RANT #14…
Today
the United States Post Office announced another rate increase. Now
postage is going to cost us at least .82 per envelope. This is to offset
an estimated 7 billion dollar deficient for the coming year, or was it
10 billion? My question is….why don’t they just go ahead and make it
$1.00 and then they might stop increasing the rates almost annually? We
all know they can never be profitable and will never be able to operate
without a subsidy every year. Just get it over with and leave us alone
for a year or so. No one uses the mail anymore anyway except for
politicians and the Crate and Barrel and the Signal catalog people. I
could do without those without any problem, especially the politicians.
The Signal catalog has some cute things every once in a while, keep it
coming.
Enough about the good old USPS, I’ll do
more next January when my annual rant comes out. I’m usually good for
about 6 months on them before I find something to gripe about. However,
in all fairness, who could actually put a letter in an envelope and
transport it across the entire country for just $.82? No one could, but
since it’s a free country (at least for now) I can still pick on them
from time to time.
This week I’d like to focus our
attention on things that we are told but cannot do anything about. My
question is….why are we told about it in the first place? Do we care or
do we want to care? Or more importantly, do we need to care?
For
example, the other day I was reading that the earth’s axis had shifted
about 3 inches as a result of earthquakes. This also had an effect upon
the length of a day and our time had been shortened by about 1.27
microseconds over the course of 1 million years. If you are like me, I’m
certain this news is going to ruin your day. Just think about it for a
second….on the other hand forget what I told you, who cares? It isn’t
like you and I will lose any sleep over this information. What I’d like
to know is just who tracks this kind of stuff and why? Did someone go to
school to become an expert on the position of the center of the earth?
If so what school? Who would hire anyone for this and what would they
get paid? Better yet, why would they get paid? Why is this important to
anyone? I bet there is a government grant of some sort keeping up with
this stuff. No, forget those questions, I don’t want to know.
On
the other hand, we have the daily recall information. Or perhaps I
should say the daily auto recall information for just about any make and
model automobile. In my opinion you’d be better off driving a used
anything than a new something. It seems to be brakes today and engines
yesterday. You could spend most of your waking life driving back and
forth to the dealer just to get the necessary repairs. You must also
take into consideration that the days are getting shorter as I mentioned
earlier, so you don’t have as much time to waste on repairs. Think
about it.
Got a cell phone? I’ll give you something
to think about. Try tumors for your brain. Do cell phones cause tumors?
Who knows? It seems they do in mice, but I have a hard time visualizing
mice making many cell phone calls. Who could they call and what would
they talk about if they could call? It isn’t like they could make any
plans to travel or go fishing or skydiving, is there? These are things
we don’t need in our brains.
So, is coffee good for
us or bad for us? One day it is and the next day it’s terrible. On
Monday 1 cup is good, on Tuesday 3 cups is better and on Friday any cup
at all will cause your liver to petrify. I drink it anyway and so that
probably puts me in the rebel category, but then again, I use a cell
phone, so I guess my life is going downhill in a hurry. As far as global
warming is concerned, I’m all for it. Or maybe I’m against it…I can’t
seem to remember from one day to the next which way I should position
myself. I do know that I have cut back on my carbon footprint by making
sun tea instead of using the stove. I tried baking biscuits on the hood
of my car, but I found it took more than four hours, and I was missing a
lot of work. So much for that idea. They also fall off when you are
driving over 25 miles per hour. If you go any slower, people get really
agitated on the freeway and honk and wave their fingers at you in a
strange way. They also yell and mumble things about your parents.
Don’t
even get me started about microwaves, you can find over 200,000
articles about their dangers or safety. I just know that I should not
put live things inside of them and I don’t stand in front of them for
hours at a time. I figure that’s being cautious enough. Of course, I
don’t stand in front of anything for hours at a time, so that’s not much
of a stretch for me. Who watches things getting cooked in a microwave
anyway? If you do, you need a hobby of some sort.
If,
you are in your twenties, then I guess it’s ok to worry about these
things, you still have lots of room in your head for useless things. But
after you get to be my age you start to consider all of that useless
information you have put into your brain over the past years and wonder
if you have a lot of room left for any new stuff. Putting something new
into a brain as old as mine is dangerous since it could push something
out that I needed. Perhaps some of those people who are found wandering
outside of a nursing home got that way because they read about mice
getting tumors from cell phones and then lost their memory of how to get
home? It’s possible, isn’t it?
Personally, I think anything relating to the post office or the location of the earth’s axis falls in the category of stuff I don’t need to know about. I can’t do anything about either one, neither can you.
See you next week…Peary Perry
