Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

The Brass Wheel

The Brass Wheel (A dirty song I heard as a kid)

This part of the country (Central Wisconsin) is famous not only for its dairy farms but is also a place where they raise a lot of Angus Beef. There is a market in Adams/Friendship where they sell it locally and often the specials are almost too good to be true. They also serve those rotisserie chickens which I am sure you can buy these days everywhere… that are a great meal.

Anyway I have been grilling in the snow a couple days each week and everybody has gathered to watch…. When I say everybody I mean all the creatures that live on or around my farmstead. Naturally I use a gas grill because in the winter, charcoal is not practical. The last two days things have warmed up and the snow is almost gone.

This is the last week of the Exploratory Writing Workshop (EWW.) It has been a very successful undertaking for both myself and the students. Nobody dropped out, if you can believe that, and here we are coming down to the wire and everybody is working on those outlines.

Today on the way back from town I had Linda pull over to the curb and I went to check out the window sticker on the Chevy Volt. It was priced at over $45K. Darn near twice what my Prius went for. Then I heard yesterday that the Volt won “Best Car Award” in Europe….Can you imagine that? They can’t give them away here, had to shut the factory down… and in Europe the fiasco is awarded “Best Car.” What is going on with this…. Do they sell the Oscars in Europe? Actually the press is much freer in the US than over seas and they are riddled with Socialism and corruption even worse than in Chicago… I don’t think they have an equivalent of “Consumer Reports”

Actually I am surprised that the Prius survived it’s infancy. I remember being in a Toyota dealership several years back and the sales man showed me a comparison chart between I think it was a Corolla and a Prius. They used basically the same math I did and said that with gas at less than $2 a gallon that the additional expense (at the time) would never make it viable. This was in their own showroom and it wasn’t being spoken in whispers… The chart was on the wall. How times have changed… They have gotten the cost way down and today it is one of their best sellers. This success is sure to embolden other carmakers much to the chagrin of the oil companies.

Ever since I was a kid I have heard stories of the oil companies buying up the patents on promising energy saving technologies and burying the blue prints in their archives. I know that sounds a little schizophrenic but I’m only relating here the scuttle-butt that has been circulating for a long time. I remember one rumor back in my teens of a carburetor that could get twenty-five miles to a gallon.