Spiked by Ike; or, The Great Gas Panic of 2008

Current music: Lifeline – Simon Slator

Y’all remember Katrina, right? Ike may, at least in terms of gas prices, turn out to be worse. Back then, we had a 20% jump… which turned out to be about 55 cents, ending up at $3.12. Depending on how things settle by Monday, it could be as much as 40% this time.

While Gustav hardly budged gas prices, the second large hurricane in a week to hit an oil-producing part of the coast triggered the Great Gas Panic here on Planet Georgia. By early evening, local gas stations were running out and the remaining ones were getting drained by long lines. Some of the smarter operators starting putting purchase limits on their fuel. The rumor mill was rife with talk about how gas would be over $5 on Saturday, perhaps even to $6. This seemed like crazy talk to me — a 20% jump from Friday’s $3.59 price would put us around $4.29, which was a little higher than the summer peak price. Local stations had jumped to $3.79 during the afternoon, perhaps a vain attempt to blunt the growing onslaught. By 9:30, only two stations had gas to sell — both BP, which ironically had the most trouble keeping gas on hand after Katrina. The one at the highway had jumped to $4.29 (and still had a long line), while the station in town continued selling at $3.79. “No limits,” the guy told Mrs. Fetched. “We have 1500 gallons left, and we’ll sell it until it’s gone.” The premium pumps were bagged (i.e. no gas left), but most people weren’t after the high-test anyway. Things were a little complicated by a friend who was nearly out of gas and bopped around to several stations before finding the BP in town.

Meanwhile, there were several people parked at the pumps at the Shell station, even though all the nozzles were bagged up. I was amused by the sight of a Dummer cruising through, looking for some more gas. We made our way to the BP in town, where I got in line to tank up Mrs. Fetched’s mom’s van (plus a 5-gallon can of ours) and managed to get it. A car tried to go around me and ended up in the ditch, which was entertaining since nobody got hurt. Local cops showed up to direct traffic and perhaps keep the peace… there was a near-incident where someone either didn’t figure out how people were coming in or didn’t care, but it was defused without drama. That wasn’t the case at Kroger, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

The crazy stuff started in the morning. The BP in town continued to post $3.79, the local Citgo stations moved to $3.99, and the rest jumped clear to $4.49 or even $4.59. I heard (from P.O.D., not the most reliable source) that the gas stations along the freeway were charging $5.09… and people were making phone calls. Planetary Governor Bok-Bok got on the idiot box last night and said he would deal harshly with price gougers, and supposedly these folks got slapped with $40,000 fines. Mrs. Fetched had offered to take Jam to Mal-Wart, while we had another errand to run, so I suggested we combine the trip and I offered to sit in back with Brand X and Evil Lad NOT. That worked out fairly well, since Mrs. Fetched got to drive and bottom out the suspension on the bumps (and she couldn’t give me her patented Dirty Look about it for a change, heh heh).

Part of the errand-running included a trip to Kroger, since ice cream was on sale and Mrs. Fetched’s mom wanted some (which gave Mrs. Fetched a convenient excuse, which gave me a convenient excuse to replenish the Moose Tracks). While we were there, we ran into the store manager (who we kind of know since The Boy worked there back when he was like 15). I asked him about what Mrs. Fetched had heard from an EMT the night before: there had been a fist-fight at the Kroger and the cops shut the place down. “No,” he said, “I shut it down. There was a fight alright — some guy in a big truck tried to jump in line and I wouldn’t let him. Then he tried to hit me with his door. I’m not having that… he went to jail.” I’m not sure I believe the rest of this though: “We had to pay $5.02 for premium — wholesale — and I’m selling it at a loss ($4.49), and people are telling me they’re calling the state to report us for gouging.” Hey… if he has the receipts, let ’em call. I did wonder, though, what the deal was… if Citgo was selling gas for 50 cents less, and Kroger was still selling at a loss, the distributors might be gouging. Or perhaps they’re taking care of their own brand(s) and letting the indies fight over the scraps.

