That first one  made the national news this morning.   It's hard to
tell because of the lens and camera angle, but I'd bet that the long
tailslide into a group of cars in an intersection is downhill, Portland
being well provided with hills.

I think most or all of the perpetrators were also getting a hard first
lesson in what an SUV does and doesn't buy you.

Something else one notices:  some of these were subsequent accidents --
people piling into the scene of an earlier stall or accident -- and a
number of those sent pedestrians scattering.  The end of the first
sequence, in particular, seemed to catch a number of people by surprise
who'd been crossing the street or  standing around in the middle of the
street eyeballing the aftermath of the earlier accident.

Fortunately I saw this from a city just south of the freeze line in the
storn du jour.  A few people went out and found the patches of black
ice,  but most folks seemed to exercise common sense and made it
through the morning commute undamaged... or just had a second cup of
coffee in their own kitchens until things got better.   (Sometimes the
most valuable thing thing the old-timers know about the bad driving
conditions peculiar to their area is when to stay home!)

None of the browsers are perfect, but Firefox for the Mac
(http://www.getfirefox.com) and whatever free plug-ins I've plugged
into it over time served me well.  

--Joe

Yeah, supposedly I need Firefox 1.5 despite the fact that Seamonkey 1.1b
runs off of a later version of the Mozilla source.

necromancer <55_sux@worldofnecromancer_nospam_noway.org> said in
rec.autos.driving:

Same here.