This email is not really being written from a physical junk yard, but from a virtual one: the Bay Area. It's not that there are wrecks all over the place -- Alta California only has about 250 fender-benders a day -- but if you listen to AM radio, you'd think that there were junk cars all over the place. You see, our local AM stations run ads every few minutes indicating that listeners can donate their junk cars to charity for sizeable tax writeoffs. At least once an hour, different charities tell you how easy it is to get rid of that pesky old car, running or not, in most cases." They tell us that often because they figure we forget. Like our driveways are festooned with project cars we're never going to restore, or our grandmother's 1949 Desoto. And then there's that '75 Fiat Spider in the back yard and the Isetta that our brother-in-law had lifted to the roof as a practical joke. Even assuming we all had stray vehicles, why do they think that a radio announcement will stir us to action? To fit their hypothesis, we would have had to be derelict for years and been too lazy / stupid to sell the hulks for cash. If an individual is that dumb, is he likely to be the meticulous type who itemizes his deductions? Or if an individual is rich enough to use the deduction, is he likely to value the extra space he'll gain by giving away the spare Dusenberg? Nowhere else in the country, except maybe LA, are there ads like this on the radio. So the Bay Area really must be the only place where there are all these junk cars. I can only assume that the charitable organizations must have done some very careful research to figure this one out. David O. Taber DOTnet Consulting, Inc. www.D-O-Tnet.com 555 Bryant Street, Suite 789 Palo Alto, CA 94301 USA voice: +1-650-326-2626 (direct) page: mailto:5105024055@mobile.att.net (message <100 characters! !) fax: +1-650-326-1475 mail: mailto:DOT@D-O-Tnet.com ICQ: 138661538 MSN-IM: DOTnet Y! davidotaber AIM: DOTnetConsulting