The last thing he said was “We’ll be at 60% capacity, best case, for the next two weeks.” That was about how long it took to get things more or less put back together after Katrina, so that makes sense. I guess there will once again be spot shortages for a little while. At least this time I have a little motorcycle that’s immune to purchase limits. Mrs. Fetched admitted to being annoyed when I bought it, but now she’s thanking God I had the opportunity and took it.

But if $4.49 is the price where everything settles, that’s a nearly 27% jump in prices. Worse than Katrina, in both absolute and relative terms… at least as far as gas prices go. I’ll post an update early next week after the next FAR Future episode.

WTF of the Week

Okay… I’ve known that Planet Georgia is full of moonbats, and they’ve been running the place since 1984 or so.

But finding a dead Bigfoot here? That goes above and beyond the call of the weird.

You Go, Girl. To Some Other School.

Lovely… and it’s the school I graduated from.

This is a story that sucks on several levels.

Lordy, but I was glad to get out of high school. I blew that town and didn’t go back for a long time. When I did, I took Mrs. Fetched to the Farm House, a restaurant I worked at for a while. I told the waitress I wanted to say hello to the owner, and she got a funny look and said, “Oh… he moved to Grand Rapids with his daughter. And nobody knew he had a daughter.” oooooops

How cool!

I’ve always wanted to do something like this.

“The most splendidly pointless space experiment of all time” — and they expect it to survive the trip down!

This has potential!

Via Man Eegee…

The Lakota people are seceding from the US, taking what appear to be large chunks of five states with them:



I’d like to get some popcorn and watch the fun, but this could just as easily be either boring or horrifying. It’s also a little unsettling, as (much) later episodes of FAR Future will cover the balkanization of America, including the native nations. Once again, reality is jumping the gun on me.

Love those headlines

The only thing I can say about this is: I can relate.

A Toast to The Register

And to New Zealand, from whence comes important and glad tidings.

Now if work would only stop being bipolar…

iPhone-mania; or What I Really Want

Vacation starts tomorrow. I’m momentarily resurfacing to cover the technology story of the week. I had a productive writing night last night, here’s hoping for more…

Like many long-time Apple users, I was keenly interested in the iPhone and how it would turn out — but (again) like many, had no plans to buy one any time soon. I got a Samsung Sync at the beginning of the year; it’s no iPhone but does a fair job getting online and can even play music and (some) video. Still, I’m glad that the iPhone has done so well so far — by the time I’m ready to replace the Sync, the iPhone should be a good bit more affordable (even after the reduction Steve announced this week) with the more serious complaints (no 3G, for one) ironed out.

A couple of musings about what I’d like the Sync (or the iPhone, for that matter) to do, began to crystallize when I read a MacObserver forum discussion about what a sub-notebook should look like. But it took the introduction of the iPod touch to put the last piece together.

What I really want is something CS (my college roomie) and I brainstormed about way back in 1980 or so: a good pocket computer. The 2007 version is basically an iPod touch with TextEdit, an email client, and the ability to pair with a fold-up Bluetooth (or USB) keyboard. This would be something I could stuff in a jacket pocket or fanny pack, or under a car seat, then pull out wherever I happen to be and do some writing — with background music, if desired! — if the mood strikes me. I could email files home right away (given wifi availability) or transfer it when I get back to FAR Manor.

I'll have to see if “they” manage to get Linux working on the iPod touch like they have the “classic” iPod. If they do, I just might have my pocket computer at last.

Reality is Stranger Than Fiction

Things can get pretty silly without making up any of it. Check it out…

If a dog has two noses, does it smell twice as bad?

Mexico’s Santa Muerte (Saint Death) gets a facelift. Um… right.

What’s next? Cops wearing Hello Kitty armbands? Oh, never mind.

Hey Family Man, this might be a drastic cure for migraines.

In some happier news, SCO lost the Unix rights to Novell. This should put the final nail in the coffin of SCO’s (Microsoft-funded) anti-Linux crusade.

