CNN.com readers holding on to big SUVs

(CNN) -- iReporter James Holler is the first to admit that he drives a gas-guzzler -- in fact, he has two of them.

Kim Davis says she gets tired of the glares she gets from Prius owners.

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The Houston, Texas, businessman spends about $75 a week to fill up his 2004 Ford Expedition and another $80 on premium gas for his 2001 Jaguar XJ8.

But instead of being a drain on his wallet, the soaring price of gas has been a financial windfall.

"There's good business in it," Holler told CNN. "They're older models, but because everyone's dumping their vehicles you can't beat the price on them."

Holler paid thousands less than the cars' blue book values and also saves on insurance because they're older cars, he said.

One of his friends bought a Toyota Camry hybrid and is saving about $300 a month on gas, but has a $600 a month car payment, he said.

Holler also is making money off of the SUV glut by buying vehicles at cut rate prices and selling them to people in Central and South America, where gas is cheap and big trucks are in high demand.

"I'm snatching them up as fast as I can," he said.

He says he just bought a pair of 2007 Ford F150s for $9,000 each and he's selling them for $18,000 each. It costs him about $2,200 to ship a vehicle out of the country, which leaves him with a tidy profit.

We asked CNN.com users why they were hanging on to their trucks, vans and SUVs in the face of record oil prices and $4 per gallon gasoline. We heard from hundreds of people, who love their big rigs, or would love to get rid of them. iReport.com: Still driving a gas guzzler?

iReporter Scott Edstrom, of Grand Ledge, Michigan, says he's pretty much stuck with his Chevrolet TrailBlazer because he's "upside down big time."

"I know what I owe on it and I know what they're going for -- significantly lower than what I owe -- so I haven't even attempted to sell it because I know I can't," Edstrom said.

The network IT analyst said gas prices have doubled since he bought the car in 2005 and that he's paying about $100 a week to fill up.

"I've run out money before I've run out of month several months in a row now," Edstrom said. "It's been a struggle to get by."

Kim Davis, a Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, software product manager, tried to sell her Land Rover Discovery two years ago, but didn't get a single offer.

Davis is glad she held onto it now, because she said she is only about $1,000 away from paying it off. She said it costs about $70-$85 to fill up.

"I make enough money to drive my car, $4 [for gasoline] isn't going to kill me per se, it's the principle that the United States doesn't have any control of prices," she said. "It seems like things are going out of control."

Davis doesn't drive it much during the week because she works from home and carpools when she has to go to office.

She'll probably trade it for a more fuel efficient SUV one day, she said, but she's not sure putting another new car on the roads is the best thing for the environment either.

"Hopefully they can convert these cars to other fuels," she said.

Cory Werner, of Austin, Texas, has taken auto recycling to an extreme. He drives a 1959 Ford panel wagon that was a Sears delivery truck in a previous life.

The 39-year-old baker said he's been fixing up old cars since he was 16.

"I've never had a car payment in my life," Werner said.

The truck gets surprisingly good gas mileage, he said. About 20 mpg on the highway and 15 mpg in town. He said Austin has a pretty good public transportation system, and he also rides his bike to work a lot.

"My gas bill a month is $140, $200 a month for gas," Werner said. "Some people's full coverage insurance is more than that."

In addition to the cost savings, Werner said he gets the enjoyment of working on old cars and the satisfaction of saving a vehicle from the junkyard.

But there are some drawbacks, especially in the hot Texas summer.

"It's not for everyone. It doesn't have air conditioning," he said. "It's expensive to add air conditioning to an old car."

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What Women Want (Maybe)

Junko Kimura/Getty Images for Showroom Seven

SCIENTIFIC FRONTIERS Lindsay Lohan, right, with Samantha Ronson in Tokyo last year

By ANDY NEWMAN

LADIES! Behold the splendor of the nude male form: sleek and powerful, a miracle of sculpted sinew, striding confidently across the sand or stretching out before you in ever-uncoiling glory.

On second thought, perhaps you’d prefer not to.

So say scientists at the frontiers of research on the eternal question of what women find erotic, the latest answer to which seems to be: not naked guys, or at least not simply naked guys.

“For heterosexual women,” a researcher, Meredith Chivers, says in a new documentary about bisexuality called “Bi the Way,” which was shown at the NewFest film festival in New York last Friday, “looking at a naked man walking on the beach is about as exciting as looking at landscapes.”

Dr. Chivers, a research fellow at the Center for Addiction and Mental Health at the University of Toronto, says she has data to support this assertion. She recently published results of a study in which she showed people video clips of naked men and women in various sexual and nonsexual situations and measured their genital arousal.

