At least ED doesn't tell the child in such stark terms that he will die sooner or later. I've never experienced the extreme climate of New England, but Boston and Harvard get the same climate as Amherst, don't they, regardless of whether they're urban or rural? I expect Boston-born and Harvard professor Helen Vendler to cry with joy at winter's end as much as her rural cousins. It's something foreign to us, of course, where the seasons move from our bleak, damp winters to bleak, damp summers, through a dreary, damp spring and - you guessed it - a bleak, damp autumn. Today, however, it's actually quite warm and sunny, but we've become rather fatalistic in the face of so many false weather dawns, and the word on the street (or at least at the bus stop this morning) is that it won't last. . Oh, the fraud that can't fool the bus stop