I knew this day would come…

An eBay seller going by the handle pseudopr415 is offering 10 Facebook profiles, each with a minimum of 200 friends, for sale in an eBay auction that closes June 14. The seller writes: “I currently am testing the waters, and would like to see if any marketers are interested in using these.” Facebook makes a lot of noise about how its users trust the site so much, they’ll often supply their cell phone numbers, email and home addresses for their friends and contacts to see. Access to that information could be worth plenty to spammers as well as identity thieves. The product description pseudopr415 created — including a five-step fake profile plan, descriptions of the characters he’s created for the 10 profiles and, in case you have any questions, an email to contact the sneaky bastard — below:

I am the owner of ten Facebook profiles. Every single one of my profiles has at minimum 200 friends. I have aggregated the friends for each persona organically. I will briefly mention the manner in which I compiled a list of genuine friends for each persona.

Step 1: Develop a persona with an intense interest on specific subjects/topics
Step 2: Integrate that individual into communities/forums based on their interests
Step 3: Stimulate conversation inside communities/forums and interact with other users
Step 4: Establish the persona inside the communities/forums
Step 5: Begin to add friends organically

The ten profiles I have are as follows, and can be sold separately if requested:

• Samantha (age 19) – loves music, makes art, and enjoys the outdoors
• John (age 35) – health purist, into yoga, active runner, amateur cyclists, and into healthy eating.
• David (age 23) – Computer programmer, big gamer, into the latest gadgets, and is a blogger
• Michael (age 42) – Intellectual, reads books, enjoys poetry, has a weakness for fast food, and loves his two kids
• Carrie (age 26) – Fashionista, craves gossip magazines, doodles potential outfits, and follows celebrity developments
• Erik (age 29) – Big beer drinker, watches a ton of sports, likes sports cars, and likes to cook
• Holly (age 18) – Big into volunteering, loves reading, loves school, and interested in travelling abroad
• Peter (age 19) – Athlete, big into college life, likes drama and mystery movies, and can’t live without mac and cheese
• Shannon (age 33) – Design aficionado, into exploring a city’s culture, active artist, and
  is latched onto her iPhone
• Kristin (age 40) – Live at home mom, loves cooking for her family, wishes she had a new car, wants a vacation to the beach, and is really into gardening

These personas are geographically dispersed, and they all live in major cities across the United States. I am leaving the last name of the profiles absent, as not to be identifiable by Facebook employees. I am not providing a screenshot of the profiles either, but they are available if a serious request is made.

All of these Facebook personas engage on a daily basis with other Facebook members, they share content, and they update their status. They have a variety of applications installed on their Facebook page, and they have a substantial amount of comments left on their wall. Additionally, these personas post pictures they find interesting on their Facebook page.

I currently am testing the waters, and would like to see if any marketers are interested in using these. Under the right conditions and for a fair price you will receive full control of these personas, as well as associated emails. A walk through each of the characters is possible if an individual is serious about their interest, and is willing to assign a value to the persona ahead of time.

I would love to hear from you. Please contact me at: pseudopr@gmail.com for questions

• Tutorial9

  David Leggett and his team have been getting more and more impressive as the months go by over at Tutorial9. They launched at the beginning of the year and have one of the slickest sites around, with a great bit of branding and really useful tutorials. Definitely worth bookmarking!

  Visit Site

• PS Hero

  I’m not really sure who the hero is in PS Hero because he doesn’t have an about page that I can see, but with his tutorial awesomeness I’m sure he must have a cape and be wearing his underwear on the outside. Fabulous tutorials, awesome site.

  Visit Site

• Tutzor

  Tutzor is super new and is mostly written by Constantin Potorac who you might recognize from a few PSDTUTS tutorials! He’s been posting some great work there, and I’m sure the site is going to continue to grow. Hopefully soon we’ll steal Constantin back over to the dark side here at PSDTUTS

  Visit Site

• PhotoshopStar

  Fellow Australian Eli has been running PhotoshopStar for 2 years (how’s that for consistency!) and has done a fine job of it. He’s got some great tutorials and also provides a good resource for keeping up to date with what’s happening around the web.

