"We both have valid discs on our windscreens, and genuinely did not understand anything whatever about the new system that came into being.
Almost immediately, things started to change.Mr Giuliani cracked down on the things that made the city unliveable, such as the "squeegee merchants" who wiped windscreens at stop lights and demanded money with veiled menaces.
Fliers have started appearing on Austin windscreens warning eloquently that "Homosexual groups want to pass the same-sex marriage in Texas".
TO MOST people, condensation is something that mists up car windscreens at inopportune moments.
And there is more technical wizardry on the privatised motorways: drivers with special sensors on their car windscreens can pass through separate "green lanes" without having to stop and pay a toll.
The airport is fringed with abandoned Mercs and Beemers, many with maxed-out credit cards taped to the windscreens...The presumption of building a five-minute city to vie with Paris or New York by copying the coloured shapes is stupid, dangerous and wrong...Dubai is a beautiful parable - as beautiful as those silvery buildings rising from the dust, and as ephemeral.
And even if some of these famous imports imported subversive ideas, all are now hymned for having enriched their host country.Not many of the young Kosovars armed with mops and squeegees who cause discomfort by wiping the windscreens of Londoners' BMWs at traffic lights will go on to found intellectual movements, or even to Oxford colleges.
Will Grace of Schlumberger, an oilfield services company, likens it to dropping a plumb-line from the top of the Empire State Building and then guiding it through the rear and front windscreens of every car parked in the nearby streets.Such technology vastly increases the area one rig can cover (see diagram).
Ford has provided eight sedans for this experiment and is using them to try out various ways of alerting drivers: sounds, warning lights, even projections onto the windscreens using a head-up display.
His model is the "head-up" displays of useful information on the windscreens of aircraft.
In Buenos Aires, the capital, destitute citizens picked through rubbish to collect anything worth recycling, sold crafts on the pavement, charged drivers to "protect" their parked vehicles and cleaned car windscreens at red lights.
