OT

Apropos of my just-concluded road trip (eight thousand miles in four months, the last 2,800 completed in under five days):

Having lived in rural or, at worst, fully yuppified versions of the American nightmare for the third of a year, with perhaps three out of 117 days spent in any big metropolitan mess, I can see why the Victorians with any sense of how life might be lived outside the City were convinced that miasmas and mephitic exhalations were the sources of urban illness. Come to think of it, at least in a psycho-social sense, in what way were they wrong?