Bitchin' and Moanin'

We all know what this sign is referring to, and we have ceased to be amazed by anything we find posted there. What can you do about it? You really want an honest answer? Read on.

First and foremost, you can do nothing about gas and diesel prices except make a choice, or a series of choices, to STAY OFF THE ROAD.. Gasoline and diesel (and the crude from which they came) are commodities bought and sold in a global market.

As such, whenever a load of fuel is bought or sold, a price is established by a bidder or broker, and the agreed-upon price becomes the baseline value of that quantity of that commodity for delivery at a given point in the future. Yes Virginia, there is a future, and oil brokers make or lose their fortunes (and those of the people they represent, buyers and sellers) on the basis of how well they can predict the future. Try doing THAT in a rollercoaster environment!

Buy today, you pay today's price, and that price is constantly in flux because the "price of oil" is not one price but a composite of many many transactions taking place simultaneously all over the world.

No single corporate entity or bigwig or faceless monster "controls" the price of oil. The most any single entity in this market system can do is to buy a commodity (or make a promise to) or sell it (or promise to), and in doing so he/she/it is in full-bore competition with other interested parties with oil to buy or sell, and that is pretty much that. Organized chaos.

Cartels are affiliations between interested parties that band together, either loosely or not, to attempt to maintain the interests of those parties...in other words, to try to ensure that they have stable markets for what they buy and sell. By "stable" we mean dependably predictable. Using the word "stable" in connection with a commodities market is oxymoronic. Stability is a relative term. And market volatility has both fact-based and emotional components to it, making "stability" a description of a wobbling spinning top hovering around on a tabletop, occasionally coming perilously close to flying off the edge. Yet the top is "stable" because it keeps spinning. If a market/top ceases spinning, it collapses. Cartels fear collapse more than anything in their world, and the bulk of their efforts go to preventing any such thing from happening, and "controlling" prices, even if that mythic dream were possible, would not "stabilize" the market system, it would destroy it.

This is what people don't get.

Anyway, discussion aside, I return to the initial question/answer, what do you do about it? Well, as the answer given above states, get off the road. You don't have to pay for what you don't buy. You don't have to buy what you don't use. You don't have to use what you can get by without.

So do some self-analysis and, this time, pay attention to what you discover. Did you drive a circuit doing shopping, for example, or did you dart from place to place all willy-nilly? You are a GASHOG. YOU, not the unfortunate vehicle toting you around. Did you have to turn around and go back the other way because you were in a hurry and forgot something? Shame! Gashog.

You might be a Gashog if you are perched atop a two-story vehicle gazing down on all of us below with all that superiority of yours, because, admit it! you don't need a Monster Truck to make a run for a pizza. Call and have the hotrod in the little car do it. You might be a Gashog if, GreenPeace treehugger you, you cruise around all over town attending protest meetings every other day to Organize when a couple phone calls would get the message across just as well. Your nifty new and trendy Prius might get good gas mileage but ask yourself the question they asked everybody in World War II...

"Is This Trip Really Necessary?"

The man who changed American Education

Noah Webster (1758 – 1843)

American lexicographer, textbook author, spelling reformer,

political writer, and editor. He has been called

the "Father of American Scholarship and Education."

His "blue-backed" Speller books taught five generations of children in the US how to spell and read and his name became synonymous with the term "dictionary", the modern Merriam-Webster, first published in 1828 as

"An American Dictionary of the English Language."

Noah Webster was born in Connecticut (as native daughter Andree reminded me) and really left his mark despite having trained as and failing to make a living as a lawyer. One thing he did love was the world of words, and he believed that Americans should write as Americans, deciding by common usage what their rules should be. At first he accepted the English "u" in such words as "humour" and "colour", but later decided to drop them. Thanks to him the words "centre" and "theatre" became "center" and "theater", among many others he thought were too upper-class elitist and not to American taste. A great man, and a great mind. And a man of the people, too!

Unauthorized printing of his books, and disparate copyright laws that varied among the thirteen states, led Webster to champion the federal copyright law that was successfully passed in 1790.

(picture and bio from Wikipedia)

"Color"? or "colour"?

When I was in school over at the University of Michigan, we Engineering undergrads were stigmatized as napalm-making, war-enabling weapons mongers. This stunned us, because as all these demonstrators were waving these signs in our faces we were still trying to find our classrooms and drafting boards and slide-rules and get down to work. We weren't political animals. (Engineers aren't, as a rule. They have to be reminded to vote.)

Engineering students faced heavy class-loads of math, computer science, physics, etc, etc, etc, and had little time left to be assigned for literary endeavors, but the powers that be did require us to be at least marginally well-rounded, and therefore a course in Humanities called "Great Books" was made "mandatory". (This you should interpret in student-speak as "unneeded and unwanted".)

Three times a week, therefore, a group of twenty of us "Unjin" boys (no females in those days) would show up with our paperbacks in a dusty classroom with ancient desks and discuss the classics. Our instructor was an ex-newspaper editor with Harry Potter glasses, elbow-patched tweed jacket, black beard and weary attitude. I'll call him Professor Belcher.