Heterosexual women, Dr. Chivers and her colleagues found, were no more excited by athletic naked men doing yoga or tossing stones into the ocean than they were by the control footage: long pans of the snowcapped Himalayas. When straight women viewed a video of a naked woman doing calisthenics, on the other hand, their blood flow increased significantly.

What really matters to women, Dr. Chivers said, at least in the somewhat artificial setting of watching movies while intimately hooked up to a device called a photoplethysmograph, is not the gender of the actor, but the degree of sensuality. Even more than the naked exercisers, they were aroused by videos of masturbation, and more still by graphic videos of couples making love. Women with women, men with men, men with women: it did not seem to matter much to her female subjects, Dr. Chivers said.

“Women physically don’t seem to differentiate between genders in their sex responses, at least heterosexual women don’t,” she said. “For heterosexual women, gender didn’t matter. They responded to the level of activity.”

Dr. Chivers’s work adds to a growing body of scientific evidence that places female sexuality along a continuum between heterosexuality and homosexuality, rather than as an either-or phenomenon.

“She’s pinpointing what’s kind of obvious, and yet unexplored: that women are so fluid in their sexuality,” one of the directors of “Bi the Way,” Josephine Decker, said at an after-party for the screening at a Russian-themed gay bar in Midtown.

Even in a culture that often cycles through moments of bisexual chic — Britney and Madonna, make way for Lindsay Lohan and Samantha Ronson (photographed smooching in Cannes, France) — and despite survey data showing that young people, in particular, are open to sexual experimentation, bisexuality still tends to be treated as a novelty, a titillating fluke, a phase or even a cover for homosexuality. Dr. Chivers herself was an author of a 2005 study using similar methods that found that men who called themselves bisexual were significantly more aroused by one gender, usually by men.

But women, some researchers say, are fundamentally different. A University of Utah researcher, Lisa M. Diamond, published a study in January in the journal Developmental Psychology that followed the love lives of 79 nonheterosexual women who variously labeled themselves lesbian, bisexual or none-of-the-above. Over 10 years, Dr. Diamond found, the women continued to be attracted to both sexes.

Women’s response to images of coupling extends even to other species, Dr. Chivers found. In a 2004 experiment, and again in the recent study, published in the December 2007 Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Dr. Chivers and her colleagues found women slightly but significantly aroused by footage of bonobo chimps mating. Men showed no such response.

And when Dr. Chivers asked her subjects to rate their own arousal to the videos they watched, the women, whether gay or straight, tended to give higher ratings to films showing women. “Heterosexual women are responding to women, which is counterintuitive,” Dr. Chivers said. “Why are women so turned on by watching other women?” Straight and gay men, as well as lesbians, were more predictably aroused by images of their preferred sex, Dr. Chivers found.

It is tough to know what to make of this information. Dr. Chivers makes no bold claims for it. “To conclude that women are bisexual on the basis of their sexual responding overlooks the complexity and multidimensionality of female sexuality,” she wrote in her paper. She did allow that the apparent flexibility of women “may be related to greater potential for bisexuality in women than in men.”

The makers of “Bi the Way” draw their own conclusions. “What started as a fad may have become a revolution,” a director, Brittany Blockman, says in a voiceover in the film, which traces the romantic peregrinations of five members of what a commentator calls the Whatever Generation. “But either way, it’s clear that young people are redrawing the map of sexuality.”

That’s a conclusion Dr. Chivers, for one, is not ready to draw. Ms. Blockman, 27, who holds an M.A. in medical anthropology from Harvard, said she got the idea for the film when she channel-surfed across “The O.C.” and saw Mischa Barton’s character kiss another young woman.

“When did two girls making out on mainstream teen shows become acceptable and cool?” she said in an interview. “I felt like I’d missed some kind of cultural shift.”

At the after-party for the screening, at Vlada on West 51st Street, the culture seemed to be shifting in several directions simultaneously. A woman in Ziggy Stardust makeup, wearing a prosthesis cast from a man’s penis, participated in a simulated sex act. A while later, the woman, Amy Ouzoonian, a dancer and performance artist, made out on a couch with a mannish woman in a black suit.

“You go along in life looking for that one person,” said Ms. Ouzoonian, 29. “The genitals shouldn’t really matter that much.”

A party guest, Gillian Baine, a private-school teacher (and avowed heterosexual), said that seemed about right to her.

“Young people are not wanting to pigeonhole themselves, and are doing that in a lot of ways,” said Ms. Baine, 28. “They’re feeling less constrained by norms. Or the norms are changing.”

But norms are tricky things. Ms. Decker, 27, one of the movie’s directors, seemed a little embarrassed by her own limited experience.