Quiet… (and what’s weird in the world)

Current music: XMusicOnline

The Boy has been gone since Monday, with maybe one phone call in between. A day or so later, he came by (driving his girlfriend’s mom’s truck) and picked up J. He showed up Wednesday, when his family came by for the 4^th, but that’s the last we’ve seen or heard from him too. So it has just been Mrs. Fetched, Daughter Dearest, and me. Mrs. Fetched has had a killer cold lately — and it’s difficult to get a nag going when it gets interrupted by a coughing fit — and Daughter Dearest is too absorbed in hanging out with her boyfriend online to be around very much. So it has been rather quiet around FAR Manor lately.

Since nothing much is going on at the manor, here’s a couple of interesting news items that caught my eye lately:

You’re a bride in India, your in-laws are making life hell for you over a dowry, how do you protest? Here’s one way to get some attention!

The European Union takes the slogan “Come Together” to new heights (or lows?).

I’d relocate to Australia for one of these jobs!

This Belgian will probably cop an insanity plea.

Paris, I got your number.

Good (technology) news

Current music: BassJunkees

Two news stories put a smile on my face this week. Quality journalism, as always, from The Register.

California, one of the more technologically-savvy states, has demanded that voting machine manufacturers submit the source code to their machines for a top-to-bottom review. ES&S whined mightily about it, and they were three months past the due date, but they finally coughed up the goods.

I hope the Secretary of State’s office was smart enough to insist that what they furnish could be used to generate software that they can compare with what’s already on the machines. Of course, ES&S would claim something like “oh, we accidentally shipped a debug load.”

***

The RIAA, being the scum of the earth that they are, tried shaking down a 10-year-old girl in 2005 — even going so far as to try contacting her at her school by claiming to be her grandmother. Her mom had the spine and brains to countersue the SOBs, and the RIAA (like any bully when stood up to) finally backed down. But mom? She’s upping the ante.

Good for her!

You keep siccing your dog on people, and eventually you’re going to run into someone with a meaner dog. Or lawyer.

News briefs

Looks like the retail industry is now following the home mortgage industry down the toilet.

All the schemes that have been tried to feed Africa’s poor, and the one that seems to be working? Urban Gardens. Get together with your neighbors and plant a garden in the vacant lot next door. I like this quote, for some reason: “He can't grow crops that will get too tall, or else they will absorb too much pollution. Also, bandits might hide in the foliage. Better to keep the vegetables low and leafy.”

And this gem from (of course) The Register: the things that people smuggle into Irish prisons. Not for the squeamish.

How Much Weirder Can Life Get??? (UPDATED)

Here’s one straight out of the X-Files.

Russian fishermen don’t know what they caught, but they ate it anyway

This video is just… well, I hope it’s faked.

UPDATE!
The mystery is solved: Scott on Techcomm tells us, “It's a guitarfish (a.k.a. shovelnose ray, shovelnose shark), and they're actually very tasty fish.” Whew. Just knowing it's just strange instead of other-worldly makes me feel better. :-)

Reality is Stranger Than Fiction

Here’s the plot. Work with me on this one, OK? You’ve got these three astronauts, two women and a man. One of the women gets jealous, drives 1600 miles to confront her, and gets charged with attempted murder. Great late-night movie plot, right? Oh, never mind.

All right, let’s say you’re a huge company and your product isn’t selling in Asia as well as you thought it would. What do you do: survey your potential customers to see what you could do better… or insult them?

Dang. It’s a good thing I never tried to become a novelist — you just can’t make up stuff as weird as what reality throws at you.

Quality journalism

Retailers call today Black Friday — mobs of shoppers starting the real Christmas season now that Thanksgiving is behind us (burrrrrrp!). I don’t know if this happened everywhere in the US (probably did), but the Christmas stuff started coming out on this planet before the Labor Day grills finished cooling off.

I don’t know why Mrs. Fetched and Daughter Dearest are planning to go shoe shopping today. It would be much better to curl up with a warm laptop and read some quality journalism from The Register. Here’s a few interesting stories they’ve run recently:

A kidnap attempt goes horribly w0rnG!

