Five months ago, I had to pay $4.55 per gallon for regular unleaded at the local Valero gasoline station. At the time, gasoline prices were just 10% away from hitting the $5.00 per gallon mark. So, if I was offered a bet on whether gasoline prices would be over $5.00 or under $2.50 in five months, guess which way I would have wagered? However, here we are in the middle of November and regular unleaded is $2.35 per gallon. So, what does this all mean?
Right now, I am not sure. Was it oil speculators that previously drove up the price of gasoline? Or, is the economy that badly off to dry up demand for gasoline? In some parts of the Bay Area, the signs of the real estate deflation are obvious. However, in other cities, housing prices remain pricey. I always thought demand for gasoline was relatively inelastic. Everyone has to drive, right? However, if the demand for gasoline is true off kilter, then we are all headed for trouble times, regardless of which neighborhood we live in.
Joining a rapidly growing list of technology companies reeling from the financial turmoil, Sun Microsystems, which sells server computers, has started a broad restructuring that could see up to 6,000 employees lose their jobs.
I spotted the above article earlier this morning and it just struck me as being off base. Sure, you can connect the layoffs at Sun Microsystems with the sub-prime mortgage crisis. However, while the financial implosion and the Sun layoffs are occurring at roughly the same time, any connection is coincidental rather than causational. Sun was on the list of reeling technology companies long before the sub-prime crisis hit. Now, if Google or Apple announced layoffs of the magnitude that Sun announced…
In Who Murdered China’s Emperor 100 Years Ago?, scientists revealed that Emperor Guangxu died of acute arsenic poisoning. Although Guangxu’s death cleared the way for his famed successor, Puyi, to ascend to the throne, Puyi abdicated three years later.
The 99 Ranch Market in Mountain View is finally open. I visited the store on Saturday to check it out. This new Asian supermarket is conveniently located on 1350 Grant Road, just off El Camino Real, with easy access to highways 237 and 85. For those people living in Mountain View, Los Altos, and Palo Alto, switching over to the Mountain View 99 Ranch Market (from the Cupertino location) will save you about 7 miles of driving each way.
I found the Mountain View 99 Ranch Market to be the cleanest 99 Ranch Market I have visited, but maybe that is just because it is the newest. Only time will tell. I also found the store to be absolutely cold. Maybe they’re still working out the kinks in their air-conditioning system, but the entire store was down right frosty (in temperature only). Finally, I found the store to be well-stocked. For example, the previous weekend, I couldn’t find Gold Plum Chinkiang vinegar at the Cupertino 99 Ranch Market. That happens on occasion when all the store has in stock is the Asian Taste brand. However, the Mountain View store was fully stocked. Again, this may just be a new store issue where the managers wanted to leave a positive impression and made a concerted effort to have everything in stock. Anyways, I walked away with a week’s work of groceries and a positive impression. For now, the Mountain View store is just a place to buy groceries and drive off. It remains to be see whether Asian restaurants will fill in around the supermarket, like at the other 99 Ranch supermarkets, to provide a broader ranger of Asian goods and services.
Is Proposition 8 a civil rights issue? The supporters of Proposition 8 would claim otherwise. Allowing blacks and whites to marry is one thing. However, allowing two men or two women to marry is another. Their argument is that the purpose of marriage is to propagate the human race. That’s why allowing gays to marry is different from allowing people of different races to marry. However, a look back in history reveals that the same arguments against gay marriage were also used to ban interracial marriage:
It is stated as a well authenticated fact that if the issue of a black man and a white woman, and a white man and a black woman intermarry, they cannot possibly have any progeny, and such a fact sufficiently justifies those laws which forbid the intermarriage of blacks and whites, laying out of view other sufficient grounds for such enactments.
I suspect that if this was 1948 instead of 2008, the same people supporting Proposition 8 would be advocating for the prohibition of interracial marriage.
I just finished watching Wayne Wang’s The Princess of Nebraska on YouTube. A few hours ago, I had just read that the movie was being released for free on YouTube. Without reading any reviews (or spoilers), I headed off to YouTube to track down the film. You won’t find a light-hearted tale of overachieving Chinese Americans (like from the Joy Luck Club) in this movie. Be warned. This is not a movie to see with the kids to learn about Chinese culture.
I thought that today would be a good day to change the windshield wipers. We already had experienced an early bout of rain a week or so ago, so I didn’t want to be caught again with streaky wipes. So, I headed to the local Kragen Auto Parts to pick up some replacement wipers. At first, I picked up some Bosch windshield wipers and took them outside the store for sizing. The 17″ Bosch wipers were the exact size. However, when I returned to the store, I noticed that they only had one in stock. That wouldn’t do. So, I picked up a pair of Trico 17″ windshield wipers and headed outside to install them. However, when I removed the old wipers, I discovered that the Trico 17″ wipers were short. Glad I tried to install this in the Kragen parking lot this morning instead of waiting until I returned home after work. So, I went back into the store, returned the Trico 17″ wipers and purchased a pair of Trico 19″ wipers. How is it that the 17″ wipers on one brand would be the same length as the 19″ wipers on another? I don’t get it.
The Asian Art Museum is hosting a special exhibition entitled Power and Glory: Court Arts of China’s Ming Dynasty from June 27-September 21, 2008. Fortunately, Target sponsors a Free First Sundays program that opens admission to the museum for free on the first Sunday of every month. This past Sunday being a “first Sunday,” I headed to San Francisco to see what Ming treasures the museum had in store. I arrived shortly before 10 a.m., which is opening time, and discovered a line that literally wrapped around the museum. You would think that they were selling the beloved iPhone 3G at the gift store or something.
Well, San Francisco being San Francisco, the weather was overcast, cold and windy in the middle of summer. As we entered the museum (about an hour later), we were given tickets that indicated our assigned time for viewing the Ming exhibits. After some more waiting inside the museum, we finally entered the first room at around 11:20 a.m. An hour and 20 minute wait! The Ming art is distributed among 3 exhibit halls on the first floor of the museum. As we proceeded from hall to hall, we had to wait in a new line. Some lines were longer than others.
If you are visiting with a large group, you will save a few bucks by attending the Free Sunday event. However, the experience is sub-optimal from the long lines to the crowded exhibit halls. If you really want to see everything, you need to be patient because each exhibit probably had 10 or so people around it. People packed around the exhibits. More people streaming in. Not quite the quiet and leisurely pace typically found in museums. I don’t know if the museum is less crowded when they charge admission. I should have asked, but was a bit too frazzled from the whole visit.
Yahoo! / Reuters: U.S. “Outraged” by Myanmar’s Response to Cyclone. The United Nations estimates 1.5 million people have been “severely affected” by the cyclone that swept through Myanmar and the United States expressed outrage on Thursday at the delays in allowing in aid.
“It’s clear that the government’s ability to deal with the situation, which is catastrophic, is limited.”
5 points if you guess correctly whether the person speaking was talking about the U.S. response to Hurricane Katrina or the Burmese response to Cyclone Nargis.
The sky is falling! As if $4.00/gallon wasn’t bad enough, we now have food rationing. In America! At Costco!! The local store of abundance in the land of plenty ran out of rice this afternoon. Just a lonely note standing guard over two empty pallets. Although the store had no jasmine or calrose rice, it had plenty of basmati rice on hand. I spotted a customer with three bags of basmati in his shopping cart, perhaps in anticipation of the contagion spreading to the next pallet over.
