This just in. Or not.
I heard on the radio this morning that Americans are using less gasoline, that maybe rising costs at the pump are causing drivers to, like, drive less. Or drive more fuel-efficient vehicles. Or something.
You don't say! Higher prices might make consumers reconsider their spending priorities? Capitalism in action! The Unseen Hand of the market made manifest!
But actually, they went on to say that gasoline sales were not actually down so much as they hadn't continued their upward trend at quite the expected rate. So we're not using less gas; we're just not using more.
This shocking story was followed a little later by a fluff piece* about the demise of the roadside attraction. Apparently the venerable tradition of giant balls of string, enormous fiberglass animals, and painted toilet seat collections is in decline across the nation. No mention of a corresponding decline in the road trip itself, just some stuff about how the little home-based businesses are overtaken by development, their eccentric owners die or retire or get bored, or the attraction itself breaks or dies or loses its unique appeal.
Between that and the Babe the Blue Ox beheading in California, I just don't know what to think.
*I heard these stories on NPR's Morning Edition. Transcripts are not posted yet, so there's no link. [Update: Here's the roadside attraction story. The other must have been part of the newscast, as I am not finding a transcript. But I'm pretty sure I heard it and did not merely dream it.]
Labels:
in the news,
NaBloPoMo,
transportation
5 comments:
BABE THE BLUE OX BEHEADING??? AIYEEE!
I don't think Marge (in FARGO) would have approved of yer police work, there, guys, yah?
:)
Hee! "The suspect is fleeing the interview!"
I love Marge.
I am a little disturbed by the idea that the owner is going to replace the 35 lb head with "A stuffed animal head" for Xmas. So now this is Babe, the Blue Ox, science experiment gone mad?
Does this mean the days of getting jammed in the car with your siblings and having the same arguements for 12 straight hours is not longer considered a "vacation?" My father determined that we would all get to play a tape (tells you when we took our car trip, or how old our vehicles here) in ROTATION. This is when I starting listening to minimalist classical music; nothing like 90 minutes of Micahel Nyman or Grass out of pure revenge to try and turn a sibling insane (now I am starting to understand why my parents stopped at EVERY historical marker when it was MY turn to play a tape).
Okay, that replacement head idea? That's just wrong. So very wrong.
Yeah, the head replacement thing is deeply weird. The little town where my family's summer cabin was (and where we lived for a few years when I was in grade school) had an enormous fiberglass Babe the Blue Ox statue in the center of town. Bigger towns, like Brainerd and Bemidji, had enormous fiberglass Paul Bunyans as well. The one in Brainerd actually spoke, but our town only had enormous footprints painted on Main Street leading to the Babe statue. But I keep picturing that statue, sans head, with a little tiny plush bobblehead stuck inside it.
It's not pretty.
Minnesota, incidentally, has an awful lot of roadside attractions, and may in fact at one point have led the nation in number of enormous fiberglass animals. Still does, for all I know, but now that there's a Republican governor, everything's gone all to hell, infrastructure-wise. Who knows what's happened to all those fiberglass walleyes and so on.
I'm recalling family car trips in cars that had only radios, not even tape decks. We used to sing. I recall one ride up to the lake with my mother and my aunt in the front seat of a black 1963 Falcon station wagon -- both with their hair in big green rollers -- and my 2-year-old old sister, my (6 and 8 years old) and 9-year-old me in the back with an Irish setter, a cocker spaniel, and a schnauzer. The two boys and I were wearing plastic fire helmets and making siren noises, dogs howling, until my mother hollered at us to sing something nice.
"Sing a Beatles song," she said. We did "Hey Jude," which was her favorite. And which is pretty annoying once you get to that 'na na na na, na na na na' part and start with the screaming.
It's amazing that any of us survived.
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