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Cash for Clunkers is the economic equivalent of eating sugar when you’re tired.

Sure, the car sales numbers for July and August will be great, but then what happens when the program is canceled on Monday? That’s the problem with government stimulus – it’s a temporary measure. What happens in September, October, November, and December, when all the people who wanted cars this year bought them with the Cash for Clunkers program and there’s no one left to buy cars?

Coming down off the sugar high…

The country needs the economic equivalent of a long-lasting energy bar.

Another point – there are numerous charities that take used cars from you and sell/give them to needy people. You get a tax deduction, and someone who needs a car gets a car. Won’t the charities be hurting for donations this year? I bet they have to restructure their operations because of the reduction in old cars.

Not only will the charities be hurting, but the needy people – the ones who can’t afford a new car – have just witnessed their transportation options being taken away. There were thousands of cars that were perfectly fine and could have helped families with getting to school or jobs, but the government just took all those cars and destroyed them for no good reason.

Okay, there were two reasons the government was doing this Cash for Clunkers thing: stimulate the economy by getting people to buy cars and improve the average gas mileage of the cars in America.

The first point worked, although the lasting effects have yet to be determined.

The second point is why the cars were destroyed. Okay, actually it was just the engines, but effectively that takes out the whole car. That was to prevent cars with low gas mileage from being driven, and that is supposed to combat global warming (and that is another topic for another blog post). Given how little effect that cars have in the global climate, and the fact that gas-fueled cars were just replaced with gas-fueled cars, how much effect will this really have on the environment?

My main question: is that really worth destroying the cars and making life more difficult for poor families? Would it really have hurt that much to distribute the cars to the needy? If you’re a politician who is not convinced of my point, just think of the photo-op and good press that would have got you: here is Senator So-And-So, seen giving a car to a father whose car was repossessed and he needs a car to drive to work so he can afford to feed his children.

Of course, maybe it’s just my innate sense of not being able to throw away things, especially things that are still working. Note to wife: socks with holes in the toe are still considered “working”.  Maybe destroy the cars with the worst gas mileage and give away the clunkers with decent gas mileage.  Surely some sort of compromise could have been effected.

Last note about Cash for Clunkers – I heard a radio news item that referred to the program as being popular. The evidence they gave for the popularity was that it ran out of money quickly. However, they way they said it put a different image in my mind.

I thought that the money could have disappeared quickly due to embezzlement, political favors, or any number of items not related to the purpose of the program. Just because the government spent the money quickly does not mean that it all went to the right people.

I thought it was rather nice of people to take pictures and put them onto Google maps so that I could see places of interest from angles other than what Google itself provides. Then I thought maybe I could return the favor by posting pictures of places that I have been.

So now I am the proud owner of a Panoramio account. Go view my photos. Click on the pictures you like. Leave comments if you want.

These are just scenery pictures – no family members or anything like that. The point is to show other people what they would see if they went to that place on the map.

There, now I have contributed positively to the internet. I am a team player.

We enrolled the kids in a Kids Bowl Free promotion, which entitles them to bowl up to two games per day for free (shoe rental not included). We paid extra (another $20 or so) for bowling for the adults too. So any day we want during the summer, we can go bowl and not pay any lanes fees.

Before this summer, I bowled rather infrequently, maybe once a year. We have gone bowling a couple times this summer, not a lot, but enough to get our money’s worth out of the deal. It had been a while since I had been in a bowling alley, and they added a new feature since I last bowled: speed readouts.

Now when you bowl, you get not only your score on the screen but also the speed at which you threw (or rolled or whatever) the ball.

Here’s a hint: don’t pay attention to the speed.

Unless maybe you’re trying to win a bet or something. Because, at least for me, speed and accuracy are inversely proportional. The faster I threw the ball, the fewer pins were hit. Here’s a good example. In this first picture, I was bowling normally, just aiming for the center pin and bowling at my normal speed.  I got a strike.

In this second picture, I was still aiming for the center pin, but I was also concentrating on throwing it as fast as I could.

I got a 1 and a gutter.  Not how you want to follow a strike.