“The sad thing is, I desperately need to get with a girl,” she said, adding that a few stolen kisses was all she could count on the female side of her sexual ledger. “I just didn’t want it to be some random woman.”

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Why Is Germany Collecting Italy's Trash?

Germany appears to be the only country in Europe that is in a position to help Italy tackle its massive trash problem, which came to light when the city of Naples ran out of places to dump its trash, forcing the Italians to turn to its European partners for help.

Cars pass mounds of garbage left on a roadside in Naples' suburb of Afragola.

(Ciro de Luca/AGN/Reuters)
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The two countries recently cut a multimillion dollar deal that allows Italy to dispose of up to 160,000 tons of waste and ship it to Germany for incineration.

Most of the Italian waste comes from the region of Campania, which includes the Amalfi coast, Pompeii and Naples, which has been under a kind of "garbage siege" since last December, when the dumps in southern Italy were declared full and garbage collectors refused to collect the trash.

Ever since, Naples has seen thousands of tons of trash pile up along its streets. The city has become notorious as the city of garbage.

The deal brokered by the two countries means that over the next three months three to four trains per week will arrive at the northern German town of Hamburg after a 45-hour ride all the way from southern Europe, each train bearing some 700 tons of refuse.

Up to 60,000 tons of trash will be collected from the streets of Naples alone, and another 100,000 tons will be made up of household waste from around the Campania area.

Other German cities, like Bremerhaven and Düsseldorf, are partners in the deal. They are sharing the trash in order to put their state-of-the art incinerators to work, but Hamburg can easily handle up to 3,000 tons per week in addition to managing its own trash.

The Italians are reportedly paying approximately $235 per ton, and paying for the transport as well. Hamburg officials admit that the city makes good money helping the Italians.

However, they insist they can provide only a short-term solution.

"Our incinerators have excess capacity because it's summertime, which allows us to provide 'first aid' to Naples. There's no way we can provide a long-term solution, but we do have the capacity available to help Naples out from under," Reinhard Fiedler, spokesman for Hamburg's waste management agency, told ABC News.

"There's less trash in summertime because so many people travel, which gives us extra capacity."

Fiedler said, "There is no quick fix for Italy's problem, which goes back some 20 years, because local governments have apparently been unable to get all sides to agree to a long-term plan allowing for the problem to escalate. Our city is lucky in that it has completely overcome the opposition toward building incinerators."

Fiedler explains that the city of Hamburg owns some of the best, high-quality incinerators that are relatively clean, using the latest technologies to filter out heavy metals, nitrous oxides, particles and sulphites.

"One of our incinerators is able to produce heat for some 12,000 apartments in downtown Hamburg. The heat from burning trash is fed into the local heating grid," he explained.

"Another example is the huge Hamburg Harbor container terminal, where the entire surface consists of recycled incinerator slag used for road construction instead of having to dump it."

There are plenty of good examples of how to deal with garbage, mainly, how to reduce it not only in Germany but also in the Scandinavian countries, all of which have focused on reducing the amount of trash they send to landfills.

With garbage dumps filling up quickly, not only in Italy but everywhere in densely populated Europe, the European Union ruled that its member nations had to cut their waste dramatically, and the EU has strictly limited the reuse of garbage dumps because of health and environmental problems.

In Germany, the birth place of the environmental Green Party, waste management has successfully kept the use of landfills to a minimum, so much so that between 1990 and 2005 it has saved some 46 million tons of CO2 per year.

A spokesperson for the Berlin Environment Ministry explained the German system: "Ever since 2005, no biodegradable waste goes to landfills. Everything that is recyclable should be recycled, everything that is reusable should be reused, everything that does not fit into either of those categories should be dumped into the incinerator; in other words, Germany has managed to almost completely do away with disposing its trash at landfills."

"Trash management is really a hot issue here in Europe, and there is no one-size-fits all solution. Different countries face different problems. A recent study shows that countries like Italy, Spain, Portugal, Ireland and Britain, where some 60 percent of the trash is still being sent to landfills, will have difficulties to meet a 2016 deadline by the European Union requiring them to reduce biodegradable trash sent to landfills to 35 percent of what it was in 1995," said Almut Reichel, project manager at the European Environment Agency, referring to a study published by her agency last year.

"On average, one can say that overall, a total of 45 percent of all municipal waste in Europe is still being disposed of at landfills, and the road from land filling to recycling is a difficult road ahead."

Back in Hamburg, Fiedler is convinced that his city's waste management system will soon be adopted by other European cities, especially in Italy.

"We were more or less forced into tackling these problem years before other countries in Europe, because there was too much trash and we were constantly running out of space for it. Now that we have overcome the teething problems, we're self-sufficient and we're encouraging other cities to follow us."

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