respublica

O'Hare overcrowding

After the MAtH (man about the house) returned from a short trip Sunday night where he was required to change planes in Chicago and he mentioned how maddenly crowded O'Hare was. 

Today the New York Times caught up with the American Airlines plan to cut flights from St. Louis and other cities while increasing flights out of Chicago.  All this made us consider just how awful the crowds will be at O'Hare in the near future and how hard it will be to avoid them.

Keeping the characters straight

Have you ever started reading a newspaper story and found that after a couple of paragraphs you had trouble keeping all the names and relationships straight?

Dale and I both agreed this morning that this is happening a lot lately and we often find ourselves having to go back to the beginning of a story to sort out who did what to who and who is related to someone else.  Reporters seem to feel the need to get as many people into their stories as possible. 

A case in point is the sad story of the kidnapped California girl who was kept in the back yard by a man and his wife until she was found this week.  A New York Times story this morning had so many different people quoted and described I had to start over several times.  It doesn't help when family members all have different last names and the reporter adds university a spokesman, a couple of sheriffs, a California Department of Corrections official, a printing customer, neighbors and anyone who ever walked by the house in question.

They must get paid by the word.

Flash Mob

Ok class.  Listen up.  Here is your new vocabulary word for the day.  Officially recognized as a term last month by Merriam Webster's Dictionary Flash Mob is defined as:

Groups of people brought together to perform some odd behavior before dispersing.

Example:  a gathering of people video taped performing a satirical song or dance or craft or car trick for uploading on YouTube or other video sharing sites. 

These videos differ from the traditional in that they are planned and thought out rather than a recording of what happens on the spot. 

You just knew this was going to happen

From the Washington Post:

"Car dealers are growing increasingly impatient with the government's slow pace in reimbursing them for accepting trade-ins as part of its popular "Cash for Clunkers" program, even though Transportation Department officials say they are working to address the delays. "

"In Maryland alone, dealers have put in $36 million in claims under the clunkers program but have been reimbursed for only about 2 percent of the total."

The customer is gone, the new car is gone and there's no money.

Government run programs.  You just have to laugh.

Cash for clunkers eligibility list

It looks like the Cash for Clunkers program will continue with a fresh influx of money.  We've been hearing a lot about this lately, but do you know which cars are eligible for a trade in or which cars qualify for purchase?

A trade in clunker must be one which gets 18 miles per gallon or less. 

Here's the clunker list.

And here's the purchase list.

driving and texting

A new study of truck drivers found that the risk of a crash is 23 times the normal rate when the driver is texting while driving.

Prior to crashes, the average operator looked down at his phone for 5 seconds, long enough for the vehicle to cover more ground than a football field.

Horrific.

The findings for passenger cars would probably be similar, the main difference being it does not take as long to stop a car than a big truck.

One young man who drives a car and habitually texts or emails from his phone said, "I put the phone on top of the steering wheel and text with both thumbs,” he said, adding that he often has exchanges of 10 messages or more. Sometimes, “I’ll look up and realize there’s a car sitting there and swerve around it."

Let's stop this practice right now.  One of us at a time until it becomes anathema.

Finding a connection with MJ

During the past two week Michael Jackson news cycle, the MAtH (man about the house) pretty much confined his comments to one thing and this one thing he repeated many times.

"Michael Jackson had to have drunk Dixie Dairy milk when he was growing up."

Gary Indiana, the hometown of MJ, is also the home of the gone but much loved Dixie Dairy.  If you grew up in the southern part of Chicago or northern Indiana, you'll understand.

Initial this

There are way too many initials standing in for things these days.  Everything is shortened to initials. 

Here's one I came across today.

EMP-  as in fear of an EMP attack.

What's EMP?  Something else we now have to worry about.

Electromagnetic Pulse

More Americans Pro-Life

For the first time since 1995 when the Gallup polling company first began asking "Are you pro-life or pro-choice?", a majority of Americans answered, Pro-Life.  51% - 42%.

All of the increase in pro-life sentiment is on the conservative or republican side of the populations, democrats/liberals have not changed. 

What makes this result so odd is when a comparison is made to the political conventional wisdom.  To listen to the newsmakers and pundits, there are very few republicans left, the last election turned all but a few die hards into democrats.  The republican party is on life support.  If this were true, the rise in pro-life sentiment among republicans and conservatives would certainly not give that view a majority. 

Then again, independents may be turned off by the opposition to the  "born alive protection act".

Interesting.

Bees and now snakes

We've had a bee explosion around here this spring, after a few years of seeing relatively few and a worry they might be in trouble as a local species, they're back.

I hope recent stories like this one where a big old snake got into the Missouri statehouse power plant and caused an outage yesterday doesn't mean we're in for a snake population explosion too.  In the past couple of days there have been several snake stories on the local news, snakes in homes, snakes on jogging paths.

I really really do not do snakes.  They freak me out so I'm hoping we're not into finding snakes all over the place this summer. 

The statehouse snake?  He was electrocuted. 

Good.