One of my Peace Corps buddies, Don, who still lives in Thailand sends me e-mails. Apparently he is on a mailing list with straightdope.com because a lot of the things are articles from there. One interesting one lately was about refrigerator doors. I’ve always heard how important it is to take them off when you throw a refrigerator away, but never could figure out why they would be so dangerous. This points out that old timey refrigerators had latches that held them shut from the outside. With any refrigerator made in the last 40 years the doors aren’t a problem though you still hear about how dangerous the doors are. There are all kinds of things like that at Straight Dope.
Category: Uncategorized
The Oscars
I thought the Oscars were pretty good, but I made good use of my DVR to fast forward over most of the slow spots. The songs didn’t seem that good. It’s a pathetic year when you have to pick two foreign movies to come up with five decent songs. I don’t see why they couldn’t get the original singers. Certainly Antonio Banderas didn’t sing that song in the movie and I know Beyonce couldn’t have been booked for three movie songs. If you’re not going to have the original singers do their songs, then what’s the point?
Day in Court
The day before Thanksgiving I passed a slow-moving car on a two lane road in a passing zone and was given a ticket by a Dekalb County policeman. He wasn’t real interested in hearing my side of the story and wound up giving me a ticket for driving on the wrong side of the road. He set a court date in January and told me I could explain things to the judge. In January I went to court. Not only was my case not entered, forcing me to come back, but this first court appearance was just an arraignment where you pled guilty or not guilty and then would come back for a trial.
The Price of Water
I got my water bill today from Dekalb County. They announced that, effective January 1, the price of water was going up to $5.41 per 1,000 gallons. Of course they don’t tell you what the old price was, so I figured it out and got $4.30. That’s an increase of 26%.
Then I wondered when the last time they went up was. I keep a spreadsheet of past utility costs and discovered that prior to January 1, 2003 the price was only $3.50 per 1,000 gallons. That means water has increased in price 54% in only two years!
Grant’s Picture
There’s a picture of Grant that shows up on the main blog page every now and then where he is smoking a cigar on the porch down in Bradenton. That’s one of the funniest pictures I’ve ever seen.