  Visit Site

• Tutorial Dog

  It’s man’s best friend for learning!! Devin Ross of TutorialDog is not only great at coming up with brand names, he’s also a great tutorial writer. And we’re looking forward to showcasing his talents over at NETTUTS very soon!

  Visit Site

• More Sites

  A few other noteworthy sites to visit:

  PhotoshopGUIDesign
  Abduzeedo!
  Worth1000’s Tutorial Section
  Digital Grin
  PhotoshopSupport

  Visit our Resources Directory for even more sites…
  

So there you have it! A lot of great Photoshopping to be done. As for us, you can be sure that we’re going to continue to strive to be the best through our tutorials, articles and innovation!

Link to article • Image

Link to NPR article • Image

They are living in a typical habitat for the sort of New Yorkers they appear to be: an enormous ’20s-era co-op with Central Park views (once part of a triplex built for the philanthropist Marjorie Merriweather Post), gutted to its steel beams and refitted with luxurious flourishes like 16th-century Belgian mantelpieces and custom furniture made from exotic woods with unpronounceable names.

But some of that furniture and some of those walls conceal secrets — messages, games and treasures — that make up a Rube Goldberg maze of systems and contraptions conceived by a young architectural designer named Eric Clough, whose ideas about space and domestic living derive more from Buckminster Fuller than Peter Marino.

The apartment even comes with its own book, part of which is a fictional narrative that recalls “The Da Vinci Code” (without the funky religion or buckets of blood) and “From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler,” the children’s classic by E. L. Konigsburg about a brother and a sister who run away to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and discover — and solve — a mystery surrounding a Renaissance sculpture. It has its own soundtrack, too, with contributions by Kate Fenner, a young Canadian singer and songwriter with a lusty, alternative, Joni Mitchell-ish sound, with whom Mr. Clough fell in love during the project.

It all began simply enough, Ms. Sherry said, when she and her husband bought the 4,200-square-foot apartment for $8.5 million in 2003.

“I just didn’t want it to be this cookie-cutter, Upper East Side, Fifth Avenue kind of place,” she said.

The six-foot-tall Ms. Sherry doesn’t fit the mold of Fifth Avenue either: she is a former triathlete and nonfiction writer who is more interested in her children’s sneakers than in the offerings of the shoe department at Barneys.

Architects she met with made very cookie-cutterish proposals, until she met Mr. Clough, now 35, who was a friend of a friend, and they got to talking. He had smart ideas, like moving the front door and eliminating the very grand and formal front hall, the kind with marble floors and too many doors “that you’d put a round table in the middle of and flowers on top of that,” Ms. Sherry said. “A total waste of space.”

What Ms. Sherry didn’t realize until much later was that Mr. Clough had a number of other ideas about her apartment that he didn’t share with her. It began when Mr. Klinsky threw in his two cents, a vague request that a poem he had written for and about his family be lodged in a wall somewhere, Ms. Sherry said, “put in a bottle and hidden away as if it were a time capsule.” (Ms. Sherry said that her husband is both dogged and romantic, a guy singularly focused on the welfare of children, not just his own. Mr. Klinsky runs Victory Schools, a charter school company that seeds schools in neighborhoods around the country, as well as an after-school program in East New York that his own children help out with regularly.)

That got Mr. Clough, who is the sort of person who has a brainstorm on a daily basis, thinking about children and inspiration and how the latter strikes the former. “I’d just read something about Einstein being inspired by a compass he’d been given as a child,” he said. The Einstein story set Mr. Clough off, and he began to ponder ways to spark a child’s mind. “I was thinking that maybe there could be a game or a scavenger hunt embedded in the apartment — that was the beginning,” he said.

