OK, I drive a car with a big V8. I used every aerosol can I could find, even when forced to buy them at discount stores when regular stores quit carrying them. Charcoal grills, outdoor fire pits, indoor fireplaces, if it’s not 80 degrees on the weekend I’m burning something. I do this because I have been promised that it will cause global warming. I like warm weather and if it were a few degrees warmer every day I’d be a little happier. But despite all of my hard work to bring about global warming, the temperatures over the New Year’s holiday never got above freezing. This is the South, for goodness sake. It’s supposed to be hot in the summer and cool to cold in the winter, but not frigid. We’re supposed to have a couple of cold days a year where it drops into the low 20s or teens, but warms up to 50 or so during the day.
If this global warming doesn’t kick in soon I’m going to give up and buy a Prius.
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I agree with just about everyone in the area, with the exception of the seven members of the Central North Carolina Airport Authority, that the new name for the airport is terrible.
But we can call the airport anything we want. The official name is the CNCIA, but I don’t think I’ve ever referred to the CNCIA in conversation as the Piedmont Triad International Airport and I don’t plan on calling it the Central North Carolina International Airport. I have always called it the Greensboro airport and will continue to do so.
But the official name is never going to be the Greensboro airport because the Central North Carolina Airport Authority is made up of members appointed by High Point, Winston-Salem and Forsyth County as well as Greensboro and Guilford County. There is about as much a chance of getting the CNCIA named the Greensboro airport as getting Winston-Salem to change its name to West Greensboro or High Point to request that it be annexed by Greensboro.
It simply is not going to happen. It is unfortunate that the CNCIA authority wasted its time on coming up with a new name that is no better, and arguably much worse, than the old name, which didn’t mean anything either.
There is a lesson to be learned in all of this and that is, although “authorities” sound like a good idea – for instance people have talked about a municipal solid waste authority to get politics out of the garbage business – once an authority is established it is autonomous. It, in fact, reports to no higher authority, and as long as it doesn’t violate the law, it can do whatever it wants.
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The holidays are generally tough on the news business because there isn’t much news. Elected bodies, courts and most of the government is closed down, which means they aren’t causing problems and creating news. Even President Donald Trump slowed down on his tweeting.
So news agencies are out searching for anything that can be considered news, and sometimes the results are hard to comprehend unless you consider that newspapers can’t print papers with blank pages and radio news shows can’t have dead air. Having acknowledged the difficulty, the BBC gets my award for the most inane news story of the New Year. One of the featured stories by the BBC on Tuesday morning was on blind massage therapists in South Korea. I don’t know about you, but the plight of blind massage therapists in South Korea is not high on my list of concerns. I have no doubt that some of the blind massage therapists in South Korea are fine upstanding citizens and some are not, just like any other group of people in the world.
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Trump went after the US Postal Service in a tweet questioning why the Postal Service that loses money was delivering packages for Amazon at a loss. I don’t know the cost of delivering packages, but I do know that the vast majority of the mail we receive at our house is junk mail. It is not mail that is specifically for me or my wife, it is advertising sent to the house.
I have a vested interest in being critical of direct mail advertising since it competes with newspaper advertising, so I admit I have a bias. But if the post office is losing money, why doesn’t it raise the rates for junk mail? Most people don’t want it and throw it away as quickly as they can get to the recycling container.
I heard a political analyst say that he figured that when they sent out a direct mail political advertising piece, they had to get the message across in the time it took someone to pick up the mail and dump it in recycling. He said if the message from the piece wasn’t delivered in three seconds, they considered it a loss. Whether you liked or hated Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan, it met the criteria.
The post office should definitely stop Saturday mail delivery. In today’s world anything time sensitive is sent by email or text.
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With the clear skies and a full moon Tuesday night, it was bright enough to walk around without a flashlight, but I couldn’t help but wonder if anyone of my generation could do it without “Moonshadow” by Cat Stevens running through their head. I know I couldn’t.
