O little yellow strips of plastic --

How you made my drive fantastic.

[At least you minimized the pain:

With you, I used the carpool lane.]

The best eight bucks I ever spent

Was for these babies. They were meant

To nudge us into hybrid wheels;

And thousands flocked to take those deals.

It worked too well, and now they must

'As chimney-sweepers, come to dust,'

Expiring with the fiscal year --

That’s why my R.I.P. is here.

I’ll miss the joy as I descry

Your cars backed up while I whiz by.

Now I’m the one who’ll brake my ride

For Volts’ and Leafs’ electric glide.

Those greener tricks will roll and rock

On past the grim, unstickered flock

That numbers me -- and yes, I’m sad,

But thankful for the time I had.

Perhaps for years I’ll scrimp each dime

And buy electric -– just in time

To take again that solo drive

Once they’ve redone the 405.

-- Patt Morrison

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California's high-speed train wreck

Photo: California "clean air vehicle" stickers are seen on hybrid vehicles on May 6, 2011 in San Rafael, California. Credit: Justin Sullivan / Getty Images

Orange County is the healthiest county in the Southland; Los Angeles comes in at a mediocre 26th and San Bernardino an abysmal 45th. If you're a fan of rankings, you'll love the new county-by-county health scores from the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute. Its statistics go far beyond the maps recently released by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, ranking each county on a wide range of health-related demographics--mortality rates, quality of life, high school graduation rates (yes, education correlates to lifespan), unemployment, obesity and air quality.

Marin County, which already came out looking good on the CDC's ratings of exercise and obesity rates, ranks No. 1 in California, while Del Norte County comes in last. (A couple of counties weren't ranked.) Bay Area counties tended to do well; the most rural counties were pooled at the bottom.

Not that you should make decisions about your next house based on these; they're simply a demographic snapshot. While some aspects of a healthy life can't be controlled by individuals -- such as smog -- exercise and education are more a matter of individual choice. As a society, we tend to overrate ratings.

RELATED:

Physical activity: Angelenos are lazier than you'd think. But why?

--Karin Klein

You can stick a fork in it. The future of nuclear power in America, that is.

There's nothing quite like seeing the words "Japan battles to avert nuclear meltdown" on your TV screen or "Risk of meltdown increases at Japan nuclear reactor" in your newspaper to focus the mind, is there? 

For example, The Times on Monday ran this headline: "Japan's crisis may have already derailed 'nuclear renaissance.' " 

Ya think?

Nuclear power plants have one fatal flaw: To be totally safe, nothing must go wrong -– ever. And, from Three Mile Island, to Chernobyl, to Japan -– heck, to the Titanic -– something always goes wrong with the stuff we build.

From that one problem comes many. Not the least of which is, nuclear plants have to be built somewhere, and somewhere is always someone’s backyard. And in today’s United States, "not in my backyard" is the new "don’t tread on me."

But it's strange relationship, Americans and risk. For example, what if I said the lesson of the Sendai quake is that it shows we should build nuclear plants?

Lock up the loony guy, right?

Sure, OK. But first, answer this: How many people have died so far in Japan's nuclear crisis? That's right: None that we know of.

But how many people died last year from coal-produced energy? Hundreds, thousands, maybe even millions: the miners killed in accidents, or from lung disease; the people in surrounding areas who've died from diseases caused by the pollution spewed by the plants; and then there are those of us at risk from the global warming caused by the burning of a fossil fuel.

So why do we vilify nuclear power?

Perhaps for the same reason we demand so many safety measures in air travel, yet we willingly accept that thousands more of us will die each year in auto accidents than in air crashes.

Nonsense, you say: Nuclear power just isn't safe. We can't build new plants. Learn from Japan.

OK. Nuclear power isn't safe. So go shut down San Onofre right now. And Diablo Canyon. And all the other nuclear plants in the U.S.

Oh, we can't do that. We need that electricity. Our rates would go through the roof. We'd have rolling blackouts, or worse.

And then there's our military. Remember, we have nuclear power plants on board our aircraft carriers and submarines. We've put dangerous propulsion systems on ships that, if a war breaks out, the enemy will try to blow up and sink. And yet we built and launched the aircraft carrier George H.W. Bush -– nuclear powered, of course -– in 2009. Where was the furor then?

So, new nuclear power is dangerous, but the nuclear power we already have is, uh, OK then?

As for lessons of the Japan crisis, one of them is this: An aging plant built with 1960s technology has -– so far -– endured the worst possible natural disaster and, though badly damaged, has survived.

Imagine how much better we could build such a plant today. After all, when the 1906 great quake destroyed San Francisco, everyone didn’t leave the Bay Area. We took the lessons from it, and from other quakes, and we built smarter and better.

Nuclear power may not be the future. Personally, I prefer solar, wind and other such sources.

But the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico didn't stop us from drilling for oil. And the disaster in Japan shouldn't stop us from a reasonable discussion of nuclear power.

RELATED:

Economy: The other fallout from Japan

Will Angelenos learn from the Japan quake?

As Cuba explores for oil, U.S. embargo could hurt both countries

--Paul Whitefield

Photo: The San Onofre nuclear power plant in northern San Diego County, south of San Clemente. Credit: David McNew/Getty Images

In politics, as the Watergate adage goes, to figure out the game, you follow the money.

