Progressive Wednesday

E85 – “ The quickest way to energy independence

There are a million things to write about E85, a fuel made from 85% ethanol and 15% gasoline. It could even be its own Wednesday topic (spoiler warning: it will be). It's a highly debated environmental issue with many pros and cons, and after being mentioned in the last two State-of-the-Union addresses, E85 has grown in popularity.

We'll discuss the pros and cons in greater depth in the near future, but here are a few. The obvious pros are:

• It's a cleaner burning fuel than gasoline.
• It will lower or eliminate dependency on foreign oil.
• It will create American jobs and help American Farmers.
• It doesn't cost car companies much to make vehicles FlexFuel (E85 or gas) capable.
• Its production can happen quickly and cheaply.

Some less obvious cons:

• It takes nearly as much gas to make the ethanol (from corn) as it does to drive a car.
• It's only about 30% cleaner than regular gas.

Most people who know all the facts regarding ethanol will agree that it is a great alternative to the oil-guzzling status quo, or at least a step in the right direction. If every new car came equipped with a FlexFuel engine, we could spend less time concentrating on making vehicles more efficient and more time on making the fuel more efficiently.

How many cars are FFVs (FlexFuel Vehicles) and how do I know if mine is? Both good questions and we're glad you asked. After all, we're here to help you make progress. FFVs cars have been around since 1992, but have only recently been marked as such. Most people driving around in a FFV don't even know that they are. If you bought a GM vehicle in the last two years, it should have the FlexFuel logo on the back. But with so many others, they don’t even bother to tell you. There is a detailed list here.

Now that you know your car can handle it you need to know where to get it. The difficulty of finding an E85 “top off– differs from state to state, from over 300 in Minnesota (hats off, Gopher State!) to a big, fat bagel in Utah. But fear not: the number of stations is expected to double in the next year, including all stations on the New York State Thruway System. So check your make and model and then “filler up– with E85, and we'll all breath a little easier.

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Gracias

We'd like to give a big old thanks to all the fine folks out there regularly checking out Progressive Wednesday, reading, participating, sending us emails, looking over photos, and commenting on our content.

While we can't personally thank all of you, we will say we're tremendously grateful for you folks from Alabama, Australia, California, Canada, Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Florida, Illinois, Ireland, Israel, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Oklahoma, Ohio, Texas, Virginia, Washington, and any other states or places we're forgetting. We also need to express our deep gratitude to the plethora of regular readers we've got from our home state of New York. (If you click any of the locations above, you'll land on a site based there, a site we dig for one reason or another.)

The interest in Progressive Wednesday has been fantastic, and we hope you'll all stick with us as the site grows and develops.

One week ago today we threw a launch party, and while most of you out there in Internet land couldn't make it, we thought we'd share one photograph which sort of typifies how much fun everyone had.

Please note: no animals were harmed in the smoking of that cigar.

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The TGIF Movie Review: Little Miss Sunshine

Of the five flicks up for an Oscar for Best Picture, I’ve seen exactly deux: The Departed (which, if there’s celluloid justice, will earn Scorsese his first statuette) and Little Miss Sunshine. As much as I adored Marty’s movie, my heart is pining for something a bit more solar to win the big one.

Little Miss Sunshine is a film about the Hoovers:

• Richard, played by Greg Kinnear, is the creator of a highly unsuccessful 9-step program for life success called “Refuse to Lose.”
• Toni Collette plays Sheryl, the mother of the Hoover clan, who tries to be the supportive, if harried, glue binding the family together.
• Steve Carell, the star of The Office, plays Frank, a gay, suicidal, unemployed Proust-scholar (yes, you read that right) recently jilted by a younger lover.
• Dwayne, played by Paul Dano, is an existential teen who’s taken a vow of silence until he can become a fighter pilot.
• Alan Arkin, in a comedic role I dig more than his turn in Slums of Beverly Hills, plays Edwin, the grandfather of the group. He happens to be addicted to heroin and vulgarity.
• The star of the film though is Olive, a 7-year-old would-be beauty-pageant winner, played brilliantly by Abigail Breslin.

The thrust of the story is fairly simple: Olive has a chance to participate in the Little Miss Sunshine pageant, and the family has to make the 800-mile trek from Albuquerque, New Mexico to Redondo Beach, California by VW van so that she can have her chance to win. What happens along the way are a series of ridiculous and serious setbacks for most every member of the Hoover family. I’d rather not mention any of them so as not to spoil the dish.

I will say this: the movie helps us see the goal-driven misfits in each of us, for as it turns out, we’re all reflections in fun-house mirrors.

And I will share some choice quotes I jotted down when I watched it:

• “Olive, you’re getting big. Almost like a real person.”
• “When you’re old, you’re crazy not to do [smack].”
• “We’ll let you go off the hook, but only if you never enlist in a beauty pageant in the state of California ever again.”
• “I can say what I want — I still got Nazi bullets in my ass.”
• “High school — those are your prime suffering years. You don’t get better suffering than that.”
• “Listen to me, I got no reason to lie to you, don’t make the same mistakes I made when I was young. !&%$ a lotta women kid, not just one woman, a lotta women.”
• “Who is that? Nietzsche? So you stopped talking because of Friedrich Nietzsche? Far out.”
• “You tried to do something on your own which is more than most people ever do.”
• “Everybody just pretend to be normal.”

The movie is a lesson in love, the importance of the quest over the spoils, self-sufficiency, feminism (the film is a delightful middle finger to beauty pageants), and the potency of family. Or to quote reviewer Richard Corliss, the movie hopes “to make America forget what makes it gloomy.” ‘Tis true. Rent or buy the sucker today, and start the first night of your weekend with a little light.

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