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Virginia, Minnesota claims 22,000 residents.  It is partially enclosed by a deep, deep pit on the west and north sides.

On the south side it runs into a freeway that brings 80% of all business to the south side of the city where there is a Target Store, a Grandma's Restaurant, a K-Mart and THE MALL. THE MALL is majestic.  (I mean everything is relative)

I grew up in Richfield, Minnesota. This was one of those all white-white suburbs with restrictive covenants and such...one of those precursors to the gated community; a symbol of 'making it' in America. Except the homes were mostly modest costing around ten grand in the old days and selling between $90 and $130 g's nowadays.

I bring this up because Richfield was artificially designed and square in layout besides being square in its ethos.

Virginia just 'happened' because of the mining of iron ore that helped win WWII and dragged us into the era of steel.

Therefore, on the east side we are bounded by railroads that carried that ore throughout the nation to the steel manufacturing centers; although sometimes that ore would simply be carried 60 miles to Lake Superior where the great ships would finish the transportation end of things.

Anyway, I bring this all up because a couple months ago I was making my periodic trek to the insane asylum which is located by our Target store. It is about 22 blocks from my residence and so now-a-days I must carry a bus pass in case my leg gives out on the way home.

We had a lovely spring. Whenever the high is 68 and the low is 52, that is heaven.

The road construction work began early this spring.

As I reached 8th street south I saw an extraordinary event for these parts.

I witnessed a traffic jam for vehicles heading east. I swear, I saw FIVE BLOCKS OF CARS STOPPED in a traffic jam.

I mean it was taking automobiles 15 minutes or more to transverse the width of this town due to road work.

It was awesome.

I mean these poor people were attempting to go about their business; trying to get to Target or K-Mart or the Mall before the dog either relieves himself in the car or on the rug at home.

The 'jam'  was a wonder to behold.

There was no road crew at work exactly. The men (they really do not let women work on roads up here) had blocked off an entire lane of traffic on this two lane street with the intent of arriving sometime in the near future to continue their good work.  I mean, this work should be completed by August, for sure.

There are usually only two or three projects going at one time in this great metropolitan area but the crew works in several different townships and so there is kind of a patchwork form of planning for all of this important work.

You have to grasp the concept of a small town.

Last month I needed to renew my driver's license.  I have no intention of driving of course. People with seizure disorders should never drive.

But the driver's license is a necessity for identification purposes. I mean you hand someone a check or you seek some help from the government and you need a proper I.D.

Now you can, of course, get some alternative ID from the DMV but thereafter people will look at you funny.

They ask questions explicitly or tacitly.

I suppose you had a dozen DUI's so that you could not procure an adequate ID.

Are you one of those temporary immigrants with some green card that might have already expired?

Oh I get it; you are an illiterate with special needs.

 These kinds of suspicions tell me that I must always have a valid DL.

So when you need to renew your driver's license in this town you end up, of course, at THE MALL. The Department of Motor Vehicles used to be housed in this little office in the wonderful Courthouse; the kind with high ceilings and echoes; truly a masterpiece of architecture. I love the old courthouse and the old library. Granite of course with the 'marble' look and modeled after the grander buildings of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Anyway I arrive at THE MALL and had to find one of those silly maps advertising hair treatments and the latest technologies. There is no map to find the map of course so it takes me five minutes in this two square block building to find the DMV.

The entire process of renewing my license took a full 14 minutes. It would have taken the same amount of time to decide upon a sandwich at Subway.  I recall in the burbs from the 60's thru the 90's that such an exercise would take a couple hours.

 In those days and in that place you had to wait in line to get a number so that you could wait in line.

I swear that half the clients I represented on charges of license issues could be attributed to the fact that the poor dolts could not figure out how to make the time to stand in line to get a number so that they could stand in line.

Anyway, life in the small town has its good points.

Back to traffic:

I recall the old days in the sixties before the introduction of the left turn signal. We knew in those days that it was just easier to make three right hand turns to find your proper direction.

You could sit at a traffic light for fifteen minutes or more behind thirty cars  waiting to turn left at the intersection.  Frankly I think it was the insurance companies that were responsible for left-turn traffic lights because accidents would abound while the old red-yellow-green lights ruled the urban streets of this great nation.

One guy would be coming north in the right lane worried about being late for work and would be sure he could make the next light on yellow since he had all the streets timed.

