break out your bicycle

i love satirewire.

On a different note, if this isn't enough to make you consider alternate transportation, what is?

"There's no question gas will hit $4 a gallon," Ben Brockwell, director of pricing at the Oil Price Information Service, said. "The question is how high will it go and how long will it last?"

my word, $4 a gallon just as i'm heading into back-to-school week is scary indeed. it was bad enough last year when the tank took $30 to fill -- with gas prices doubled since then, it will easily be $60 a tank, and i go through that in a week picking up and dropping off. carpooling no longer seems a convenient and friendly thing, but a matter of survival. natural gas prices have also gone up markedly, twenty percent in the last week alone. frankly, i was pretty impressed that the insulating measures i had taken last year managed to render a measurable reduction in my heating bill for the year. the average went down thirty percent, in a year when prices climbed. am i the only one watching the food budget shrink as the oil prices soar? add to that jeep maintenance and dental surgery and the like, and i'm seeing an awful lot of iced tea and soup in our future.

i nearly canceled the new york trip at the end of the month. then i talked with jaime yesterday and found out she was in San Francisco (literally sitting on the dock of the bay, wasting time), having just completed her interview with a library in sonoma county the day before. the interview went very well, and she loves the area. she said she isn't going to take the job unless they offer her the upper end of the salary, but i think she is hooked, and they would frankly be dumb not to hire her. she is one of the only people i know who can face their technical services situation (acquisition, reciept, payment, and cataloging of books -- they do 6,000 titles a month) without being overwhelmed. in fact, she's excited by it, as i'm frankly glad to see it; as much as i will miss her, it all sounds very thrilling and to be situated near like-minded. the upshot of this is that we have wanted to take a pilgramage to NYPL since september of 1995. ten years ago, my word! and if we don't do it before she moves to cali, we likely never will. so the ny trip is still on the books. i might have to pass the hat to get there.

but enough grim tales. check out the cubist web site story. i can't figure out why if it's a site for cubists that it's not in spanish, but perhaps they were trying to be all cool and stuff. i'll have a cubist cigar and ponder it while i relax in the oval orafice. i think i'll be needing the tee shirt.