How fast does a bowling ball go? My normal speed was 16-17 mph. I have no idea what a good bowling speed is. Is 17 mph a slowball? That was with a 16-lb ball. I topped out at 19 mph with a 13-lb ball.

And here’s a tip: always cut your thumbnail before going bowling. Because if you don’t, the ball will trim it for you.

In cooperation with LaanyKidsMom, here are some entries for this week.

• Quotes
  My 3-year-old has some fun misquotations. What made me smile this week was when, after a trip to the sand dunes, he told me “Your sands are all feety.”

  Another one of my favorites is when I drink something cold, he warns me that I could get “freeze brain“.

  Also, he doesn’t wear tank tops. He wears “none-sleeve shirts“.

  What else has brought me joy this week?

• More Quotes
  My 5-year-old was watching his cousin, who is about a year older than he is, play Mario Kart Wii. She was in last place, 12th, and my son offered her some encouragement: “It’s good to be in 12th place because then you get all the specials!”

  One more

• Finally Settling
  After playing Settlers of Catan with my brothers and brother-in-law a few times this week, I finally won a game! Since that was the last game we played during our vacation, I shall remain the defending champion for about two more years.

“How the city of praise has not been deserted,The town of My joy!”
– Jeremiah 49:25

A while back, I wrote about paper towels versus warm-air dryers in bathrooms, and how I much prefer paper towels.

I was in a public facility this past week, and I had the opportunity to experience using the XLERATOR® Hand Dryer. Normal hand dryers take way too long to dry my hands. I concede that the XLERATOR is efficient, but I almost couldn’t get my hands dry because I was too busy covering my ears with my hands. That thing is so loud that it is almost painful. I did feel like plugging my ears to block the noise. I suppose that it is a good thing that it dries hands so quickly, otherwise it might cause hearing damage.

I still vote for paper towels. Not only do they dry hands quickly, but also they are nearly silent.

“From the LORD of hosts you will be punished with thunder and earthquake and loud noise,With whirlwind and tempest and the flame of a consuming fire.”
– Isaiah 29:6

During one of the many interactions that occur on a family vacation, a relative had to apologize to me. I am keeping it vague, because I don’t remember which niece or nephew it was, or even what the infraction was.

Somebody did something innocuous such as run into me because he wasn’t watching where he was going, but that happens a lot when there are 13 mobile children in one house for a week. I didn’t think much of whatever happened, but that child’s father saw it and then told the child to apologize to me. The child apologized rather well, considering how some apologies can go, but I was momentarily (that’s for a moment, not in a moment) stymied about how to respond.

It shouldn’t be that hard to respond to an apology. My normal without-thinking reply is “That’s okay“. But just before I was going to say that, my brain stopped me. I couldn’t say that, because that phrase implies that the infraction was not worth an apology. “That’s okay” really means “You shouldn’t have bothered apologizing because I wasn’t bothered by what you did”, at least in my mind it does.

In this case it was true, but I wanted to reinforce the father’s lesson he was trying to teach his child. And I thought that “That’s okay” would undermine that lesson. In trying to help my relative, I had to abandon my casual response and actually had to think about what reply to give.

What I said at that point was “Thank you for apologizing“, but I think “I accept your apology” or “I forgive you” (not “That’s okay; I forgive you” but a simple “I forgive you”) would also work. I didn’t want to keep the child and father waiting too long for me to say something, so “Thank you” was it.

Also, “Apology accepted” and “You’re forgiven” are true, but less direct than they should be. They may have been fine for a while, but in today’s society of weasely apologies (“mistakes were made”) I think I’m leaning toward putting pronouns in there: I accept, I forgive. Maybe that will encourage pronouns (and active voice) in the apologies.

I heard a conversation today, and I will share part of it with you.

Person 1: “Do you have any more surprises coming up?”
Person 2: “No, none that we know about.”

Two things: Yes, they were serious and no, I was not one of the people.

I find that concept to be related to another popular concept at work, the “what don’t we know about this issue” concept. It’s too easy to answer “I don’t know” to that phrase, but after thinking about it for a second, I do know. It’s everything. Because there is an infinite amount of stuff that we don’t know, about any topic, so it could be a very long process to detail what is not known.