The Things We Think Of

I recently attended a conference and recounted an old story from my rather checkered past. It seems that I had crossed the border into Canada to do some work with a customer and staying overnight, had stopped at a cigar shop to pick up a couple of cigars (Cubans, but please don't rat me out to the Feds). I had some time left on the parking meter that I had fed and stopped at a small local pub to enjoy a beer while it ran out. 

When it arrived, I placed a US $20 bill on the bar and received about $25 Canadian dollars in change (the exchange was approximately $.62 at the time). For a moment, it occurred to me that if I sat there and got drunk, I could make some serious money. Isn't it funny that the strangest things pop into our head at any given moment in time. 

Oh well, it must be me, cause I have all kinds of these strange thoughts popping into my head all the time (no surprise there), for example:  

All of the recent attacks on airliners have been done by Islamic terrorists ... So what's wrong with a little racial profiling to help weed out possible threats at the airport, and cutting grandma and her walker a little slack? * 

I can put up a fence in my backyard to keep dogs that I don't want in my yard out of it (I don't have a yard, but you get the point). So how come the Federal government can't come to the same simple conclusion about our national borders?  

If six white teenagers were to beat up a black one (sorry, African-American), it's a hate crime, but when six African-American kids (see, I learn) beat up a white kid, it's not. 

Come to think of it, why is it that white people are the only ones who can be designated by color? If you went out spouting about black, brown, yellow, or red people; the political correctness police would be string you up (metaphorically speaking, of course).  

When Republicans are accused of taking bribes, we are told that this simply proves that they are in the pocket of big business. When a Democrat is discovered to have a bundle of money in his freezer, those same people tell us not to make a rush to judgement.  

Why are we are told to switch our cars to Ethanol E85 in order to help the environment in spite of the fact that creating it produces more pollution than gasoline, that as a source of energy it has a net energy loss, and that it ruins most of the engines attempting to run it? (For those of you who didn't sit through endless math and science classes, a net energy loss means that the energy expended to grow the crop, process it into a usable fuel, and deliver it for use, is more energy than can be realized by burning it.)  

We are told that letting the president of Iran speak at Columbia University is a matter of free speech, but letting the head of the Minuteman or armed service recruiters speak on the same campus is not.  


See what I mean, pretty strange stuff. By the way, I did stay for a couple of beers that night in Canada; but I didn't make any real money then. It turns out that nobody wanted to take the Canadian money when I got back to the US. I pulled most of it out again recently though, and with the recent changes in the exchange rate ($1 to $1), have done rather well. ... Go figure