When the chain of cars clogging Interstate 75 are hauling harried households in minivans headed to Florida - or perhaps SUVs leaving Blue Ash for the rolling green fairways of Michigan - then you know that summer vacation season is upon us in Cincinnati.

With the first week of summer gone, soon, most of the free world will be headed out on vacation.

Americans love their time off, too, and spend an estimated $500 billion a year on vacations, according to the newly released The Importance of Being Lazy: In Praise of Play, Leisure and Vacations by Al Gini (Routledge; $22.95).

Whether it's a pilgrimage to the ocean sands of North Carolina or to the prairie of North Dakota, just about everybody sometime puts work on hold, dumps a cookie-crusted toddler or two into car seats and heads out into a deserved sojourn of leisure.

The appearance is not even close to reality, Gini says.

According to a 2001 poll from the American Family Institute of New York, 25 percent of the American work force does not take a vacation.

"The reason is either job-related, money, timing or simply because they can't," he says. "When you factor in families, well, that's a heck of a lot of people who are not playing."

Gini, a professor of philosophy at Loyola University in Chicago and commentator on Chicago Public Radio, points out that vacations should occur for a good reason.

"The Chinese pictograph for the word busy is two characters: heart and killing. That means being busy kills us," he says.

"There is a price to pay when you wear yourself out."

No surprise here

About 8 million Americans would have lost the right to overtime under rules backed the Bush administration (but shuffled into a legislative pigeonhole by Congress earlier this month), said the liberal think tank Economic Policy Institute, based in Washington D.C.

The measure would have forced wages downward, too, leaving millions to work longer hours for less pay, the institute said.

"Not only would eligible workers not receive time-and-a-half for hours worked, they wouldn't receive any extra straight time for their hours worked," the institute said.

Kudos

Foresters, a financial services organization based in Toronto with an office in Cincinnati, bought 100 scholarships to the Anthony Munoz Football Camp at Sycamore High School.

That's a significant contribution to the local youth community, but it represents just a sliver of what this company does for the less fortunate.

For more than a decade, Foresters has been an active supporter of the Children's Miracle Network, donating more than $11 million since 1990. That helped the network raise $73 million.

A Radiothon on Warm 98 raised $284,000 this year for Cincinnati's Children's Hospital. A Dayton Radiothon raised $202,000 for the Children's Medical Center there.

Quote Carryout

"I never met a superachiever who wasn't insecure to some degree," media mogul and Cincinnati native Ted Turner said. "A superachiever is somebody that's never satisfied."

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E-mail jeckberg@enquirer.com