Before long, his firm, 212box, was knee-deep in code and cipher books, furnituremakers were devising secret compartments, and Mr. Clough’s former colleague, Heather Bensko, an architectural and graphic designer who had been his best friend at the Yale School of Architecture, found herself researching the lives of 40 historical figures, starting with Francis I of France and ending with Mrs. Post.

Ms. Bensko said she began writing chapters for a book, imagining scenes from the childhoods of those inspirational figures and trying to connect them. When that didn’t pan out as a narrative technique, she invented two best friends living in New York City who discover a mystery in an apartment and, in the course of unraveling the mystery, a sort of treasure hunt, they “meet” the historical figures.

All of that was tied into gizmos Mr. Clough, Ms. Bensko and others in their office hid in the apartment — without telling the clients — in a way that is almost too complicated to explain.

The renovation took a year and a half, and Mr. Clough, who acted as construction manager, brought it in for $300 a square foot, a rather conservative figure given the neighborhood and the scope of the project. Designing and producing the apartment’s hidden features, however, including its book and music, took four years, said Mr. Clough, who absorbed much of the cost in terms of his own billable hours, and relied on the generosity of more than 40 friends and artisans who became captivated by the project. He said he “begged, borrowed and stole” from them “in the collaborative process.”

“People were definitely not paid,” he said, “and we extend our thanks. It absorbed the minds of many people.”

In assembling talents for his project, Mr. Clough aimed high. His first choice for the author of the book, which contains clues to the scavenger hunt in addition to the mystery story, was Jonathan Safran Foer, whose work contains its own sort of coded narrative pyrotechnics. Mr. Clough sent him a little tease, a Rubik’s Cube of a sculpture made of anodized aluminum, encased in an acrylic cube that opens into a puzzle stamped with his firm’s phone number and the word “Please.”

Mr. Foer was intrigued and gave him a call. In an e-mail recently, Mr. Foer recalled that his daughter had just been born, and he was adrift in a fog of new parenthood. “It was a very good piece of mail that came at a very bad time,” he wrote. “I was losing and ignoring all kinds of things that I shouldn’t have. Did we speak on the phone? The whole thing was so dreamy I can’t really remember. In fact, the project was never described to me as simply as you did in your e-mail. Had it been, I would have rushed to do it. I suppose that’s the price one pays for being as mysterious as Clough is. Or as skeptical as I am.”

The sculptor Tom Otterness was another hoped-for collaborator, but Mr. Clough said Mr. Otterness’s acquiescence was conditional on Mr. Foer’s, and anyway he would have needed to be paid. “Of course I couldn’t have done it for free,” Mr. Otterness said this week.

The apartment is quite attractive and perfectly functional in all the typical ways, and its added features remained largely unnoticed by its inhabitants for quite some time after they moved in, in May of 2006. Then one night four months later, Cavan Klinsky, who is now 11, had a friend over. The boy was lying on the floor in Cavan’s bedroom, staring at dozens of letters that had been cut into the radiator grille. They seemed random — FDYDQ, for example. But all of a sudden the friend leapt up with a shriek, Ms. Sherry said, having realized that they were actually a cipher (a Caesar Shift cipher, to be precise), and that Cavan’s name was the first word.

Another evening, Ms. Sherry and Mr. Klinsky were lying in their custom-made bed when a rod running along its foot snapped off. “I’m thinking, What the heck kind of cheap bed is this?” said Ms. Sherry, who phoned Mr. Clough the next day.

His response, which might have taken a less adventurous person aback, was that she take a wait-and-see attitude, that the bed bit was part of a larger “story” and that all would be revealed in good time. Oh, and he told her to just snap the piece back into the bed. (Ms. Sherry learned later that the piece of wood is meant to be wrapped with a leather strap — part of a decorative molding in another part of the house — which in its coiled shape reveals a message.) That Ms. Sherry gamely complied is another example of how flexible she is as a client. “Most people” — like her friends and her mother, she said — “couldn’t believe how hands-off I was about the whole project. But I do think you have to trust people. You can’t stand behind them breathing down their neck, particularly if they’re creative.”

