"Any Idea," huh?

Reading the Tribune during lunch, I found this snippet:

Bush was asked about a proposal by Republican presidential contender John McCain, later endorsed by Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton, to suspend taxes on gasoline and diesel fuel for the summer travel season. The tax is 18.4 cents per gallon of gasoline and 24.4 cents on diesel fuel.

"I'm open to any ideas and we'll analyze anything that comes up," he said.

Suspending taxes would be stupid - it's not the taxes that are the problem, and with the government running deeply in the red as it is, it can't afford the revenue loss. However, since Shrub is supposedlly open to anything, here goes - it is well-known that the price of gasoline no longer reflects supply and demand, but instead the efforts of big-money investors to save their own asses. In the interests of preventing this price inflation from hurting the economy further, price controls should be implemented. If Nixon, the most vile President before Dubya, could do it, Bush can do it too.

He won't, though - he and his buddies are all oil guys. The last thing they want is the price to come down.

Blueberries and Cherries

On my way out this evening I noticed a metric buttload of squad cars around the intersection of Green and Locust, all but one of them with lights flashing. Two hours later, some of them were still there (or had been replaced) and the lights were still going.

Whatever was up, I fully expect to read about it in the Daily Illini tomorrow, and will be disappointed if I can't. The DI is a morning paper, it should be scooping the News-Gazette on a lot more stuff than it does. The DI's craptacular local coverage makes it really hard to defend when people I know from other schools make fun of it.

Getting What's Coming To Them

While I was out and about tonight I noticed that the police were conducting Bar Raids on the Campus bars. During UofI's Moms weekend. I'm not sure what amuses me more, the idea of Champaign getting loads of cash from Suburban parents buying alcohol for their underage progeny, or of some parents seeing direct consequences for indulging their overprivileged kids. I applaud whoever came up with the idea of running a raid tonight.

Amazing What You Can Find Online

A few years ago a copy of a Cheapass game called Fight the Power was included in an order of other games I received from them. All the game consisted of was a rule sheet, and the only pieces needed to play were six-sided dice, which one can scavenge from most other games. Sometime a year and a half ago I lost my copy of the rules, but about an hour ago finally found a copy of them online.

Yay for the power of the interwebs.

Energy Savings

Every month or so, there's a MASSMAIL to staff or a story in the local media about how the recent hikes in energy prices and usage have done nasty things to UIUC's budget. While asking faculty and staff to reduce energy usage is a good thing, it'd do wonders for DIA to set an example and not have the lights turned on at Memorial Stadium every single night for no good reason. It's not even football season anymore, the thing is effectively mothballed until August.

And yes, I'm aware of the construction. That still doesn't supply a reason for keeping the stadium lights on overnight.

A Blog You Should Be Reading

I'm not quite sure how I found it, but Judge a Book by its Cover is a blog run by a librarian who makes fun of bad cover art on books. A common target are romance novels and anything published by Baen. Updated irregularly (but still more so than I, perhaps I need more fiber...), it's still quite funny.