The Cynic Says……

Yeah… wtf is up with this idiotic weather. It’s 85 degrees and can’t seem to decide if it wants to rain or not. Humid as all holy fuck, which is annoying. I wish it would just rain for a couple hours to get rid of the stupid clouds and the humidity. As long as I’m not in it when it’s raining, it’s all good. Admittedly, riding in 90 degree heat and rain would be quite fun…. as long as it stopped raining at some point while it was still sunny so I could dry out. I’m off the next two days so I’m going to make a point of putting in 30+ miles one of those days. Maybe both, who knows? Hopefully we’ll be dead at work tonight because I really don’t feel like having to work hard. Not that my job is that hard even if we DO get busy.

Amusingly, our local buses have been free for the past 3 days (including today) because the air pollution has reached a certain level and is worse than normal. Knoxville has started a new thing where if air pollution levels are above a certain level, all KAT buses are free. They have an “orange alert” and a “red alert”. I don’t believe we’ve had any red alert days yet, but we’ve had 3 or 4 orange alert days. I think It’s a pretty cool idea except that it’s not publicized enough and the buses really weren’t any more busy than I would normally see them on any given day. As a matter of fact, most of the people I saw getting on were surprised to find out that the buses were fare-free. I think people in general are just too dependent on their cars to ever give them up for any reason. Even if gas was $5-6 a gallon, people would still drive everywhere by themselves and not carpool or ride the bus… or walk.. or cycle.. whatever. It’s kind of sad, really… but hey, it’s their own stupidity for spending that much fucking money in gas. I’d like to see the government do this commercial… Person gets in their car, puts the key in the ignition… camera zooms to the ignition… person turns the key and the engine fires to life… announcer comes on and says “everytime you do this you’re SUPPORTING TERRORISM!” Either that or show someone pumping gas and do vaguely the same thing. Considering a large portion of our oil comes from the middle east. However, I’ve read various places that we actually get a large portion of our oil from Venezuela, followed closely by Saudi Arabia and the other middle eastern countries. Russia actually produces more oil than any other country in the world, but I can’t realistically see us getting large quantities of oil from them anytime soon. Alas, we’ll pretty much always rely mostly on foreign oil since America just can’t produce enough oil to satisfy our needs.