Year: 2009
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What, me worry?
You might recognize the headline above as the caption MAD Magazine uses along with their ever-present mascot, the faintly simian-looking Alfred E. Neuman. It’s good advice. Facing uncertain times with the right psychological outlook can be as important as every other preparation you’ve made put together. Of course, we’re not advocating an ostrich approach –…
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New oilfields are good news, right?
You might have missed recent news reports that giant new oilfields have been discovered in the Gulf of Mexico, Iran, Brazil, and Uganda. Excellent! Now the price of gas at the pump is sure to plummet. Not so fast. The numbers do not seem to bear out that rosy assessment. Here’s a spoonful of reality.…
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Dangerous geniuses.
It’s only a matter of time before the great breakthrough happens – cheap energy for everyone. It’ll be the end of high gas prices and usher in a new age where the rest of the world can finally tell OPEC to go pound sand. Or maybe the great breakthrough is already here but has not…
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Come on! Die already.
Oh, come now. We all knew it was going on. It can’t help but happen when the government puts itself in charge of health care. A recent article in the UK Telegraph yanked the cover off this disturbing trend – terminally ill patients are having food and water withheld so they’ll die sooner. Why on…
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Winter driving fun ahead.
Most of us, at some point in our lives, get to experience the joy of steering a car through a winter wonderland. Even if you’re a lifetime resident of the Snow Belt, you still go to visit the relatives up north for the holidays sometimes, don’t you? Whatever the reason, whatever the season, it makes…
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Doh! That is so easy!
Is your house in need of a thousand million minor repairs? Ha! Does Dracula like to drink blood? Yes. Sometimes in our headlong sprint towards depression that we have to make a household repair, we forget to remember some very simple techniques guaranteed to elevate your status among the other primates and maybe even improve…
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Back to the Stone Age.
Remember the gallows humor joked about the United States being nuked back to the Stone Age? Turns out that it wouldn’t even take a direct strike and accompanying fallout to send us into a technological wasteland. We’re not going to try to make everyone in the audience an electrical engineer in 300 words or less…
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How precious is your metal?
We’ve all heard the never-ending hullabaloo surrounding gold as a precious metal investment. Even silver gets more media pub than the other metals in the family, even though a recent spot quote put it in lowly 11th place ranked by value on world market trading. Here’s a snapshot in case you’re curious about how they…
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Gold – it’s not manna from heaven.
We call them gold bugs. The term has been around at least since the US presidential election of 1896, when supporters of William McKinley took to wearing gold lapel pins and gold-colored headbands to show their disdain for the encroachment of the “silver menace” into our money supply. Those were the days. If only silver…
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“Thanks,” said the bear.
If you’re ever camping or find yourself in a wilderness situation, it would be good to be familiar with at least one form of “caching” your provisions from animals with no conscience – we’re talking bears, raccoons, foxes, dogs, porcupines, squirrels, rats, snakes, etc. You probably don’t want to hump all your supplies everywhere you…