despite all those emailed columns, it seems likely that the Times is underestimating online readers' elasticity of demand and is risking its status as the most-talked-about (and blogged-about) newspaper in the world. Besides, as various blog commenters have pointed out, (examples here and here), since the columns are syndicated you can find many of them on other newspapers' sites.

Left out of the blog discussion is an important aspect of the new premium service: Home delivery subscribers like me get it free, and it includes access to the large NYT archives that now charge on a per-article basis. Also, the premium columns include not just those on the op-ed page but others elsewhere in the paper, including major business section columnists.

I can't blame the Times for trying to sell more home-delivery subscriptions, which should boost ad revenue, or for trying to generate some revenue from its website. Maybe if they get this to work, they can give me a raise. But I'm not optimistic--about either the premium service or that raise.

UPDATE: "Well, if they throw in the Crossword Puzzle, I might consider it," writes reader Ray Eckhart, reminding me that the Times has long charged for online access to its puzzles.

No sane person considers Washington D.C. to be fashion-forward, but trend watchers should take note: The capital is gearing up to decide what the rest of us will be wearing next season.

We may not all be forced into bowties or pantsuits, but a congressional push to re-impose quotas on Chinese imports will determine how well, and how cheaply, America dresses. Ever since trade quotas on Chinese textile imports fell away in the U.S. and Europe on January 1, and the U.S. has been buried in a downy avalanche of cheap tees and underwear. Imports of knitted shirts are up 1,250 percent this year. Cotton pants are up 1,500 percent; underwear, 300 percent. The dramatic surge in imports is an indication of just how obscenely low the old quotas were set, and how needlessly high clothing prices were. Recent studies put the cost of protectionism for the U.S. textile and apparel industry at as much as $13 billion annually.

The domestic textile industry was given ten long years to prepare for the deluge, but instead of modernizing, trade groups are legislating. With the support of the Bush administration, The U.S. Committee for the Implementation of Textile Agreements (CITA) has announced "China Safeguard Proceedings" to protect us from all Commie underwear, the first step in what will likely end with re-imposed quotas or worse. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) says "it is time to bring out the big stick" and defines "stick" as 27.5 percent tariffs on all things Chinese. U.S. Trade Representative Rob Portman has promised "a tougher approach" with Beijing, as if decades of onerous quotas were an example of American largesse.

If politicians can resist the urge to stem the flow of imports, cheap Chinese clothing will create a better-dressed America and a sleeker fashion industry. Clothing prices have been falling for a decade, helped along by the rise of cheap chic a la H&M, Zara, and Forever 21. These stores have earned fat profits ripping off the work of Donna Karan, Michael Kors, Ralph Lauren and other fashion luminaries. By pumping out cheaply made imitations from the developing world, the shops have created a world of disposable fashion, letting teens stay trendy without sinking hundreds in a look that won't last. A $10 H&M camisole—likely China-made—will last about as long as the trend it's following, which is to say, a wash or two. It's not just moral depravity driving your 14-year-old to stuff her closet with trampy knock-offs; she can afford to approximate Beyonce's bling and Lil' Kim's decolletage like never before.

Read the whole thing.

For example, functional magnetic imaging of women's brains after strokes have revealed that one reason women recover the use of language after a stroke in their left hemisphere is because women's language centers appear to exist on both sides of the brain, whereas in men, they are concentrated on the left side.

But why does this difference in brains exist at all? The answer to this question, and to the questions of the susceptibility of women to lung cancer, to increased sensitivity to pain, even to certain medicines, may well be revealed as the X chromosome is more fully explored.

From chromosomes to cells, from hearts to brains, from livers to intestines and from skin to blood, the vast and fascinating realms--and the elegant details--of the differences between the two sexes are slowly being understood.

That's the lead of my new Forbes column, which tries to explain blogging in terms professional journalists (and, of course, Forbes readers) can understand. Bizarrely, the online version of the story does not include the "blog sampler," with links, at the end of the column. I deliberately selected blogs that not only might appeal to a business audience but would demonstrate that blogging is not all about politics. [Note: The link above is a new one that should not require registration.--vp] Here it is:

A Blog Sampler
Marginal Revolution (economics):
Daniel Drezner (international relations and trade)
Two Blowhards (arts and culture)
Grant McCracken (anthropology meets economics)
Metacool (design and marketing)
Manolo’s Shoe Blog (shoes, fashion, humor)
The Volokh Conspiracy (law)

The panel features Bill Keller, executive editor of the NYT, Lionel Barber, U.S. managing editor of The Financial Times, and Jacob Weisberg, editor of Slate. Ann Louise Bardach of UCSB and Slate is the co-moderator and organized the panel. For more information, go here. (Don't ask me why they decided to leave my primary affiliation--as an author of books--off the main page and omit my main job at Reason; both are on the press release. I guess blogging is more glamorous. Besides, the main page gets Bill Keller's job wrong.)