Finally, one day last fall, more than a year after they moved in, Mr. Klinsky received a letter in the mail containing a poem that began:

We’ve taken liberties with Yeats

to lead you through a tale

that tells of most inspired fates

in hopes to lift the veil.

The letter directed the family to a hidden panel in the front hall that contained a beautifully bound and printed book, Ms. Bensko’s opus. The book led them on a scavenger hunt through their own apartment.

But not all at once. The 18 clues were sophisticated and in many cases confounding. The family, Ms. Sherry said, worked in fits and starts over a two-week period, calling Mr. Clough for help when they got bogged down, which happened with increasing frequency as they approached the last of the clues. Indeed, as Ms. Sherry and Mr. Clough told their tale, this reporter had to ask Ms. Sherry if she ever questioned her architect’s sanity. “Yes,” she replied cheerfully.

In any case, the finale involved, in part, removing decorative door knockers from two hallway panels, which fit together to make a crank, which in turn opened hidden panels in a credenza in the dining room, which displayed multiple keys and keyholes, which, when the correct ones were used, yielded drawers containing acrylic letters and a table-size cloth imprinted with the beginnings of a crossword puzzle, the answers to which led to one of the rectangular panels lining the tiny den, which concealed a chamfered magnetic cube, which could be used to open the 24 remaining panels, revealing, in large type, the poem written by Mr. Klinsky. (There is other stuff in there, too, but a more detailed explanation might drive a reader crazy.)

The Sherry-Klinsky clan remains largely bemused by the extent to which Mr. Clough embellished and embedded their apartment. But Ms. Sherry and Mr. Klinsky are not immune to the romance of objects or messages hidden in walls, or what Ms. Sherry called “winks from one family to another.”

“You move into a place and you have your life there, and your memories, and it’s all temporary,” she said. “Especially with apartments, which have such a fixed footprint. I like the idea of putting something behind a wall to wink at the next inhabitant and to wish them the good life hopefully that you have had there.” Two years ago, when Ms. Sherry and Mr. Klinsky left the El Dorado on Central Park West to move into their new apartment, Ms. Sherry tried to create such a wink. She loaded an MP3 player with music they had loved and listened to during their time there — James Taylor singing “Jellyman Kelly,” songs by U2 and Jakob Dylan — and tucked it behind a panel filled with electrical equipment.

Six months ago, “someone drops off the MP3 player with our doorman here,” she said, “along with a note that read something to the effect of — You cannot believe where we found this thing. Good luck in your new home.”

Link to NY Times article • Image

He’s headed to Antarctica — to the McMurdo research station, to be precise — and he’s looking for answers. Sort of. Being Werner Herzog, he’s posing questions that resist actual resolutions.

Those questions, the filmmaker explains, have to do with fears and desires, the sorts of dreams that people might pursue at the end of the world. “I would not,” he promises, “come up with another film about penguins.”

That’s not to say Encounters at the End of the World is not pretty, poetic, occasionally even breathtaking. But its take on “nature” is less appreciative than it is provocative, even perverse. Though Herzog is not arguing with his subjects here, as in Grizzly Man, he remains determined to parse the world, to see how it produces humans and vice versa.

From Stefan Pashov, philosopher and forklift driver, to Karen Joyce, traveler and computer expert, the interviewees all tell remarkable stories. Where cell biologist Sam Bower is visibly thrilled as he describes the one-celled monsters he has found underwater (”slime-type blobs” and worms “with horrible mandibles”), the mechanic Libor Zicha, who escaped from behind the Iron Curtain and keeps his rucksack packed so he can move on at a moment’s notice, cannot even voice his feelings.

Herzog fills in, from off camera: “You do not have to talk. … For me, the best description of freedom is what you have in front of you: You are traveling a lot.”

Between conversations, you see life at the South Pole, images that careen from antic — a survival-camp lesson where students literally don buckets on their heads to simulate “a whiteout condition,” then wander off together, directionless, mere feet from where they want to be — to tragic, as when Herzog does set forth in search of penguins after all, and finds himself trying, not so successfully, to conjure conversation with a taciturn researcher.

