The president of Colorado's Northeastern Junior College takes the contrarian opinion that high gas prices are good for rural America. While others are finding that the increasing cost of filling a tank is reducing rural home prices and keeping students from attending classes at far-away colleges, Lance Bolton concludes that the "current absurdly high oil prices may be good for America."

Writing in the Sterling (CO) Journal-Advocate, Lance Bolton argued that higher gas prices will spur the nation's latent ingenuity. Expensive gas is just what we need to spur invention of new fuels and new sources of energy.

Meanwhile, "High energy prices may well be a golden opportunity for rural America. It will make sense again to offer choices and options for men's, women's, and children's clothing. Local retailers can be big winners as energy prices keep us closer to home. That is great news for downtown Sterling, Holyoke, Yuma, and Wray."

The State of Hawaii is in the midst of a major research project to test and use hydrogen power. But it doesn't take a state initiative, or even a village, to boost your gas mileage with hydrogen. All you need is Tim Bope.

Bope, who lives on the outskirts of tiny Tyner, Indiana, has been installing supplemental hydrogen-fuel devices in his friends' cars and his own vehicles for three years. After reading up on the subject, he "began making units that split ordinary tap water to make the hydrogen useable" to boost gas power.

After he put a device on his wife's Nissan Altima, her mileage nearly doubled, from 25 to 44 mpg. He says once a unit's installed on his motorcyle, he expects to get 100 miles per gallon.

Bope hasn't advertised and doesn't, apparently, need to. He builds his hydrogen fuel supplement kits at home and installs about five of them each week.

"We're too smart in this country to not be doing something""¨ about the energy crisis, he told Carol Anders, of the Pilot News.