Not to brag or anything but I used my powerful connections to get this swell new garbage can from the city. She's a beaut, huh?

I went to take the trash to the curb this morning and noticed that the lid of the can had rotted through. A quick call the city and they put their best people on the job. The can was exchanged by the time I got home.

In another sign that something is dreadfully wrong in the universe I heard Bob Dylan's Like A Rolling Stone on my father's oldie station today. My dad used to like this station because they played Sinatra, Bennett, the Dorsey's, Glenn Miller. Today while I was on my way to a meeting I put it on and heard Bob. That's not right. Bob has come a long way and we have all gotten older since the days when my friend Eugene's dad would shout, "turn that sh*t off!", when we played the 45 of Rolling Stone for the zillionth time. Bob Dylan should not be on the station that brags that it has the greatest hits from the 40s, 50s and 60s.

This will seem a bit preachy, but what can I say?

Our local yokels in the press are having a cow over the gas prices. I personally don't think that rising gas prices are necessarily bad in the long run. It is time we got past our love affair with the automobile, or at least gasoline.

Low gasoline prices killed small town America as surely as WalMart does. The passion to drive, resulted in bigger and bigger highways that passed by the small towns that served as stopping off points for travelers. Cars allowed urban areas to sprawl and killed public transportation, including passenger trains, although that was helped along by air travel.

Low gas prices begat bigger and faster cars, poor fuel economy and global pollution. The Big Three American automakers rode the public's passion for big cars to their own ruin, because they built their business on the assumption that gasoline would remain plentiful and cheap. Hundreds of thousands of auto workers lost their jobs in the process. Much of the industrial Midwest lies in economic ruin because of our lust for big, inefficient cars.

Part of the angst high gas prices cause results from the lack of available substitutes, I get that, but that is our fault too. Persistently high prices in much of the remainder of the world has made them much less dependent. Cries for the government to mandate lower prices is misguided. When prices are too low supplies shrink.

Gas prices are high because we continue to demand gasoline. If we each committed to using ten percent less gas, prices would plummet, but we won't. It is a shame that many people think that gasoline is exempt from the law of supply and demand, or ought to be. It is really unfortunate that many public servants don't get it either. Just my opinion.




Things in this blog represented to be fact, may or may not actually be true. The writer is frequently wrong, sometimes just full of it, but always judgmental and cranky


Tag: Daily Life
Personal Finance
Humor