I don’t think anyone will be confusing Judge Roy Moore with Shakespeare.

This weekend the phone and Internets access was down for more than 24 hours (fortunately, cable TV still worked). I didn’t miss the phone much, but it reminded me how many things I’ve gotten used to reading or doing online. For instance, I thought about looking up a potential route for cycling and realized–the horror–that I’d have to find a paper map if I wanted to check out the roads. So much for that idea.
This morning I learned–to my surprise–that the outage was caused by a plane crash occurring over in Cookeville. After reading that the pilot died in the crash, the “hardship” I endured during the episode doesn’t seem so bad.

Call me cynical, but I have a growing suspicion that the likelihood of a major terrorism attack in the U.S. is inversely proportional to the amount of related press conference warnings held by elected officials.

Yes, prices are marching upward. And for many people this winter could be nasty:

For the 2005-06 heating season, “residential per-household expenditures” will rise by 71 percent for natural gas in the Midwest, 31 percent for heating oil in the Northeast, and 40 percent for propane in the Midwest. For all of 2005, EIA projects Americans will spend $1.08 trillion on energy, up 24 percent from 2004. That amounts to 8.7 percent of gross domestic product, the largest percentage since 1985.

Speaking of fuel, one thing that struck me as being peculiar is how all the local gas stations seem to be coordinating their big price hikes. I understand how a sudden disruption in supply can lead to big price hike. What seems odd to me is how, as if on cue, they all raise the price to the same rate. Typically, you’ll see a price variation of several cents per gallon depending on what part of town you’re in. Yet last Friday, it seemed as if every station I saw had all set the price at $3.29/ gallon [over 10% more than it had been a couple days earlier].
Just seemed a weird how that played out.

The way things should be:

[The President] would be both ashamed and afraid to bring forward, for the most distinguished or lucrative stations, candidates who had no other merit than that of coming from the same State to which he particularly belonged, or of being in some way or other personally allied to him, or of possessing the necessary insignificance and pliancy to render them the obsequious instruments of his pleasure.

It’s as relevant today as it was in 1788, isn’t it?