Texas is so wonderfully hot. But never mind that. Check this out. The first picture was taken two years ago. Two.
Now one taken like a week ago.
Gas hasn’t really gone up THAT much considering. Two years ago? $3.497 vs $3.498! It has only gone up $0.001 so… what’s the big hullabaloo?!
Maybe that’s why I haven’t gotten so worked up over the gas prices. Behold the power of browsing your old Flickr posts. Fun times.
I’ve been lazy posting recently because I’ve been going back in time and re-categorizing and tagging all my old posts. I did some work on my MySQL database and deleted one extra table too many… oops. So I lost all the categories for posts. So, slowly I am putting categories and tags to all my posts. I’m 10% done. Seems like I should be closer to finished. Ugh.
So, in leu of an actual post, here are some videos that caught my fancy this week.
First we have the Skittles Chocolate advertisement. If all advertisements were this entertaining, I wouldn’t “Tivo” past them. It’s so simple, yet so hilarious. Maybe just to me, you be the judge
[flv:Skittles_Chocolate.flv 425 325]
Next up is a documentary that calls out the coffee companies on their bean purchasing practices. That really irks me about this movie, is how misleading it is. [Disclaimer: I haven't actually seen it, but if it is as the preview advertises and most of these stories go, I think I know what's going on]
They act like companies, say… Starbucks, pay pennies on the dollar for the beans as compared to the price at the store. What they neglect to mention is the fact that when the beans get to the beaneries, they are raw. No treatments have been done beyond maybe some washing and curing in the sun. They haven’t been roasted, flavored, QC’d, packaged and shipped. It is the price at the scene.
It’s like calling out Chick-Fil-A for selling a sandwich for $2.59 when the breast they used for it cost them $0.65. There were so many things that happened between the death of the chicken and the serving of the sandwich.
Now, I can’t say much for bulk coffee companies like Folger’s and Maxwell House, they are both notorious for poor practices. Either way, the movie looks interesting.
[flv:Black_Gold.flv 425 325]
And finally… No wonder the Sharper Image has filed for bankruptcy. How stupid is this thing? I mean, it looks fake it’s so bad. haha
[flv:Sharper_Image_Harp.flv 425 325]
I got my Economic Stimulus Payment Notice in the mail the other days. It says I should get $300-600 from the IRS this May because I make over $3,000. Wow, that’s all you need to make?
First off, I am totally against the this “stimulus”. The people that are making $3,000 probably aren’t saving their money. They are spending it. Yeah, I know that’s the point of this thing, for Americans to go out and shop.
However, it’s not the lower class people that need to go out and spend money, it’s the top 20% and greater. The more you ear, the more you spend. But it is relative and obvious. When you make $12,000 a year and get a check for $600, that’s 5% of your income for the year as a bonus. That is only 1% above inflation!
The bottom 80% of Americans will use this stimulus payment to go shopping, not to pay off debts or to put into a high yeld savings account. The only people who will benefit from this stimulus are the rich.
The money is basically going from our government to the rich elite of America via the person who makes $3,000-75,000 a year. This money will be spent paying for the outrageous gas prices (it will fill your car ten 
times), it will be spent buying iPods and video games. It will be spent on vacations to Disney World. It will be spent going out to eat. It will be spent going to see movies.
This money will be put back into the hands of who had it first, the rich.
Economic Stimulus Payment Notice… ESPN, parent company? ABC. Parent company? Walt Disney. Sister companies?
Basically, they now own you. For more proof, just scroll down, and down, and down and down and down until you see how much the Iraq War has cost compared to the government actually trying to fix our economic/energy crisis.
I’m clearly in a mood…
Oh, and I will probably spend my $600 check on a new lens, because I don’t want to disappoint the American People.