Thursday, September 15, 2011

Guzzle Guzzle

Currently, the American George Washington Dollar Bill is worth 42 cents in Canadian currency, so keep that in mind folks. The world has finally realized that America is a debtor's nation and we've been printing money since 1950 like it was toilet paper without any value to it. It's like buying a car on a credit card and then paying the monthly payments with another credit card. And when that CC is due then you get another credit card. Finally, some genius like the loathsome Lou Pai or Kenneth Lay thinks, "Hell, why don't we go into business making credit cards...that way we will always have credit." So, I feel we're all driving around in unowned (not preowned) vehicles that never get paid for and the debt is more than 100 generations could pay off and Obama and his men are all trying to figure out where the credit card business guys went (to jail) because the Chinese are licking their chops and buying drought land at fire sale prices. We've got mailmen in Los Angeles making $65,000/yr. Wonder why the post office is broke? Fucking inflated housing values in cities courtesy of crooked mortgage brokers and financial planners. Teamsters are right to raid the bank while the bank is still open. If you don't have your hand in the piggy jar then you are totally clueless how America is run. It's a land of Pharaohs and slaves. Oggy has been on a debt free economic system since day one. He might be the richest man in North America but don't worry, he won't break his arm patting himself on the back. God, I sound like a right wing talk radio asshole.


...this tank of go juice hurt big time. I'm going to end up pushing the van back to Maine. Or hooking up dogs to the front. I had already put in $20 a day earlier...

The slice of pizza was forgettable and too expensive and, as Woody Allen says, not big enough. "Donairs" is Canuck for "Gyros".


Corner Brook has a few more pizza places to sample and since the tropical storms may have sent the freighter with my vacuum modulator off course into the Gulf of St. Lawrence, I have to wait for its arrival. I don't know when it will get here and the Canadian Tire parts people are clueless 14 days is too long and still no part. I should not have ordered it to the island but should have called a Canadian Tire place in Nova Scotia, where the shipment might've gone over land and also because it would take me longer to get there. Now I am stuck here waiting arrival. Also, the right part might not even come. The parts guy might have ordered the wrong part. The part might be defective to begin with. And if it is the right part and not defective it still might not fix the problem I have with the shifting into higher gear. That's a lot of questions and I regret ordering it at all with inflated Canadian prices and many ways this could go wrong. But what is done is done and I'm tired of driving and I found a nice library here and the girls at the Grenfell College are all wearing skinny jeans and the campus swimming pool locker rooms have free showers and I found a parking lot where I can park at night in quiet anonymity and overlook the Humber River as I play scales and knit hats (I remembered my plan to knit hats to sell on the street!)

I guess I'll wait for a week or until the Royal Mounted Police tell me to get out of town. If I had not already been forced to pay for the part then I would simply leave. But I've paid for it and I need it and it might as well be over and done with here. It was very hard camping in Gros Morne as the locals all make their money selling $30 parking spaces so there was nowhere to park for the night. I understand their situation, but I didn't crimp 500000 pins onto a million wires so I could pay for a place to park and shit. That's what gas stations are for.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Over $5/gallon. That is how they pay for health care. Which I would gladly pay. How does the diesel compare?
WeRo

Anonymous said...

$5/gallon isn't as expensive as it used to be.

Oggy Bleacher said...

Diesel is one penny/liter more expensive here.

This is the cheapest I've paid. $1.39 a liter. The most I paid was $1.90. Around Corner Brook it is currently $1.33. I think if you multiply by 4 you get US rates. I prefer to simply pay and not think about it since the moral algebra for this expense is hard to quantify. In a small car or motorcycle you can do this Atlantic loop in less than a week if you didn't stop to shake hands or fix your exhaust or get an eye infection...
But you would also be either car camping (unloading a soaking tent to a gravel ditch near a hospital) or paying $30 a night for provincial park camping where you would unload your tent to a gravel ditch. So, my miniature RV is my home on wheels and gets 16 mpg tops. But I've been here 5 months and seldom paid for campgrounds so it all comes down to your plans or lack of plans. If you want to do this trip in 2 weeks then drive the smallest and most efficient car around and pay for hotels or campgrounds. DO NOT DRIVE AN RV. But if you want to spend 5 months here and play guitar and read in comfort then you'll need (I needed) something more spacious.

It doesn't matter since the days of solo cross country driving with dead plant fuel are fast ending. Hybrids will dominate the next decade.

Most people here drive 8 cylinder trucks. Very few efficient cars. They aren't much good in the snow. But I found it odd that in Churchill falls, a place with reliable power as long as iron can be refined somewhere on the planet to make replacement transformers and as long as water flows through the river, all the vehicles were gas powered. There are hybrid trucks and SUVs out there but not in the one place where it would make sense to have them since you can plug them in everywhere. Any thoughts on this discrepancy?

But a financial justification for car use is futile because it doesn't consider oil spills and ecosystem damage and moose collisions. It's not a fair calculation.

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Man in the Van by Oggy Bleacher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.