I love parks
I love parks, especially our national ones. And
when I visit them, I want to see nature in all its splendor, pure and
unsullied. Note that I said want, not expect. I know it's impossible
because many thousands of other people want the same thing, and usually,
it seems, they want it at the same time and in the same place that I
want it. And so, more often than not, a trip to a national park often
seems more like a trip to a zoo. A human zoo.
Heaven help us, though, if or when those pristine pockets of America
start being invaded by hordes of Segway-scooter-riding cell-phone
jabberers. Do you think I'm kidding? Read
this. And weep.
Now, it sounds like we may have enough sensible senators in both
parties to rise up and shoot this piece of legislative lunacy down --
this time around. But who knows what the future holds?
One thing I do know: Segways don't exactly provide the (somewhat)
bearproof containment-and-shelter factor that, say, a camper -- or,
heck, even a tin-can compact car -- affords. And from what I understand,
the Segway's top speed is 12.5 miles per hour;
the American black bear's is 25 -- "when," the site
helpfully adds, "it is chasing prey."
This just in from Inbox's Recycling Eccentrics Department: The
Philadelphia Inquirer published a
story yesterday about a gent from South Philly who
bicycles everywhere he goes, is an avid (did someone say obsessive?)
recycler, and publishes a calendar called Cycle & Recycle that is
intended to be reused every dozen or so years when the dates cycle back
around again.
I cite the story here mainly because it includes several odd facts
that I found intriguing, such as that there are only 14 possible
calendar date combinations, and those combinations repeat themselves at
somewhat uneven intervals; and that bicycles achieve the energy
equivalent of 1,100 miles per gallon.
Speaking of miles per gallon, are
gas prices
dropping as fast in your corner of the world as they are here in Ohio?
Every time I go out, they seem to have slid another few cents. This
morning I passed a station selling Regular at $2.09. Am I nuts, or were
we shelling out $3 a gallon a few weeks ago? At this rate, by next
summer the BPs and and ExxonMobils of the world will start paying us
to take gas off their hands.
Yeah, right; wishful thinking. What's really going on, the paranoid
conspiracy theorist in me surmises, is that the oil companies and the
home-heating-gas utilities have gone into cahoots with one another, and
from now on we'll see gas-pump prices sag every fall and winter as home
heating bills skyrocket, and then, when the weather warms back up, those
pricing trends will flip-flop. And when you add it all up, little by
little -- or more likely, a lot by a lot -- we'll keep paying more.
Write it down: You read it here at Inbox first.
Oh, and incidentally, the CIA and the Mafia co-killed JFK, no one has
every really set foot on the moon, the world is flat, and Elvis lives.
P.S. One last word to the wise: Our managing editor, whose initials
are BL, informs me that wearing tinfoil hats will keep the aliens from
reading your mind.
Pete Fehrenbach
is assistant managing editor of Waste News. Past installments of this
column are collected in
the Inbox
archive.
Entire
contents copyright 2005 by Crain Communications Inc. All rights reserved. |