Here we are in Orlando, and it’s beautiful — sunny and warm, with a brisk breeze blowing to keep the temperatures mild. The drive here was uneventful, except to say that it was like driving through bug soup. The Florida “love bugs” are in season this week, and it was a veritable hailstorm of them on the interstate. By the time we got to Orlando, the entire front of Apple’s Mazda was a bugbath. I could barely see out the windshield anymore, either, so I stopped at a gas station to clean the glass before we checked in at the hotel.
The gas station was easily the most nerve-wracking event of the entire day — the only one, really. Gas prices here in Orlando seem to be around $2.99 a gallon for 87 octane, but this Hess station I stopped at was stickered at $2.95. As you might expect, the place was packed. There were lines four or five cars deep behind every pump. Fortunately, I didn’t need gas — I just needed a damn squeegee.
That was easier said than done. In the end, I had to park along the outer edge of the gas station lot, run over to a pump, grab a squeegee and hoof it back to the car to clean it up. The first squeegee I picked, unfortunately, was falling apart, so I had to go back and get another one. Finally I had the windshield and headlights cleaned off — the rest of the fascia and hood was a disaster, but I didn’t exactly want to hand-wash the car in the middle of a mega-crowded gas station parking lot — so I left it at that.
We were just about to take off, when I looked up and saw a HUGE bus driving through the gas station, trying to circle around and go out the rear exit. I seriously thought the thing was gonna hit my car and scrape all down the side of it, but it didn’t. But, the bus couldn’t get out the rear driveway, because there was a sedan waiting in line at a gas pump, blocking it. The bus was blocking us in, so we had to sit there and wait until somebody deigned to move.
Comments (1)
Chief Oddball
Pooch
MichiganMom
Apple
Most Studies Are Wastes of Money, Study Finds
By Chief Oddball on May 25th, 2007 at 9:06 am
Filed under Commentary, Rants ··· 1 Comment
Okay, so I manufactured the so-called “study” sent up by the title of this post. But it’s the natural conclusion for one to draw after reading this article on my most-loathed cable news website, MSNBC.com.
The headline reads “TV can be bad for diabetic children.” The tagline? “Snacking, less exercise linked to increases in blood sugar levels, study finds.” Basically, what we have here is another example of how special interest groups, supposedly objective agencies with big industry funding, and the media in general control and manipulate the way in which information is presented in order to “prove” their beliefs to be true, rather than just reporting facts.
TV, in and of itself, is not going to make your diabetes worse. That’s total horse shit. But through some clever extensions of logic, by virtue of the fact that you are watching too much TV, we find that you may not be getting enough exercise. Likewise, we find that many people who sit on their butts and watch TV all day tend to snack while they’re watching. And of course, many of those snacking people are eating unhealthy snacks. So we conclude, naturally, that TV is killing you.
Ohhhhh-kay.
Seriously, do me a favor, fair reader. The next time you witness a news headline about a new “study,” be it on the Web, on TV or on the radio, please change the channel, click away or just plain do something else. The reality is that most “studies” are funded by politically-motivated organizations that already have a particular result in mind before the study is even carried out. Their financial contribution, which enables the study in the first place, may be given only under the condition that their “approved” result be reached. And so there you have it — cooked books, being regurgitated and spat out to you, the mindless American consumer, as fact.
“Turn on, tune in, drop out” never sounded so good.
Comments (1)