When the camera picks up a disoriented penguin, abandoning the colony and “heading straight for the mountains 70 kilometers away” — and so to certain death — the shot, huge landscape looming before the unstoppable trundler, is at once spectacular and strange. And perfectly Herzogian.

Some will want to dismiss Rep. Dennis Kucinich’s introduction of articles of impeachment against President Bush as quixotic, but it’s not. Twenty House Republicans joined nearly all House Democrats in voting to send the articles to the Judiciary Committee. This comes on the heels of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s 107-page report confirming, with the vote of two Republican Senators, that President Bush abused his office by deceiving Congress and the American people into the Iraq war. Although Kucinich’s articles included other impeachment grounds as well, deception about the war is arguably the most serious one.

We have long known that the reasons President Bush and his team gave for going to war in Iraq were false. Many have contended that the president deliberately misled the nation into war. Scott McClellan, for example, with his insider’s perspective, says in his new book that the president used exaggerations and misleading statements to win public and Congressional support for going to war in Iraq. Now we have important corroboration of such claims: the Senate Intelligence Report has made it official in a way that Congress will find hard to ignore.

The report describes a drum roll of groundless statements by the president, the vice president and other top officials. While it does not use the word “lie,” it offers plenty of evidence that we were “led to war based on false pretences,” to quote Committee chair Senator Rockefeller. The report shows there was no intelligence to back up the President’s contention that Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein were in cahoots, or his claim that Saddam would give WMD to terrorists, much less the Vice President’s fantasy that American soldiers would be welcomed as liberators.

Now that these are official findings of the Senate Intelligence Committee, the question is, what do we do about it? Just wring our hands? Simply hope for change in the November elections? Or does the Constitution now require something more of us?

The Constitution’s framers envisioned the possibility that presidents and their minions might seriously abuse the power of their office, and “subvert the constitution.” Their remedy was impeachment: the removal of the offending official to protect our democracy. They understood that Executives historically wanted to take countries into unnecessary wars, so they empowered Congress act as a real check on unwarranted presidential warmaking. Since lying to Congress obstructs that function, it is a grave abuse of power that “subverts the Constitution” and meets the standard for impeachment.

The House should commence an impeachment inquiry forthwith. In fact, in a sense, it is already beginning. Rep. Kucinich introduced the articles, the House has referred them to the Judiciary Committee and the Senate Intelligence Report goes a long way toward furnishing the investigative work Congress needs to do in the course of impeachment, at least as regards the run-up to the war (Congress should also look at other serious abuses of power, including President Bush’s refusal to obey duly enacted laws, as evidenced by hundreds of signing statements, his violations of the laws on wiretapping and mistreatment of detainees).

The next step is to start asking, what did the president actually know and when did he know it? Former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill has stated that President Bush seemed determined to overthrow Saddam Hussein at the beginning of his administration, well before 9/11. There was also the British “Downing Street” memo written in the summer of 2002 stating that President Bush was going to “fix” the intelligence to fit the policy of overthrow. It’s now incumbent on Congress to take these matters up in impeachment hearings.

Yes, even at the end of their terms, President Bush and Vice President Cheney can still be impeached and removed from office. There might just be sufficient time to finish impeachment before they leave office, and technically they could be impeached even after that. This administration can still be held accountable for the consequences of the unnecessary Iraq War and other grave abuses. The American people still have a chance to witness the Constitution in action as it appropriately limits the powers of this president, preventing further abuses by him (such as bombing Iran without approval of Congress) or by his successors.

This would be an important lesson in democracy. We last learned it 34 years ago during the Nixon impeachment process, which reminded Americans how the Constitution works. But our collective memory of those far-off events may have faded, especially after the past eight years of President Bush asserting extreme claims for presidential power, coupled with the failure of Congress to respond forcefully. As a result, as a nation we may have a diminished level of constitutional literacy compared to 1974. It’s time to reinvigorate that literacy. We need to understand once again that acquiescing in this president seriously deceiving us into war means ignoring what the Constitution says, and jeopardizing our democracy.

