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Bright but overcast. What a combination. It's like someone lit up the entire sky with flourescent lighting. Kinda sucky. I've been fixing up the counter script again.. It's been bothring me a bit, but I'm cleaning it up. Still got some work to do with it but things seem to be progressing well..
Hey, Sciborg is down. I guess I can't check out any .plans this afternoon.. Oh yeah, Sciborg is back up but it's kinda FUBARed. Hrumph, it's back up again. Hopefully it'll stay that way long enough for me to finish checking for spelling errors..
Went skating this afternoon. I actually woke up late this morning (since I ended up playing Delta Force a bit last night). I got out of bed around eleven.. (which was when the rec skate period started) but somehow managed to make it to school sometime past noon. Okay, I only got to skate for about half an hour or so, but at least I didn't completely miss out! The rink was a little less busy than I had anticipated, but it's a Saturday. Not too many people go skating on Saturdays. (Sundays on the other hand..) Oh well, I got a few laps in at least. I was telling Jax that I really should go skate more because I need the exercise. I think that Jax thinks that I'm overdoing it but I disagree. *tugs at flab around waist*
What the.. Sciborg is down again. Is there a monkey running the computer or something?
Oh yes, I might as well talk about my meal last night. I was planning on making shrimp Alfredo for dinner, and actually, things went fairly well. I was a little short of parmesan, but I could always get some more today. The ingredeants looked fine, the shrimp was cooked, the cream hadn't curdled, and the cheese wasn't green. What surprised me was when I opened up the (new) bag of fetuchine. I looked in and found some dark brown things the size of rice. Actually, they looked like skin shed off of some maggots or larvae that was living in there before. In fact, that's probably what they were. I felt a lot less hungry after that. A new bag too! How the heck did they get in there?!? I broke open a bag of linguine instead.
What is up with my luck with food recently? It's as if all those times I used food that I left in the fridge/pantry/floor too long (and was still good) had started to catch up with me. *shiver* Oh yeah, I threw away the fetuchine.
Since I didn't make enough food (linguine is much smaller than fetuchine) I decided to complement my meal with some ice cream that I had left over from last year. Early last year. I probably should've eaten it earlier since our freezer isn't particularly well insulated and I had left my tub of Chapman's Premium Double Dutch Chocolate (*drool*) ice cream in the warmth too long. It was mostly empty, so you could see at the bottom of the bucket a nice translucent brown stuff that was.. I wasn't sure what it was. I scraped out what I thought was what was left of the good ice cream and flushed the rest out with hot water. And that, as they say, is that.
You would have thought that I would've learned my lesson from last night and last week when I decided to make french toast this morning. *takes breath* Well, I took out the eggs and examined them. They looked fine. Checked out the bread. Seemed okay. Butter? Now how often does butter go bad? Syrup? Seemed sweet to me. Things looked alright so I went ahead. After making the food, I took my first cautious bite. Well, it seemed okay.. I took another bite. Alright, I think the food was fine. I was able to finish my breakfast without losing any of it, which is a good sign. We'll see if I swallowed anything bad.
Gee, I guess the link I had up yesterday was wrong. The place MJO wants to go to is not Freedom Communications (which *checks message* was the link he originally sent me), but in fact just plain old Freedom (which looks quite cool actually).
Ironically, with the fuel crisis going on right now, there was a show on last night about the rise of the automobile. It went on to talk about how the big three automakers were into really large gas guzzling behemoths when the energy crisis hit in the early seventies. It wasn't long after that when everyone started driving smaller and more efficient cars. Now here we are at the end of the millennium, where everybody who has a family is driving a mini, and everone else wants to drive a humvee. Bigger is better as they say (except me, I like small cars - small but not claustrophobic inducing that is). Here we are in another fuel shortage, people are still driving, but there was at least one report of someone filling up and just driving off. People just don't learn do they? Why does history repeat itself?
There were quite a number of interesting points that the show looked at. The one that caught my attention was how the American society has made owning a vehicle a de facto standard for the middle class. If you don't own a car in America, you're a second class citizen. One of the guys who was interviewed mentioned that because of the way we think, there are these imaginary signs on the doors of buses and other mass transit vehicles:
"Losers enter here."
What do you think? I'm inclined to agree but mind you, once I get my own car, I probably won't use public transit unless I had to. Having your own automobile is so convenient. I found one more thing I wanted to mention. One of the "pro-car" supporters (who I think was a VP of one of the big three) raised the point that if the government really wanted to push people towards public transit, then they'd just raise taxes on fuel. Personally I don't think that would work, since I doubt that he would suddenly switch to public transit if gas prices were raised, he'd bitch and moan that taxes are too high and that Americans should have a right to drive as much and as far as they want and that any government that would want to stay in power would reduce fuel prices. Although I don't have any basis behind this argument, look around you right now. Prices are high but people are still driving. This is probably because they perceive this as just a short blip, and that prices will fall eventually. (Just like during the 1970s energy crisis.) What we need is a large and sustained hike in gas prices to ever get people to switch out of their cars and onto the busses. Or even better yet, onto bikes and into sneakers (which would help seeing as we are the fattest people in the world). Unfortunately, I don't think our society is ready for that yet. The American dream, the notion of owning a car, a house, and having 2.4 kids is still firmly ingrained into our ideals that, well, people like me will stay in the minority for a long time to come (and I'm only in the minority because I don't have the money to pay for a car).
Gah. Then again, I could be completely wrong. What do you guys think? Automobiles, good or bad? Will this fuel crisis last? Will it be good or bad?
I've done a bit of work with the search engine, but right now it's very insecure. It should be able to search for non-alphanumeric characters so have fun with it. I'm currently looking for a way for it to pass non-alphanumerics to the journal entry calendar routine, but it doesn't seem to like what I'm doing so I turned off the highlighting. I also have to order the search results chronologically, so that's gonna take me a while to figure out as well.. *sigh*
Hrumph. The clouds disappeared while I wasn't looking. It's quite a nice day out there now. I think the fields are drying out pretty well, so it may be possible to throw the disc around next week. *crosses fingers* Here's for hoping..
Hmm.. Sciborg came back up for air before going back down again. I guess I won't be doing any checks on Jax or KGL then..
What the.. I think I screwed up my counter script for a little while there. Man, I should stop fiddling. If it ain't broke..
Hmm.. where did those clouds come from? Pretty funky weather we've been getting recently..
Thursday, May 18, 2000 at 19:10:21 (UTC)
Hear hear! Down with the gas-guzzlers!
Actually, I'm thinking of getting an electric car, or a gas-electric hybrid... well, at least I'm Reducing.
Hwansome
Thursday, June 22, 2000 at 16:52:33 (UTC)
After Michael's comments on the Insight, I'm very tempted to get myself one. However, thirty grand is a little on the pricey side..
QYV
Friday, June 23, 2000 at 16:13:47 (UTC)
Some of us just walk, or take public transport. People who are too cool to take the bus are in need of super-wedgies.
(Well, in areas where public transportation is useable, anyway.)
mister virtue