How would you like your Oil done?

Bets and I, having recently waethered a spate of obsessive 'whatifweboughtahouse'-ed-ness, have turned now to the logic (or not) of rolling our savings into a hybrid vehicle. Now that the general public is responding to (suddenly very real) concerns about gas costs, and the incipient questions voluntarily raised about oil, war, politics, the price of bananas, economic bubbles, climatic change, and 'stuff'; its a whole new world. Truthfully, its been new for longer than programming and our careers would allow. But perhaps clarity meets us more often than in the past at the gas pump.
So, I think the Prius is a worthy vehicle, especially considering the quite real possibility of $5.00 a gallon. And now that the monolithic auto industry is beginning to explore the profit possibilities in hybridized fleets, american consumers no doubt can chart a new course.
Which reminds me of the most recent book to delight me. Ronald Wright's A Short History of Progress is a much less than 200 page summation of human/bipedal culture and history as it pertains to where we stand in the Cosmos today. If you (may) find yourself outside the 'Jesus Gonna Be Here Soon' camp, thereby omitting the divine salvation/happy ending COP-OUT that gives license to all-sort of curious behavior, this book I highly recommend.
Excerpts:
"Despite certain events in the twentieth century, most people in the Western cultural tradition still believe in the Victorian ideal of progress, a belief succinctly defined by the historian Sidney Pollard in 1968 as "the assumption that a pattern of change exists in the history of mankind ...that it consists of irreversible changes in one direction only, and that this direction is toward improvement."
Our practical faith in progress has ramified and hardened into an ideology- a secular religion which, like the religions that progress has challenged, is blind to certain flaws in its credentials. Progress, therefore, has become a myth in the anthropological sense."
Using the best of scientific and historical analysis from the last century, as well as breaking news 'about Your World, for You, Right Now' in political, cultural, and environmental patterns Wright connects the dots in a world become increasingly frenetic and distracted. Do read!