Link to Huffington Post article • Image

“Look, I think that in retrospect, you know, I could have used a different tone.”

Different tone? Ya think?

War mongering is a significant aspect of your legacy, but I think we can conclude, and without much debate, that your legacy will also be one of criminality, failure and a degree of incompetence rarely achieved by any American president, much less one whose deficit of character is rivaled only by his nearly unprecedented lack of humility in the face of his unprecedented roster of inadequacies.

Sorry.

As it turns out, you won’t have much control over your legacy and the history of your administration anyway. You might have some cursory input, but no-one really takes you seriously anymore and anything you put forth will be taken as just another work of fiction; another bit of propaganda.

Your legacy will ultimately be written by those of us who have been actively documenting your presidency in real time — millions of voices authoring the narrative of your awful regime and preserving it with digital clarity one trespass at a time.

And everywhere we look, we can plainly observe your smirking, affectless footprint.

Death, poverty, war, pain, ignorance, blind patriotism, joblessness, and abandoned homes. And guess what? We’re writing it down on the Internets. Your history, Mr. President, is being written at this very moment by those of us who are watching our homes collapse in value and our friends and relatives sent to places like Ramadi and Fallujah and, in some cases, Walter Reed or worse. Your history, Mr. President, isn’t going to be settled and published decades from now. It’s being published immediately and without the fog of memory to obscure the ugly details.

These ugly details are exhaustively researched and easily accessible.

And as they congeal into a single eight-year narrative, it’s my hunch that every tragedy experienced during this dark ride will be regarded as a means to a specific end: your election to a second term and the election of successors who will carry on with your sinister tradition. The centerpiece of this tradition — the throughline of your presidential narrative — has been, simply put, endless war for the sake of re-election.

In fact (and contrary to your present lamentation) you wanted war even before you took office. War, by your own definition, would all but guarantee a second presidential term. You told your pre-2000 autobiographer, Mickey Herskowitz:

“One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief… My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it…If I have a chance to invade…if I had that much capital, I’m not going to waste it. I’m going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I’m going to have a successful presidency.”

Four years later, as you ramped up your re-election campaign, you told Tim Russert:

“I’m a war president. I make decisions here in the Oval Office in foreign policy matters with war on my mind.”

You didn’t sound ashamed of your tone back then — when you were running for your second term. Everything you managed to accomplish during your presidency was directed towards maintaining this manufactured “war president” façade. Without it, you would have been either defeated in 2004 or impeached a long time ago.

So how did you do it? History will show that you bought off the American people with $300 checks and massive tax cuts for Paris Hilton and Dick Cheney. You ruthlessly exploited the deadliest foreign attack on American soil and, subsequently, terrorized this nation and its corporate media into giving you more latitude than you otherwise deserved. You attempted to dumb down our public schools because, in your view, an educated electorate is a dangerous electorate — less susceptible to war mongering and propaganda, right? You ignored the destruction of an entire American city because the majority of its residents probably didn’t vote for you or contribute to your campaign for war in the first place. And your entire foreign policy has been constructed around deliberately inciting anti-American sentiment, thus fueling more war.

It turns out, Mr. President, that your only success is something which you appear to be walking back: your war mongering — your cynical, self-serving and bloody “bring ‘em on” legacy — and, with it, your re-election in 2004.

If you were half the man your dwindling supporters claim that you are, you would own this actual legacy of yours, Mr. President.

If you were a better man, you would own the horror you’ve created for yourself and generations of Americans to come. You would take responsibility for more than your pathetic “tone” and “rhetoric” — you would take responsibility for all of it: the lies, the casualties, the mistakes, the crimes and the cover-ups. Instead you’re presently flying around the world saying that you “wanted to solve this … in a diplomatic fashion” when we all know, based on numerous reports from insiders ranging from Scott McClellan to Richard Clarke that this is simply not true.

