Scene and heard

I have been taking Ginkgo Biloba for a few years now, with some awareness of increased morning fuzziness if I don’t take it. This can be welcome on a lazy weekend day, but perhaps not so when I am trying to get myself together for work. For those who don’t know, it is supposed to improve memory – something I admit to needing help with, and I blame genetics rather than advancing years for this – by increasing blood flow to the brain.

A couple of weeks ago, I went to The Vitamin Shoppe to pick up some supplements. Ginkgo, which I had just taken my last of that morning, was on my list. But they didn’t have the one I like, so I thought I would go to a different store and pick some up. Each morning for the next week, I would look at the pills I had pre-sorted: C, E, Glucosamine & Chondroitin and Thyroxin, and couldn’t quite figure out why there seemed too few tablets in my hand. And each morning I would put my increased cobwebs down to different things - tiredness from my move; deeper sleep after getting my new mattress. It was only when I went to put the following (or the one after that) week’s rations together, that I realised what was missing.

The moral of the story, for me at least, is: You can run out of anything else and will probably remember to procure more. But NEVER run out of Ginkgo!

While making Chicken Soup for my kids, I realised I only had one small onion, so had to run out and buy more. 86th Street can be quite busy and therefore not too easy to cross. I stepped between parked vehicles to await my opportunity, key chain still in hand. There were two cars double parked, but with their drivers still in. As I was about to cross, one of the drivers honked me and signalled that he wanted to ask me something. He drew alongside me and his wife spoke: “Are you pulling out?” “No, I’m trying to cross!” And I was reminded of moving day 2 weeks ago.

Ovington Avenue is almost as bad for parking, if nowhere near as busy a road. At first, Sean was parked illegally, but we got lucky. The car in front of his moved. Each time I came out carrying something to load into the car, I was asked by different people if I was leaving soon and politely gave each the same answer.

One man, on hearing that I was going to be leaving in 10-15 minutes asked: “Well, as you know you’re leaving soon, can I have your space and you move back here (where Sean had previously been and could not leave the car unattended without risking a ticket)?” “I’m staying here until I leave!” I tried hard, and with at least some success, to keep all traces of incredulity from my voice. For anyone out there who doesn’t know the word chutzpah, this is a good definition. In England we call it cheek, and in the USA, nerve. But these sometimes fall some way short of doing justice to the words or actions to which you are referring. Chutzpah, however, always suffices!

Nothing new here, just putting a few facts together in one place:

First the basics:

Demand is rising in China and India
America has a love affair with gas guzzling SUV’s
The current US Administration has constantly back-pedalled on fuel efficiency standards agreed years ago, but deemed too costly by the US Automobile Industry.

These points have conspired to make this very much a seller’s market. But that actually isn’t why the cost of Crude went up so sharply between 2004 and 2006. To be sure, the price would have gone up due to the forces of supply and demand, but what made it take off was the speculators. What you and I see as misery at the pumps and upward pressure on transportation costs and general inflation, these sharks see as an opportunity to profit. Of course, OPEC then decided it liked the prices where they are and made sure they stayed there when demand dropped a little. But the speculators weren’t done!

The price of Unleaded Gasoline futures went up earlier this year, even as Crude temporarily went down. The main reason for this is that no new refineries have been built here for over 30 years and a couple have had to be shut down for long tem repairs. This is a strategy by the oil companies to force up prices and maximise their profits. I have actually seen it written that this situation is a great opportunity for speculation. So in come the investors, causing still more misery for consumers, while they line their pockets with vast quantities of cash. And they sleep well. For me, if you profit on the misery of others, be it slave labour, knowingly saddling developing countries with more debt than they can handle, replacing high paying jobs with low paying ones or forcing up the price of something that affects everyone directly or indirectly, YOU ARE SCUM!!!

Of course, quite possibly the biggest reason for this is that the Pres and his chief hatchet man, more commonly known as his Vice President, are both Oil men. Why should they do anything to curtail Oil Company profits when they ultimately benefit from these? (That’s a rhetorical question!) They gifted their friends $8.1Bn of tax breaks in 2001 – like they need tax breaks!!

What should be done? Obviously, remove the tax breaks, but I’d go further. Give the oil companies a choice: Either use some of your windfall profits to build new refineries, or be levied a windfall tax, which will be used to build publicly owned refineries. ExxonMobil, BP et al will all scream blue murder, which means it is obviously the right thing to do

I have noticed two things about spitting:

1. Some American men cannot pee in a urinal without first spitting in it. I have never understood this. Any thoughts, anyone?

2. Teen males who rate themselves as tough seem to use spitting as a show of testosterone. This is as true in England as here. When I drove buses, young men would walk in front of my bus and spit, or spit as the bus doors opened, just before they got on the bus. Yesterday, while I was waiting for the subway, a young man did what so many have done before. He was pacing up and down a small stretch of the platform. The first time he passed me, he spat. Is this supposed to impress me that he is a man and not a boy? Again, any thoughts, anyone?

There’s plenty of advice floating around to help people cut down on the cost of a fill-up at the gas pump. Here’s something for people who feel the need to use mid grade gas, that I have never seen written but is really simple.

At the BP station near where I live, the prices are:

$3.23.9 for 87 Octane
$3.35.9 for 89 Octane
$3.44.9 for 93 Octane

This type of price spread is fairly standard. If you put 15 gallons in your car, here are some figures for you.

3.359 x 15 = $50.38

Or, you can put in 5 gallons of the 93 Octane and 10 of the 87. It averages out to 89.

3.239 x 10 = $32.39; 3.449 x 5 = $17.24. The total bill is $49.63. The per gallon price is $3.30.9, or 5 cents less than you are currently paying for the same thing at the same gas station you always go to.

The bigger the difference between 87 and 89 in your gas station, the more money you will save this way.

OK! So it has been 30 days and 12 hours since I emptied my Yahoo Junk Mailbox. Actually, they call it “Bulk”. Most of it is bunk! Anyway, the flow clearly slowed after the first week, and I only have 10,813 emails in that folder. Some stats:

349 are dated January 2038 - 198 from Monday, January 18th alone
496 from 2037, of which 228 are from May
Altogether, 1011 emails were future dated.

Only 7 are currently dated before the 30 day cycle. That probably at least partly explains the slowing rate at which this mailbox swelled. There were many more when I previously looked. Yahoo must have been automatically deleting these.

I haven’t been blogging of late because I moved. A week to pack, a weekend split between moving, cleaning, unpacking and being generally exhausted, and the decision to complete my tasks this coming weekend.

I did inform both my bank and the Post Office of my move. Today, I received a letter from my bank. Very nice it was, too. It confirmed receipt of my receipt address change and asked that I contact them if it wasn’t me who made the request.

Here’s the dumb part: They sent it to my old address; the Post Office forwarded it to me. Now, if someone else sabotaged my online account and made the change request, why wouldn’t they also forward my mail if they are stealing my identity? So how would I ever know the request had been made? Maybe a phone call would be more effective? I shall be making this suggestion to them. If the response is amusing enough, I will write a follow-up post!