A Blogging Smorgasboard...
...something for everyone. Step up and help yourself...

Another gloomy Business Page in today's paper...This layoff stuff is Beginning To Get Scary. Are we in a depression yet? As far as I can tell, this all started when Gas Prices went up so drastically last year, making everything more expensive. And now, gas sales are down, 'cos no one's got as much money as they used to have. Maybe it's like my own situation; I got hit with a double-tax payment late last year, and I paid it off, and it's taken me a while to get to the point where I have disposable income once again. So maybe Fuel Prices hit the country so hard last year, that everything got thrown out of whack, and it's been all downhill from there. Is there any validity to this idea? Will the economy recover? Circuit City stores going kaput? Starbuck's having to lay off? For heaven's sake, MICROSOFT is cutting back! Gosh. I'll know things are really bad when Wal-Mart begins laying off. Can you imagine a Wal-Mart 'going out of business' sale? They'd have to 'roll back' their prices even further; who knows, maybe some items in the store would be rolled-back to a 'negative' value, which would mean, that I, as a shopper, could take something off the shelf, go through the checkstand, and then the cashier would pay me to take it out the door. Things aren't that bad yet...or are they? Maybe Wal-Mart is hoping someday they won't have any competition, and they'll be the Last Existing Retail Chain in the Country. (The 'Cockroach' nuclear-survival theory as applied to Business...) So, how will businesses continue to cope with The Sluggish Economy? By resorting to measures like this...?



He Says he's not a crook...lately, Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich (did I spell that right?), has been all over the news. He's in the process of getting impeached for trying to recoup vast personal benefit for giving (or in his case, selling) someone, anyone, the Senate Seat which was vacated by Some Guy Named Obama. "Bloggo" hasn't been attending his own Impeachment hearings. A Narcissist like him would hate to Look Bad in front of a Jurist Panel. So, instead, he's been going all over the place, appearing on TV, trying to prove to Everyone that he's not a crook. He went so far as to say he was the "Anti-Nixon"; it turns out 'Bloggo' was captured on tape trying to hammer out a deal for the Senate Seat! He later intimated, on network TV, that he wanted Good Things done by whoever he appointed, and said he wanted the tapes heard, so people would know How Good He, "Bloggo", was...yeah, rrrright...but promising a Senate Seat for anything, even something 'good' is just plain-old "Influence Peddling", and it's WRONG. And of course, I'm sure 'Bloggo' had his own 'angle', maybe something along the lines of, "hey, if I appoint someone who does good, the voters will like ME...or at least not hate me as much as they do." With the help of various MSNBC talking heads, I finally understand this. Except, I don't. How do these corrupt CLOWNS get elected in the first place? Wait, Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton got to be Prezzident, so neverrr mind....) I guess we shouldn't be surprised by anything anymore. So, everything we know is wrong; when a politician says "I'm not a crook", that obviously means, "I AM a crook".


Obviously, King Bloggo's appointment wasn't going to cost an Arm and a Leg, but he was hoping for at least one limb...

Update on "Bloggo's" dilemma...it turns out he WILL go to the Final Day of his Impeachment Hearing tomorrow, when The Vote Will Actually Be Taken to run him outta town. He's gonna state his case, having practiced his statement many times on TV this week. "Bloggy" was so DESPERATE for exposure that he appeared on "The View", f'cryin' out loud. You know, the "hen party" of sorts that features 'Baba Wawa' from time to time (heck, she owns the show, so she can appear...or not...any time she wants to...or not...)

What goes up...must come down...and then back up again? Even though I bought $15 dollars worth of gas last week, and even though I still had just under half a tank-full, I bought gas again today. After seeing gas go down to $1.40 a gallon, and seeing it go back up again (to $1.95 last week), I drove past the friendly fill-'em-fast today and saw that gas had gone down AGAIN, this time, to $1.84 a gallon. I had stuff to do, after which I read in the nooz-paper, over breakfast, that gas prices were Set To Rise Once Again. And immediately, I thot of the $1.84 gas back at the fill-'em-fast, and it's happened, it actually has, where gas prices can go UP mid-day, if the fuel supplier's quick enough to jack things up rapidly. Had that happened at the fill-'em-fast? On my way home, I saw that the 'fill-'em-fast' sign still read "1.84", so, SCREECH!, I pulled in and got another twenty-dollars' worth. That just about filled up the tank. My car musta thot, "What? A Full Tank? I'm not used to this". So what'll happen now? Will gas rise tomorrow...or fall further (as usually is my luck when I get gas these days...)? Who knows? Of course, no matter how low gas goes, in this economy, it's still hard to cough up the bucks needed to fuel the car, prompting responses like this...


What's sad about this is that the poor lady probably wasn't joking at all...

And they called him Mellow Yellow...Some of my old favorite pop stars have really aged well, while some look pretty shaky. I guess we all "age" differently, and that there are genetic factors involved, in addition to what chemical substances one might have ingested over the years. Some people are just prone to high cholesterol or heart attacks, or, like me, The Gout. Of course, Decreased Visibility is a factor in our perception of age. For instance, it seems like the gray-short-haired Eric Clapton is all over the place on various Musical Programs, so I'm used to the way he looks these days. Other Old Rock Stars are seemingly ageless; Stevie Winwood (He sang on Spencer Davis' "Gimme Some Lovin" back in the '60s) looks like a kid, even though he's gotta be part of the over-60 crowd these days. Paul McCartney also looks dapper, even if he annoyingly wears tennis shoes with his suits; does anyone else besides me think that's ODD? A while back, I found a contemporary photo of the '60s singer, Donovan, who was once a big pop star. The last time I saw a contemporary picture of him was some Thirty Years Ago, so I wasn't prepared for what I saw...now he's just old, sorta like the rest of us. In one of his songs he wrote, "Electrical Banana, bound to be a certain craze; electrical banana, bound to be the very next phase"...huh? what? No one cared if it didn't make sense, tho; it sounded good. Hey, it was a Number One Song, after all. Anyway, while surfing the web one night, I ran across this picture of Donovan...it kinda shocked me a bit...


The present-day, sorta-frail-looking Donovan...ohhh, he's so mellow...

You've probably heard of Donovan's other Number One hit, "Sunshine Superman"...well, I always wondered where the title came from, and one day after about the 10,000th time I heard it on the radio, it hit me...the first verse of the song says, "SUNSHINE came softly to my...a-window today..." while the second verse starts out thusly: "SUPERMAN and Green Lantern ain't got...a-nothin' on me..." so now you know. And of such things, number one singles are made.
____________________

Finally, I've often wondered about this...a Full Gas Tank weighs more than one that is three-quarters', or half, or quarter-full. So, if you fill up your tank, which increases your car's weight, does that mean you get less miles-per-gallon? And if there is an optimal amount of gas you should have in your car, how much gas would that be? Will you go further on two half-tanks than you would on one full tank? Has anyone ever researched this?