What makes these lamps glamorous? (Left: Chiasso. Right: Crate & Barrel.)

How about this photo? Why isn't it as glamorous as it used to be? (Source:David Olsen.)

In a new article for the NYT's now-bimonthly Circuits section, I look at the charms of wireless glamour.

For some fun mid-century examples that were too complicated for the article, check out these illustrations from Ephemera Now.

LOS ANGELES - You tinker with the recipes in Bon Appetit and add ice cubes to your white wine. You prefer the shuffle mode on your iPod and you skip the boring parts of The Tonight Show with your TiVo. Now, thanks to the U.S. Congress, maybe you can skip the boring parts of movies, too.

No, this wasn't really what legislators intended. The Family Movie Act of 2005, signed by President George W. Bush on Wednesday, was aimed at folks who use software to cut out four-letter words, nudity and graphic violence from movies they rent or buy for home viewing.

But the law may also loosen Hollywood's tight control over its products. It passes some of the control over how movies are edited to you and, hypothetically, a mini-industry of movie remix artists.

As long as movie creators get to see their work on screen, reap the profits, and get credit for their ideas, I don't see any reason they should object to private remakes. It's just another example of user innovation. Maybe moviemakers should try to emulate other industries and see how they can tap, rather than stamp out or grudgingly tolerate, user ideas.

Sean does add a caveat, however: "I wonder about a 24-year-old who spends 'a whole day' on the Scion website because its part of her lifestyle -- as a PR man I found that quote suspect. However, the overall article is quite interesting."

I think that GM needs to take a cue from Ford and redo the corvette along the lines of the new Mustang. Take the Corvette and redesign it to look like a new version of the pre-1968 models, a la the new Mustang. People would go crazy over it. The Corvette already has probably the best performance for the dollar of any car on the market, but its looks haven't matched its performance since the 1968 redesign. If you can't think of new ideas, just steal other people's good ones. Could you imagine a redesigned Corvette based on say the early 60s model? It would be beautiful.

According to Ms. Postrel, this Studebaker - widely consdered one of the most beautiful cars ever built - failed because it didn't capture the national mood in the heady days of the early 1950s. She also links to an old Atlantic article from the 1950s, where the man credited with the design of these cars, Raymond Loewy, argues that these Studebakers were too sophisticated for Americans to appreciate.

The real story is considerably more complicated. The Studebaker wasn't a flop because it didn't reflect the exuberant national mood obsessed with jets and rockets, or because Americans couldn't appreciate good styling.

The new Studebakers debuted for the 1953 model year. The 1953 Studebaker line was styled by Robert Bourke of Raymond Loewy Associates. Loewy, however, took all of the credit, as he owned the design firm and promoted his designers' ideas to Studebaker management.

The coupes and hardtops (known as Starlights and Starliners, respectively) are widely considered among the most beautiful cars ever built. The Starlights and Starliners were based on a prototype that Robert Bourke originally designed as a showcar.

Studebaker management loved the prototype, and decided that it would serve as the basis for a radical new model that marked Studebaker's second century in the transportation business (the company, which began by manufacturing wagons, celebrated its centennial in 1952).

But Studebaker couldn't survive selling only sporty, low-slung coupes and hardtops. Its lineup had to include two-door and four-door sedans. Management therefore decreed that the sedan models be based on Robert Bourke's prototype.

That was the first mistake. The second mistake was to place the sedans on a shorter wheelbase than that used for the coupes and hardtops. While the coupes were long, low and sleek, the sedans - the bread-and-butter models of any mainstream manufacturer - were short and dumpy.

A third mistake occurred during the development of the models. Management decided that the frames of the new Studebakers should contain a fair amount of "flex" in order to smooth out the ride (the frame would flex with the road, and thus absorb minor bumps, at least in theory). Unfortunately, when the engine was mounted on the coupe and hardtop frame, it caused the frame to bow, which meant that the hood and front fenders didn't mate properly with the rest of the body! Without the engine, the sheetmetal matched perfectly! The coupes were delayed for several crucial weeks while Studebaker scrambled to work out a fix. The sedans were not affected.

Despite all of this, the 1953 Starliners and Starlights were a success. The problem was that the sedans were duds, so Studebaker as a whole registered lackluster sales in what was a decent year for the entire industry.