The historical record of your presidency has unequivocally verified that, even now as you attempt to Windex the crap off your legacy, you’re lying about the war. But what’s worse is that your administration’s objective of fostering endless American warfare continues in Iraq and elsewhere while being endorsed by Senator McCain who has hugged-out any conflicts he might have had with your policies. And, if you and Senator McCain are lucky, the corporate media will crack open its Election Year Mad Libs script and paint Senator Obama as somehow more dangerous to the future of America than you ever were.

Your legacy, Mr. President, isn’t just about war mongering. We’re going to see to it that your legacy is almost entirely about how you lied us into an unnecessary war as part of an almost unspeakably horrible strategy for re-election — as a way to mask over your inadequacies as a leader and to somehow delude future Americans into believing that your two-term presidency deserves special renown.

So good luck with all of that “different tone” crap. It’s not going to work. Sorry.

Back in 1980 - 81 we were shocked as gas prices rose above $1.00 for the first time. This was especially shocking because in 1976 gas was $0.60 per gallon. But by 1981 the average price for the entire year was $1.35.

Obviously if that was the average some people were paying much more. Adjusting this for inflation we get an average inflation adjusted price for a gallon of gasoline in 1981 of $3.17 in March 2008 dollars.

According to the US Energy Information Administration the average price of a gallon of gasoline in March 2008 cost $3.21 … although I know in many places like California people would have been glad to find gasoline for $3.21 a gallon.

I spent several weeks driving around California in March and often saw gas closer to $4.00 a gallon.

But the same would have been the case back in 1980-81. We are not dealing with peak prices but average prices. And not only average prices over the whole year but also over the whole country, so there is quite a bit of variation.

The chart at the right shows the Average annual Gas prices in nominal terms (what you actually pay) and in inflation adjusted terms (red line).

Back in 2006 the news media began talking about “all time high gasoline prices” but at that time our chart showed that in “inflation adjusted terms” we weren’t there yet.

But recent spikes have brought it up above the average levels of 1980 - 81.

Unfortunately, way back in 1918 when Gasoline was a luxury item and people still rode horses as their means of transportation… gasoline in inflation adjusted terms was about $3.50 a gallon.

So average prices are not quite above “all time” records except in places like California. But it won’t be long and I will be able to officially declare “Average Annual Gasoline Prices in Inflation Adjusted Terms are at an All Time High”.

But current prices are higher than the average annual price in 1980 putting us in position to have higher average prices than 1980.

Remember the stress those high prices put on the economy. We need to be cautious because the economy could be in danger from high energy prices.

In an exclusive interview, he expressed regret at the bitter divisions over the war and said that he was troubled about how his country had been misunderstood. “I think that in retrospect I could have used a different tone, a different rhetoric.”

Phrases such as “bring them on” or “dead or alive”, he said, “indicated to people that I was, you know, not a man of peace”. He said that he found it very painful “to put youngsters in harm’s way”. He added: “I try to meet with as many of the families as I can. And I have an obligation to comfort and console as best as I possibly can. I also have an obligation to make sure that those lives were not lost in vain.”

The unilateralism that marked his first White House term has been replaced by an enthusiasm for tough multilateralism. He said that his focus for his final six months in office was to secure agreement on issues such as establishing a Palestinian state and to “leave behind a series of structures that makes it easier for the next president”.

Mr Bush is concerned that the Democratic nominee Barack Obama might open cracks in the West’s united front towards Tehran’s nuclear ambitions. At the EU-US summit in Slovenia, he pressed for tougher sanctions against Iran unless it agreed to suspend its uranium enrichment programme verifiably: “They can either face isolation, or they can have better relations with all of us.”

Mr Bush told The Times that when his successor arrived and assessed “what will work or what won’t work in dealing with Iran”, he would stick with the current policy.

