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Did you hear the one about the poisoned cat? A hostess finds her cat nibbling on the salmon, but serves it anyway. After dinner, she finds the cat dead in the driveway and frantically confesses to her guests who all race to the hospital to get their stomachs pumped. When she gets home, the hostess has a message on her machine: “Please accept our apologies for running over your cat; we’ll replace him.”

Or what about the Mrs. Fields Cookie recipe? A woman writes for the famous cookie’s ingredients, gets the recipe, but also a bill for $250. In revenge she duplicates the recipe and sends it to hundreds of people.

Then there’s the one about the decapitated driver? A motorcyclist overtakes a truck carrying thin steel plates. A steel plate dislodges, flies off the truck, and decapitates the biker. The truck driver sees the motorcycle with its headless rider, has a heart attack and dies.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Professor Jan Brunvard, who has heard, studied, and categorized just about every urban legend out there.

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The traditional-garden zealot Michael Weishan has a method and a motto for landscape design: Optima Antiquorum Pro Novibus – the best of the old for the new. The key to successful gardens is not in copying grand European models, he says, but looking at our own humble New World origins, where the interplay of need and resource once upon a time combined to create a unique style called the American garden.

We were pretty good at it for a couple of hundred years, but around World War II, Americans lost their knack, became blinded by gnomes and pink flamingos, and started their own unique style of bad gardening. We must go back in time, Michael Weishan says, and hoe this row. Stop planting in a vacuum. Start planting for others. And garden by a few simple principles: Unity. Order. Balance. Beauty. Productivity

Guests:

Michael Weishan, author of The New Traditional Garden, talks about reviving the garden’s glorious past.

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Sprawl suburbia is where most Americans live now, and are stuck in traffic. They are gridlocked and fuming, not just in drive-time but even on a run to that no-name convenience store or to a soccer game.

This is the moment, we’re told, when suburban citizens are looking again at the anywhere strip mall, the desolation of their downtowns, the disappearance of greenlands, and wondering why we live here. Just maybe the presidential votes in the “Shady Oaks” cul-de-sac will go to the man, George Bush or Al Gore, who understands, and has an alternative design for growth.

Waste, isolation, emptiness, ugliness, the squalor of public spaces that come with all that development beyond the highway: these are familiar old knocks on the new addresses that millions chose and many still love. But there’s a backlash of anxiety and anger that may be bigger this campaign year than crime, schools or health care.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Jeff Speck, author of Suburban Nation

and David Lee, professor of Urban Planning and Design at Harvard University.