In Los Angeles, you follow the traffic.

Of course, traffic is about money too, and that’s where Beverly Hills comes in – or opts out.

As my colleague Dan Weikel just reported, the 90210 town could be the fly in the ointment for the Westside subway extension.

From the sound of it, BH is sharpening its legal knives. Which is – thanks, Yogi – déjà vu all over again.

Once upon a time, there was a Beverly Hills Freeway on the state’s transportation drawing board. It was to be the great east-west link across Los Angeles. And as anyone who’s driven through Beverly Hills at rush hour knows, it didn’t happen.

BH says it’s concerned that a subway route might require tunneling under homes and Beverly Hills High School [I think the word "subway" pretty much encompasses the notion of "tunneling."]

And even if there is a subway, the closest stop to Beverly Hills would be in Century City – which is like all those real estate listings for houses boasting of being "Beverly Hills-adjacent."

Reading Weikel’s story sent me back into The Times' archives, to stories about the genesis of the BH Freeway in the late 1950s. The plan had the early support of a board of officials from cities in Los Angeles, Orange and Ventura counties. It had the blessing of the L.A. City Council, the L.A. County Board of Supervisors and the state; at one point, even Gov. Ronald Reagan backed it – or at least he didn’t stop it.

[Poignantly, L.A. City Council member and future county Supervisor Ed Edelman argued for spending some gas tax money for rapid transit instead, concerned as he was that "auto fumes will choke us to death someday."] 

And then … and then …

The push-back began. There were petitions from BH residents to put the freeway underground, a "cut-and-cover tunnel," as it was called. [BH evidently liked the tunnel idea back then]. There were studies aplenty. The city insisted that there would be no freeway ramps in Beverly Hills itself; you could only drive on or off the freeway at the city limits, not in the city itself. Gossip columnist Hedda Hopper covered the indignant BH celebrities who wrote $100 checks and organized a "mass meeting" to stop the freeway. "Steal their girls, beat them at poker, take away their star billing," Hopper wrote, "but invade their homes and you’ve got a fight."

Nothing ever came of it. The BH Freeway got talked to death. Over the course of 20 years, it got studied, analyzed, meetinged and redesigned, polled and compromised into a faded line on a planner’s map.

Maybe it was a good thing, the no-go BH Freeway. But this time, it's different -- and the  same. Fifty-plus years later, subway planners should learn those history lessons lest they be repeated. And this time it’s the Westside subway at issue, something that could serve the city far better in the long run than another freeway might have, and something that also touches on Edelman’s wistful worry about L.A.’s lungs – or could, if this time Beverly Hills can see its way clear to let it.  

-- Patt  Morrison

The Nov. 2, 2010 ballot propositions have been sent to the printer to appear in the 2010 Voter Information Guide. Monday was the deadline to make changes to the propositions, and both supporters and opponents of Propositions 22, 23 and 25 took advantage of the time they were given.

On Monday, Aug. 9, backers of Proposition 25 won a key battle in court that reversed an Aug. 5 decision by a Sacramento Superior Court. Proposition 25 is the measure that would allow state budgets to be passed by a majority vote of lawmakers, and the Aug. 5 ruling removed a sentence from the proposition's title and summary and ballot label that notified voters that the measure would do nothing to alter the two-thirds vote requirement to change taxes. The clarification would have appeared on the proposition's title and summary and ballot label, and would have been included in the ballot pamphlet and November's General Election ballot. The Yes on 25 campaign appealed, and the court reversed its decision, ruling on Aug. 9 that the sentence be reinstated because there was nothing in the measure "that would allow the Legislature to circumvent the existing constitutional requirement of a two-thirds vote to raise taxes."

Atty. Gen. Jerry Brown lost a court battle on Aug. 4 to the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn. over the wording of Proposition 23, the measure that would repeal environmental law AB-32 until the unemployment rate lowers significantly. The court ruled in favor of two wording changes. The first ruling changed the term "major polluters" to "major sources of pollution" because the court found the original phrasing to be pejorative. Judge Timothy Frawley wrote, "the term 'polluters' has an obvious negative connotation, [and] is likely to create unnecessary prejudice against the measure." Now, the measure would suspend a law that requires "major sources of pollution to report and reduce greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming." 

The second change altered only one word, changing the word 'laws' to 'law.' Originally, the proposition provided for the suspension of "air pollution control laws," but the court decided to refer to a singular law because the original phrasing misleadingly suggested that other laws besides AB-32 would be affected by the passage of the measure.

Proponents of Proposition 22, a measure that would prevent the state government from using funds set aside for local government services and transportation, scored on Aug. 6 when the court ruled in their favor. Supporters were irked over the way in which the Legislative Analyst's Office worded the measure's Fiscal Impact Statement -- a report that estimates how much the ballot measure would cost California's treasury should it pass. Proponents faulted the office's failure to use the words "local government," because the ultimate purpose of the measure is to prevent state "raids" on local and transportation funds. On Friday, the judge ruled that the second bullet point of the proposition's Fiscal Impact Statement will read, "Comparable increases in funding for state and local transportation programs and local redevelopment," instead of the original wording of "Comparable increases in transportation and redevelopment resources."

-- Emilia Barrosse