The guy coming from the south anticipating his chance to turn left would see his opportunity for victory after a 20 minute wait; with just one thought in mind: yellow shall redeem me.

China currently has 128 vehicles per one thousand people. (2008)

America currently has 765 vehicles per thousand people. (2008) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_vehicles_per_capita

In 2001, when China's per capita GDP passed the $1000 mark, households had already started to purchase cars.  The number of family cars purchases each year from 2003 -2007 was 1.78m, 2m, 2.93m, 4.11m, and 4.93m - around a 1m increase every year.   In 2008, per capita GDP passed the $3000 mark.  According to the normal progression, the number of family cars sold should have reached 6m.  But because of the financial crisis, only 5.5m were sold.

In 2009, according to the normal progression, 7m cars should have been sold, and in 2010 8m.  But because of subsidies to buy, and pent up demand from 2008, the number of cars sold in 2009 was 8.5m.  That means in 2009, 0.5m cars that should have been sold in 2008 were sold late, and 1m cars that should have been sold in 2010 were sold early.  Adding it up, we predict car sales in 2010 of 7m (the 8m that would normally have been sold, minus the 1m that were sold a year ahead of expectations).'

http://www.chinatranslated.com/?p=766

I added this squib and link to underline the vast changes in Chinese family income over a six year period. I mean I grew up knowing that the commies would not let their Chinese population get more than one loaf of bread a week.

And over a six year period, the number of cars sold to Chinese families went up ten fold while their income tripled.

This is just amazing to me.

This link ends with a wonderful epiphany:

As someone who cycles around an increasingly gridlocked and gritty Beijing, I find the focus on increasing car ownership bizarre.  But with Chinese incomes continuing to rise, subsidies to car ownership remaining in place, and car ownership an importance symbol of status in a status orientated society, its difficult to see a change in the trend.

This is America in the fifties for sure. WE HAD TO HAVE CARS AND TV'S.

The house came later.

Eisenhower's Administration built the single greatest road way system ever seen on the planet earth. Supposedly the reason for this great investment of infrastructure was to render unto the urban centers the ability to get out in case of nuclear war.

But GM was the single biggest corporation in this country for decades and GM could not have reigned so long had it not been without this highway system.

The United States is home to the largest passenger vehicle market of any country in the world.[1] Overall, there were an estimated 254.4 million registered passenger vehicles in the United States according to a 2007 DOT study.        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_vehicles_in_the_United_States

There were 168 million cars in China in 2007. http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/10/number-motor-vehicles-in-china-usa.php

Don't you see? Within a couple years there are going to be more vehicles in China than in the USA.  Of course China has four times our population:

America's land area is 3,537,455 square miles.

China's land area is 3,600,950 square miles.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_outlying_territories_by_land_area

So I figure that China needs a lot more left hand turn traffic signals to go with all these new cars!!!

This must just be great for the environment: A 62-mile-long traffic jam has punished Beijing drivers for nine days, highlighting China's worsening car congestion. A surge of traffic from heavy trucks August 14 first slowed traffic on the Beijing-Tibet expressway, and then roadwork made it worse five days later. The clog is so bad that local merchants have begun selling water and food to trapped drivers as high prices. The highway has been plagued by heavy traffic as it's a key artery bringing goods, groceries, and coal into the city from Hebei and Inner Mongolia. The slowdown is expected to last till mid-September  http://www.thedailybeast.com/cheat-sheet/?cid=hp:cheatsheet7#cheatrow_19330

I must add this little snippet I gleaned from Beast concerning evolution:

Sorry intelligent-design fans, your theory is still wrong: Scientists at the University of Bristol have published a study arguing that Charles Darwin may have been wrong to argue that competition between species is the driving force in evolution. Ph.D.  student Sarda Sahney and colleagues argue that the availability of "living space" is more important than competition. They argue that big evolutionary changes take place when animals move into spaces that are empty of other living animals--for example, when birds evolved the ability to fly. Darwin's theory held something quite different--"that intense competition for resources in overcrowded habitats is the major driving force of evolution," as the BBC puts it. A professor from Yale raises a good objection: "And in general, what is the impetus to occupy new portions of ecological space if not to avoid competition with the species in the space already occupied?"  http://www.thedailybeast.com/cheat-sheet/?cid=hp:cheatsheet10#cheatrow_19341

I don't really think that homo-sapiens is that smart actually.

To all of my brothers and sisters in the great Republic of China:

Welcome to hell:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxr-fbtV1-8