Nobody was fooling anybody here, Prof Belcher told us, right off. He knew and we knew and we knew he knew and he knew we knew this stuff was only for "our own good" and we'd probably toss the books in the bonfire when we were through with them, but, hey, some things transcend everyday practicality.

So we discussed the classics. This meant, or was supposed to mean, that at some point we actually READ the books on the class reading list... buy or steal the title from the bookstore, take it home, and apply eyes to print.

Some of us did this, I suspect, and many did not.

We were assigned Papers to write based on this fairly non-existent research. We were asked to express Opinions. We were expected to Think about Deep and Meaningful Things.

Being a go-getter in my youth, and creatively naive, I wrote a paper about the significance of the Knight's Tale from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. (Chosen by me at random the night before it was due, of course.)

Oh, it was a fine paper. The best that an all-nighter could buy. I waxed eloquent. I discussed and declaimed and reached far-flung conclusions any critic in the world would envy. It was a masterpiece.

And it came back marked with all these little blue marks editors make, and an "F".

I was outraged! Here was a word I'd used to describe the Knight... "amoral", blue-penciled with a cryptic "wd". "Wd?" What the hell was THAT supposed to mean? I seethed and boiled and went down the paper noting all the other little cryptic markings this Prof Belcher had appended to my tome and made a raging redlist of offenses to my honor, then wrote a rebuttal to each and every one of his remarks, my pen spewing unrepentant venom.

And I took this new version of my painfully typed paper, now festooned with a dozen new handwritten counter-arguments, and stalked off toward Prof Belcher's office. He had written one phrase in actual English at the top of the paper: "This work is troubling and confusing. Please see me." Well, by God, I was taking him up on THAT!

"You have been a very good writer up until now," he began, as we sat down, he behind his desk, me in a wooden chair nearby.

"So why did you flunk me?" I asked, an edge of controlled sarcasm in my tone.

"Because you were not clear... this paper is a jumble," he responded.

"And what is it with my use of 'amoral'?" I continued. "Was that unclear, too?"

"Oh, that? I meant that you chose the wrong word for what you were trying to say."

I narrowed my eyes and stared at him. "But if the paper was a jumble, how did you know what I was trying to say well enough to reject a perfectly good word I used saying it?"

For a moment I had him. I had him!

"Well," he mumbled finally, "I suppose you can rewrite the paper and resubmit..."

"Thank you, Professor," I responded. "I think I will."

And I did, and the word "amoral" stayed, and I got a B+ the second time, mainly by rearranging a few sentences and dropping one loose end. We had both saved face. It was a victory.

Since those long-ago years I have been in debate with people about language and words at times, especially about English usage such as "colour" instead of "color" and "judgement" instead of "judgment." I happen to prefer the English versions, but feel entitled to use whichever version strikes my fancy because Merriam-Webster says I can. I use whichever word is most appealing on the page. Sometimes I bend the rules. Sometimes I invent terms. Sometimes I use a word in an inappropriate context because it seems to make sense.

Shoot me, go ahead. 'Cause I'm a rebel!

"Stranger in My Mirror" by Mary Stebbins Taitt

It's an old story, as old as the human race. But for every individual it's brand new, all over again.

We are young... and then we age. No matter how gracefully we age, we lose some of our vitality and some of our beauty. My mother always used to say how she felt the same inside, old or young, and was shocked when she looked in the mirror. Who is that old hag? Not the lithe and winsome creaure she used to be!

Mother got old... and then she got older... and then she died. And now it's my turn.

I don't recognize myself in current pictures. Only just barely. My mother reached a point where she didn't recognize herself at all. "Who is that old lady?" she would ask. At first, it was a joke, but later she really meant it. She truly didn't know it was herself.

And I'm almost there already.

"Making a Mark" by Michael Serafin

I am not a rich man or very influential, and most of the people I've met weren't either, by the measure of gold or power. Looked at statistically, so few individuals meet this standard definition of "world-shaker" we write books about them, as if they were all-worthy of worship.

Well, maybe they are worthy of praise. They have excelled. They made a mark on this planet, and they are in our memory banks as legends, living or dead. Some are more notorious than beloved, of course (we could name names) but what should that matter, really? In virtually every case someone listened to them, looked to them as leaders, or admired their spirit.

These famous people were not "loners," none of them were. Oh, they may have lived and even died alone, but they persist in history because they were not as normal as we are. They were beyond and above normal. Perhaps you could even say ABnormal. They were Special. And because of that, they were noticed. And because they garnered this notice, you really must say they were Social people... their thoughts and passions became patterns for us all.

Do you think you are Special? I hope you do. I hope that you try to prove you are worthy, every day. But bear in mind that to be special, to excel, to carry on abnormally in a very normal world, you don't have a hope without someone to share it. You can't have a dream without help with its dreaming. You won't make a mark with no eyes wide to see it.