The new vehicle market in 1953 was up 38 percent. Sales of Studebaker's handsome new coupes and hardtops increased by 61 percent over comparable 1952 models. But sales of Studebaker sedans dropped by one-third when compared to 1952!

When 1954 rolled around, Studebaker thought it had the situation in hand. But a sales war broke out between Chevrolet and Ford, and both divisions began shipping new vehicles to their dealers, regardless of whether there was an order for them. The dealers naturally heavily discounted these cars. Studebaker and the other independents (Nash, Hudson, Packard and Kaiser) were hammered, as their weaker dealers wouldn't or couldn't discount their wares to match Chevy and Ford. Sales for all the independents dropped dramatically in 1954. Before the start of the 1955 model year, Studebaker had merged with Packard, while Hudson and Nash had combined to form American Motors.

The drop in sales brought out another hidden weakness - Studebaker's labor cost were far higher than its Big Three rivals. Even worse, it had to spread those costs over a much smaller production base. The competitive environment made it impossible for Studebaker to raise prices. (Ironically, GM faces a similar situation today, when compared to Toyota, Honda and Nissan.)

In 1953, Studebaker had one of the most critically acclaimed cars in history. And within two years of its debut, the company was almost bankrupt, and saved only by a merger with Packard. Studebaker limped along for almost a decade, but never really recovered, and finally threw in the towel by closing its South Bend, Indiana, plant in December 1963.

Production continued in Canada for three more years, but the company's engineering and styling departments were gone, so there was no real hope that the Canadian plant was anything more than a temporary arrangement. Studebaker continued to supply cars to dealers, and thus avoided lawsuits for violating the franchise agreements. As sales dropped, and the dealer body dwindled away, Studebaker ended all car production in March 1966. It was a sad end for the nation's oldest car manufacturer.

And W. Edward Howard, Jr. writes:

I'm not sure what Grant McCracken had to say about Loewy's 1954 Studebaker design, but the cars weren't "streamlined" in any 1930's or 1940's curvilinear modern sense. They were basically rather angular wedge shaped, low drag designs (especially the coupes), and actually resembled airplanes much more in cockpit design than other makes at the time. They were regarded as too modern, rather than retro. The GM cars during the 50's were based more on late 1940's aircraft designs in use and production during the 50's. Harley Earl was said to be fascinated by fighter aircraft, and based most of his design elements on early jets.

Earlier Studebakers, from 1949 to 1951 or so, appeared to be airplanes from the front (resembling early P-40s and P-38s), with nacelles, bullet spinners, faired radiator intakes, and struts, and were also perceived to be out of the mainstream. The 1954 Studebakers were a facelift modification of a design from 1952 or so that was quite radical for the time, and had changed very little from 1952 to 1955. They had begin to look outdated, or perhaps too familiar, while still appearing too radical for the mainstream. There was apparently no way to update the shell for mid 50's styling cues.

The big problem from 1954 or 1955 on was that Studebaker didn’t have the money for a new design, with wrap around windows, etc., like GM and Ford. The same body shell from the early 50's was used through the early to mid 60's and was by then three or four generations older than the big three. It was chopped off and became the "compact" Lark, which was easy since the design never had reached the length of the other early 60's makes in the first place.

Just one more example of the dispersed knowledge you can elicit from a blog with a diverse, well-informed, and engaged readership. Thanks to everyone who has written to me about blog postings over the years. I don't always have the time to reply, but I always read your emails, learn from them, and appreciate them.

My test car had a sticker of $32,160, which not only seemed steep, it put the LaCrosse uncomfortably close to some true gotta-have cars from Acura, Infiniti and Lexus. The same money will buy more envy if you invest it in a well-equipped Chrysler 300 Limited.

Don't take my word. Look at how the market values the LaCrosse: with such tough competition, dealers are slashing prices by ever larger amounts, a bad sign for a new car. Edmunds.com, the auto information Web site, reports that in March the average transaction price was 17.2 percent below the average sticker, or $4,702. That compared with a 3.7 percent markdown for the 300, 10.2 percent for the Five Hundred and 8.7 percent for the Mercury Montego.

At least with LaCrosse, the discount isn't on damaged goods; if you disregard matters of taste and styling, it is hard to find serious faults. Come to think of it, that describes the Camry and Accord, too, so right there Buick is in a whole new league.

Yeah, but if you're going to compete with the Camry--Cobb is, in my opinion, too down on the Accord's styling--the quality expectations will be significantly higher. The main lesson here is that competition in the auto industry has ratcheted up quality expectations, and aesthetics is increasingly a basic dimension of "quality."