I'm a Stranger Here Myself by Bill Bryson

lot of healthful fresh air and exercise, and the woods were stunning in their snowy softness. It was strange to think that in all that vast stillness there were the remains of a oncerobust little community, and stranger still that somewhere out there with me was a crumpled, unfound plane with two bodies aboard.
    I would love to be able to tell you that I found Quinntown or the missing plane or both, but alas I did not. Sometimes life has inconclusive endings.
    Columns, too, I’m afraid.

    (Author’s note: On Christmas Eve 1998, as this book was being prepared for publication, the second anniversary of the plane’s disappearance passed without any new news on what might have become of it. One theory is that the men, searching for an open space, tried to land on a lake but broke through the thin ice and sank to the bottom; in the night the ice reformed and was covered in fresh snow by morning. Working on that assumption, the lakes in the vicinity were checked by divers and airborne metal detectors in the summer of 1997. The search turned up nothing but some old cars and abandoned refrigerators.)

I am assured that this is a true story.
    A man calls up his computer helpline complaining that the cupholder on his personal computer has snapped off, and he wants to know how to get it fixed.
    “Cupholder?” says the computer helpline person, puzzled. “I’m sorry, sir, but I’m confused. Did you buy this cupholder at a computer show or receive it as a special promotion?”
    “No, it came as part of the standard equipment on my computer.”
    “But our computers don’t come with cupholders.”
    “Well, pardon
me,
friend, but they do,” says the man a little hotly. “I’m looking at mine right now. You push a button on the base of the unit and it slides right out.”
    The man, it transpired, had been using the CD drawer on his computer to hold his coffee cup.
    I bring this up here by way of introducing our topic this week: cupholders. Cupholders are taking over the world.
    It would be almost impossible to exaggerate the importance of cupholders in automotive circles these days. The
New York Times
recently ran a long article in which it tested a dozen family cars. It rated each of them for ten important features, among them engine size, trunk space, handling, quality of suspension, and, yes, number of cupholders. A car dealer acquaintance of ours tells us that they are one of the first things people remark on, ask about, or play with when they come to look at a car. People buy cars on the basis of cupholders. Nearly all car advertisements note the number of cupholders prominently in the text.
    Some cars, like the newest model of the Dodge Caravan, come with as many as seventeen cupholders. The largest Caravan holds seven passengers. Now you don’t have to be a nuclear physicist, or even wide awake, to work out that that is 2.43 cupholders per passenger. Why, you may reasonably wonder, would each passenger in a vehicle need 2.43 cupholders? Good question.
    Americans, it is true, consume positively staggering volumes of fluids. One of our local gas stations, I am reliably informed, sells a flavored confection called a Slurpee in containers up to 60 ounces in size. But even if every member of the family had a Slurpee
and
a personal bottle of Milk of Magnesia for dealing with the aftereffects, that would still leave three cupholders spare.
    There is a long tradition of endowing the interiors of American cars with lots of gadgets and comforts, and I suppose a superfluity of cupholders is just an outgrowth of that tradition.
    The reason Americans want a lot of comfort in their cars is because they live in them. Almost 94 percent of all American trips from home involve the use of a car. People in America don’t just use their cars to get to the shops but also to get between shops. Most businesses in America have their own parking lots, so someone running six errands will generally move the car six times on a single outing, even