Category: Rant

Highways, East coast vs. West

There are 2 things about the highway system on the east coast that I wish California would emulate:

  1. East coasters number the exits. It is REALLY convenient, it lets you know if you are going in the right direction and how far you have to go
  2. East coasters mark all of their highways with directions (GA400 North and GA400
    South). In California we have this ridiculous notion that many are marked with
    landmarks – CA163 to Downtown and CA163 to Escondido (instead of south and north)

Seriously??

I know I am not one to talk, but there are just certain people – people that we should take seriously – whose names make me laugh… Charles Quackenbush, Bruce Babbit (not Bobbit – nobody ever took them seriously) and my third grade teacher, Mrs. Onderdonk.

Speaking of taking themselves seriously, how can Rush Limbaugh wake up and look in the mirror and take himself seriously? Does he really swallow all of the cow dung that he spews? Just wondering…

Rant of the day

OJ SimpsonElian Gonzales GO HOME!! This incident has now officially claimed the second spot from the Ramsey’s for the most annoying overplayed TV specter of the week. First place still, and probably always, belongs to Orenthal.

A great quote from the Onion…
dude from the Onion
The Elian Gonzales situation has sparked much controversy. What do you think of this situation?

"First those immigrants come and take our houses and our jobs and now they want to come take our immigrants?? Well I say that we just send them all back to… wait, what was the question?"

Pollen

Regarding the stock market, why is everyone surprised that companies that make no money, have no plan to make money and have no idea how they could make money who are shoveling money into large flaming bonfires stock’s are getting hit. What is the big mystery here??

I was doing my best to not comment on this because it really is pretty silly. How many people have seen the billboard for Gazoontite.com on 101 North a little ways past SFO? For those of you that don’t have the fortune of leaving ’round here or for those of you that do have the fortune of not having to drive on 101 – the billboard has a big display that says: “Pollen count: XX%” where XX is always above 80. Now let me ask you, what the hell does that mean?? Pollen is typically measured in grains per cubic meter not as a percentage.

According to pollen.com “Pollen grains average between 20 to 40 micrometers in size”. Let’s take 30 micrometers as average. Assuming that pollen is cubical with 30 micrometers on each axis, this means that each grain of pollen is 27*10-15 m3 in volume. This means that you could fill one cubic meter with about 4*1013 grains of pollen, this is what they must mean by 100% pollen count. An 88% pollen count would then be 3.5*1013 grains/m3.

I did a little poking around on the web and found the AAAAI who is a semi-official pollen measurement authority. The nearest station they had was for San Jose. The measurements they had for today was: Trees: 479, Grasses:7, Weeds: 4, Molds: 1958. All numbers are given in grains per cubic meter. This gives us a pollen count of 2448 grains/m3 in San Jose.

This means that the pollen count in San Jose is 2448 grains per cubic meter and the count 35 miles to the north is 35 TRILLION grains cubic meter. Gazoontite.com is reporting a 14 MILLION percent increase in pollen over the course of 35 miles!

Before you say anything – yes, I realize that this is a stupid thing to get worked up over and I know that the board is not actually measuring the pollen count in the air…