Remember those Tibetan flags from the San Francisco Olympic Torch protests?
Turns out they were made in China.
I recently partook in a discussion about how driving less or even driving slower might have an impact on the environment, our finances, and our dependence on foreign oil (not to mention bending over the guys over at Exxon just a little bit for their continual record profits). I made a pledge that on my next tank of gas i would drive within the speed limit, watch my acceleration and coast to red lights in neutral (i have a manual transmission), instead of racing up to the light and slamming on my brakes…and then take a good look at my MPG and see if it made a difference.
Now, i’m not a scientist but i do remember the scientific process from high school, so here’s my hypothesis before the experiment. Once i do it, i’ll let you know the actual numbers.
Currently, i get an average of 24 mpg, i have a 14.5 gallon tank, but i fill up when the light goes on somewhere between 13.5 and 14, so let’s say that i go 336 miles on one tank of gas and i use one tank of gas every 7 days. I use premium fuel to keep my rocket ship at peak performance and I usually pay about 3.70 for a gallon of gas…that’s about 60 gallons a month costing me $222 per month times 12 months which is $2664 per year on fuel. If my driving slowly and conservatively suddenly gets me 28 mpg (which is what i get on road trips typically) that would get me about 390 miles before i have to fill up again, about a 60 mile improvement, or about 2.5 gallons of gas further than normal…which maybe, just maybe gets me one or 2 more days of driving on a tank. So let’s say i go 8 days between refills instead of 7, that’s 3.75 refills a month, times 14 gallons per refill time $3.70 per gallon equals $194 per month or about $28 a month in savings or $330 a year.
In the end, $300 a year isn’t going to make a huge impact on my life. Yes, i’m a spoiled privileged white person but i also have a good paying job and i don’t live paycheck to paycheck. So $300 a year is definitely some extra beer money but all in all, not a huge impact on my overall life and probably not enough to reinforce those better driving habits…environmentally speaking, i would save approx 96 gallons of gas over the course of a year, or about 1 barrel. If everyone in America saved 1 barrel of gas, that would be around 300 million barrels of gas a year. The world currently consumes 120 million barrels PER DAY, so we would save the world approx 2.5 days of oil…a drop in the proverbial barrel. It wouldn’t have that big of an impact. Now if driving slowly all of a sudden got me 50mpg, then we’re talking. Sorry to play out all the figures in this post but i’ll be interested to see how my hypothesis compares to my experiment.
“It has to start somewhere, it has to start somehow. What better place than here, what better time than now?” – Zach De La Rocha-
I’ve mentioned before that i’m a dork about my blog stats so forgive me if this is completely meaningless to you…a few weeks back (right around when The Office came back), i posted this photo of Jenna Fischer:
And all of a sudden, i was the #2 result for image searches of Jenna Fischer. Obviously i received a ton of visits, meaningless ones, but visits nonetheless. It was kind of exciting watching my stats soar, but now i find myself in a depression knowing that i’ll probably never top that day when i received 1,145 visits or 3,806 in that single week…now, things have settled down and everything is back to normal and damn does this look sad:
Filed under: apocalypse
You know, there’s a lot wrong with the U.S., but at least we don’t have to worry about this!
Tonight, John McCain, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama will appear on WWE’s Monday Night Raw in hopes of appealing to the progressive, intelligent and influential “No way man, wrestling isn’t fake” demographic…
I tried, i really did. I tried to care and tried to buy into this race as important and into these candidates as different, and you know what? They’re not. They’re the same pandering, soulless, vote grubbing whores as every other politician ever. Ever.
The only thing that would make me vote for any of these 3 at this point would be for one of them to say the following: “Dear wrestling fans of America…if you’re watching this show and you’re old enough to vote, please, do not. Yes, you heard me correctly, do the world a favor and please do not vote. That is all.”
Filed under: music
There are currently 5,870 songs on my iPod, and i’m not going to lie…i’m sick of every single one of them.
Someone recommend something new and do it in a hurry…
Filed under: apocalypse, hell, more fucking stupidity, plastic, plastic surgery
Dear Dr. Michael Salzhauer,
Children are not a marketing tool. They don’t need a book to explain why mommy needs fake tits to get daddy’s attention back from his secretary. They need to be watching Disney movies and learning valuable lessons about death (see: Lion King, Bambi, etc.) Please kindly take a moment to go fuck yourself.
See you in hell!
Adam
Filed under: McCain
Remember the clever Bomb Iran song?
Filed under: Facebook
For those of you who use Facebook, there is a new Application called Blog It that allows you to post from Facebook to your blog automatically…I’m not a huge Facebook fan and probably won’t use it all that much, but here’s the first post…in any way, it’s a better app than Werewolves or Zombies or the BS that used to be on here…
(I won’t use it because it doesn’t even have basic editing features…i had to leave Facebook and log into wordpress just to add links…i’m sure it’ll get better eventually but for now, it’s no good.)
Parents fought over which gang tot should “claim”
You can’t make this kinda shit up….