Drunk Aussie comes up with a novel way of keeping the coppers at bay

Michigan high school student builds working fusion reactor (and this is how word got out)

Haggard over Haggard

hag•gard (adj.)
1 Looking exhausted and unwell, esp. from fatigue, worry, or suffering

How terrible it will be for you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites! For you give a tenth of your mint, dill, and cummin, but have neglected the more important matters of the law: justice, mercy, and faithfulness.…
How terrible it will be for you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You clean the outside of the cup and the plate, but on the inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. You blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup, so that its outside may also be clean.
How terrible it will be for you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs that look beautiful on the outside but inside are full of dead people's bones and every kind of impurity. In the same way, on the outside you look righteous to people, but inside you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness.
—Matt. 23:23-28

The spectacle surrounding the sordid Rev. Ted Haggard situation is simply… craptacular. If you’ve been hiding under a rock, or avoiding the media in hopes of dodging the negative political ads, here’s a brief recap: Rev. Haggard, the former head of the National Ass. of Evangelicals (oooh, appropriate), has been whipping up the fears of the fearful for years, keeping gays stigmatized and Republicans in office. In the last week or so, a gay prostitute came forward with claims that not only had Haggard hired him for sex about once a month for the last three years, he helped Haggard buy meth. After the denials came the partial confession (“I bought the meth, but didn’t use it”), the resignation from his church and the NAE, and finally an admission of “sexual immorality” (which in the evangelical mindset is the Express Ticket to Hell).

Many have come to expect such hypocrisy, unfortunately, from people such as Haggard — the Jim Bakker/Jimmy Swaggart scandal of the 1980s was simply the most visible and well-known example. The thing that angers me most, as a Christian, is that such people make us all look bad by association. They encourage Christians to act like Pharisees and vote for moneychangers, while paying (at most) lip service to “the least of these.” They skip past the many occurrences of “fear not” found in the Bible, and play on the fears of the ignorant.

In the end, someone who is so adamant about persecuting gays had to have some issues. How best to deny your own gay tendencies, which you have been taught almost from birth to abhor, but to go around attacking other gay people? I mean, look at the guy. Is that not one of the creepiest smiles you’ve ever seen? I wouldn’t have let someone looking like that baby-sit my kids to begin with (good thing; he and The Boy might have swapped secrets of how best to hide a drug habit).

For every Haggard that falls on his face, though, there are dozens — hundreds — ready to step in and take their places. I fear that they will have to answer for God for the things they have done in His name.

World Cup Headbutting analysis

There was more to the Zidane headbutting incident in the World Cup final that we were aware of. Now we know, thanks to more quality journalism by The Register!

Half-right

A while back, I wrote that Ken Lay (and Jeff Skilling) would stay out of jail because Bush-league would write them pardons on his way out the door. As it turned out, I was half-right — Ken Lay will never spend a day in jail — but I got the reason wrong.

That’s really too bad, and I truly do feel bad for Mrs. Lay. I’d hoped that Ken Lay would live for a long time... behind bars, of course. Skilling may have been just as involved, but he was lesser known and he might slip by with a pardon, if Bush-league remembers to give him one.

But this pretty much ends the Tale of Enron. Skilling’s appeal and eventual sentencing (and possible pardon) really only rates an afterword or appendix.

Making lemonade

When you’re confronted with a device designed to be used against you, how do you react? Geeks find their own uses for technology.

This is precisely why attempts to firewall access to naughty sites is ultimately futile — motivated kids will eventually break through whatever obstacles you throw at them, or (like in this case) turn them to their advantage. You have to trust them to make good choices — in our case, we’re batting .500 at the moment.

Lost in Translation

Another gem from Techcomm.

There were red faces in the Ordnance Survey office when its English surveyors returned from compiling a list of house names in mid- and north Wales. The results contained an unusually high number of properties called “Gwyliwch rhag y ci” or “Caewch y git,” better known in English as “Beware of the Dog” or “Shut the Gate.”