WhistlinDixie

The Grand Vanishing Act

Usually, at the end of a quarter, you have some friends who are seniors, who graduate. At Kettering, it seems that you should also plan on having half of your friends drop out or transfer. Really, I have something like four friends who are transferring. I find this to be somewhat depressing. Honestly, what other school transfers such a large percentage of its students to other colleges?

It all begs the question: Who do I blame for this great outflux of friends?

Is it me? Did I not talk to them enough, to help make them feel like they meant something to me? Na.. Couldn’t be my fault. It’s never my fault.

I’ll just blame it on my younger brother. After all, you can always blame everything on younger siblings. Er, actually, I can’t do that either. After all, he’s never met any of the defectors, and I seriously doubt that he has the ability to affect people that he has never encountered before.

Maybe it is our school. John’s always talking about how it has the ability to suck your soul right out of you. Maybe the dearly departed simply felt the need to actually live and experience the college life like it was meant to be experienced.

Then again, we may never know the truth of why such great people decided to disperse themselves across the nation to such far away places as Nebraska and Colorado. It is their story to tell. My only question is: Are you sure that you are doing the right thing?

These Prices Are Insane!

In case any of you have been in a hole for the past week, you have probably noticed the skyrocketing price of gas. Just about a week ago, gas here in Flint was about $2.40. Yesterday when I was driving to a friend’s place, I saw that the gas prices had risen to $3.19! I was listening to the radio this morning (it’s my alarm), and they said that if you need gas, you better get it now because they had heard that it was going to jump to $3.50 later today! I am driving home today, so that really, really sucks. I can only hope that Ohio gas prices are more sensible, as they normally are.

As they normally do, the hosts of the show on the radio show that I was listening to were taking calls from the listeners about the topic of discussion for the day (gas prices). Someone called in and said it was just inflation taking its toll. After all, prices for things such as milk had risen in price the past few years so why not have gas follow that trend? I’ll tell you why. If you remember about seven years ago, during the summer, we had the great gas wars. Stations were battling with each other to have the lowest prices, selling gas to consumers for about $.80 a gallon for regular. Right after that, gas stabilized to around $1.00 per gallon. Considering that gas is now approximately $3.50 a gallon, that means that the nation as a whole must have experienced an inflation of around 350%, right? Um, no! Honestly, if milk had tripled in price over the past five years, we would be up in arms. Has any other good in our economy risen in price so much?

Honestly, these companies need to quit it with all of their price gouging and the environmentalists need to shove it. Because of them, we haven’t been able to increase our nation’s refining capacity for over 25 years because of stringent regulations that they had pushed through Congress. Because of them, our nation is coming close to being crippled because of the suddenly ballooning gas prices. If we had been able to increase our refining capacity over the last quarter century, then Katrina might not have had such a huge effect on our gas prices ($1.00 increase in a week’s span).

Oops!

Well, I just figured out why my site not only appeared funny, but also failed to register a single hit. The hit count wasn’t because nobody visited. It was actually due to an error in the code of my page that I had changed to try to place a download counter for Firefox on my page. Ends up that something broke along the way and made my page invalid HTML. Anyway, now it’s fixed, so all of my pages will render correctly and I will be able to tell that there are still people out there who might just have a passing interest in what is going on inside my head.