Shaul Mofaz, a hardline Israeli minister, has suggested that a military strike on Iran is “unavoidable”. But Mr Bush said: “We ought to work together, keep focused. His comments really should be viewed as the need to continue to keep pressuring Iran.”

The President was keen to bind his successor into a continued military presence in Afghanistan and Iraq, but offered only cautious optimism about a recent decline in violence. Asked about corruption allegations dogging Hamid Karzai, the Afghan President, Mr Bush insisted: “I have found him to be an honest man.”

He also offered words of encouragement for another ally, Gordon Brown, whom he will meet on Sunday. He said that he needed no advice on coping with political adversity. He is “plenty confident and plenty smart, plenty capable — he can sort it out”.

But he delivered a thinly veiled warning to Mr Obama that his promises to renegotiate or block international trade deals were already causing alarm in Europe and beyond.

“There is concern about protectionism and economic nationalism,” he said. “Leaders recognise now is the time to get ahead of this issue before it becomes engrained in the political systems of our respective countries.”

Acknowledging that his refusal to ratify the Kyoto Protocol once created consternation in Europe, he said that there was now a recognition that that richer countries needed to “transfer out of the hydrocarbon economy”. He insisted, however, that any binding emission targets would have to include China and India to be workable.

The President knows that Republican nominee-in-waiting John McCain will have to distance himself from the current Administration. “He’s an independent person who will make his decisions on what he thinks is best.”

Asked if the US is ready for a black president, Mr Bush says: “I think the fact that the Democratic Party nominated Barack Obama is a statement about how far America has come.

“Having said all that, it’s going to be important for the American people to figure out who can handle the task of the 21st Century. It’s a challenging job.”

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Concept cars give automotive designers a chance to let their imaginations run wild, often with outlandish results. But even by that measure, BMW has come up with something as strange as it is innovative — a shape-shifting car covered with fabric.

Instead of steel, aluminum or even carbon fiber, the GINA Light Visionary Model has a body of seamless fabric stretched over a movable metal frame that allows the driver to change its shape at will. The car — which actually runs and drives — is a styling design headed straight for the BMW Museum in Munich and so it will never see production, but building a practical car wasn’t the point.

Chris Bangle, head of design for BMW, says GINA allowed his team to “challenge existing principles and conventional processes.”

“It is in the nature of such visions that they do not necessarily claim to be suitable for series production,” company officials said in unveiling the car Tuesday. “Rather, they are intended to steer creativity and research into new directions.”

Giving Bangle and his team that latitude to design so radical a car “helps to tap into formerly inconceivable, innovative potential” to push the boundaries of appearance and materials as well as functions and the manufacturing process, BMW says.

Bangle and is team actually built GINA — which stands for “Geometry and functions In ‘N’ Adaptions” — six years ago, but BMW kept it under, er, wraps until Tuesday. It’s built on the Z8 chassis and has a 4.4-liter V8 and six-speed automatic transmission. BMW says the fabric skin - polyurethane-coated Lycra - is resilient, durable and water resistant. It’s stretched over an aluminum frame controlled by electric and hydraulic actuators that allow the owner to change the body shape. Want a big spoiler on the back? Wider fenders? No problem. “The drastic reinterpretation of familiar functionality and structure means that drivers have a completely new experience when they handle their car,” BMW says.

GINA has just four panels - the front hood, two sides and the rear deck. The doors open in jack-knife fashion and are completely smooth when closed; access to the engine is through a slit in the hood. BMW says the shape of the body can be changed without slackening or damaging the fabric. The fabric is opaque so the taillights shine through, and small motors pull the fabric back to reveal the headlights.

The interior is equally innovative. The steering wheel and gauges swing into place and the headrest rises from the seat once the driver is seated, making it easier to get in and out of the car.

BMW says GINA is built on a space frame that provides all the safety of a conventional car, but we suspect people - not to mention BMW’s lawyers and government regulators - wouldn’t embrace fabric bodies. Still, the company says GINA could influence the design of future Beemers.