Veritable Smorgasbord

So apparently the government was a little too generous with its "Cash For Clunkers" program, in that it created an incentive great enough ($4500), that within two days the entire program's $1 billion budget was exhausted. I may not be good at math, but I think that's something like a little over 222,000 cars bought in two days.
I want to ignore the economics of this and focus on the less obvious: our roads are dominated by awful, embarassing cars. In order to qualify for this government subsidy, the car you are trading in must be a guzzling old hunk of junk, getting an abysmal 18 mpg or less.

So I find it scary that not only were there 222,222 of these cars on the road to be traded in, but worse yet, that's only a tiny fraction of the qualified vehicles in America. Are we so horrendously culturally and environmentally irresponsible?

In other news, I am currently eating a "Fuji" apple. Apparently "Fuji" means that during the apple growing process, the farmer sprinkled the glowing green worms from James and the Giant Peach, because this apple is about the size of a grapefruit. The fruit is delicious, the color lovely. But it's just scary huge. And since apples are bought by the pound and not by the quantity, this apple cost me about $3 bucks. $3 for a giant mutant apple.

In other other news, I happened to click on the msnbc.com live feed just in time to watch the shuttle land safely. Pretty neat trick, considering from the time it enters our atmosphere to the time it lands in the Cape, it's essentially a powerless glider, and the pilot only has one chance to land safely. I need to make sure I sit The Abstracted Daughter down and make her watch the next couple shuttle launches...as I've mentioned before, we're at the end of an era.

In other other other news ( I swear this is the last tidbit), human scientists have determined that mammals are better at evolution than reptiles. In other news, lizard people around the world bashed the scientists, calling their research "pro-mammal" and "warm-blood biased".


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