I MAY BE PREJUDICED BUT I LIKE NEW ENGLAND BEST. Pardon the alleviation in outrage this weekend (you can build your own, easily, out of stories like this one about the human waste products who run credit card companies and the extortionate rate jumps with which they fleece us suckers) but I am visiting editor Martin and his lovely wife Zara in Hanover, NH, and it is hard to feel sour when the air is so fresh, the company so pleasant, and the maple syrup so, well, maply and syrupy (we are just over the Connecticut River from Vermont).

Today we ate in Dartmouth's collegetown, which, like every collegetown, has its busy, beloved diner (Lou's, which was too crowded, alas), its take-the-parents bistro (the Canoe Club, where the steak sandwiches were excellent and the Dartmouth memorabilia inductive of Ivy League pride by proxy), and its general air of boola-boola. We then spent a pleasant hour at the Vermont Institute of Natural Science Nature Center, over by the Quechee Gorge, viewing owls, vultures, hawks, eagles, and falcons. I was amused to learn that the American Bald Eagle sounds in real life rather like a seagull, and that the Red-Tailed Hawk usually does his voice-overs when Old Baldy is serving on TV and film as symbol of our nation's strength. That says a lot, of course, but the birds, the magnificent new facility, and the harsh beauty of the stripped trees and granite outcroppings made even the more poetic kind of political commentary seem rather beside the point.

But of course I haven't been reading the paper, and will soon be back in my urban hellhole, recycling my discontent like an ammunition belt. See ya then!