This past weekend, we went to the Demolition Derby in Spanish Fork. Rhett had a good time. I put together a bunch of the clips I took with my digital camera and threw on a commentary track. It’s hosted over at Apple’s site because I’m too lazy to put it elsewhere.
The local media in Utah has taken it upon themselves to incessently harp about gas prices in the region. Here’s the story being told:
The conclusion the media feeds to us is that Utah residents are being gouged. An all-out witch hunt has been started, even going so far as to call for state legislators to investigate the reason for the high prices. KSL called for a one-day “boycott”. Heck - even the governor has decided to start a probe into the prices.
The sensationalist media seems to prey on the uninformed public being too busy to actually look at the data and think for themselves.
Note in the chart above, that in March the Rocky Mountain region was paying less than the national average. Hmm… You will also notice that if you shift the price curve over a few weeks - you will see that the Rocky Mountain Region pretty well mirrors the national average, only it lags behind by a few weeks. When prices are increasing, this favors Utah - because people we will be paying two-week old prices… but when prices drop sharply in the national average, we pay more.
Why is this so hard to understand? Sure I don’t know exactly what CAUSES the lag in prices, but it’s pretty simple to see on the graph - if you allow for a 5% to 10% error it’s a pretty decent approximation.
Also notice this: Prices in the Rocky Mountain region (that contains utah) are dropping just as sharply as the national prices. (Funny side note: I’ve heard local media taking credit for this drop in Utah gas prices, saying such things as: “Yes, I know gas prices are down to 2.49 a gallon, but can you imagine where they would be if we didn’t bring so much attention to it?” (My guess - probably even lower. It seems the only thing the attention has done is curb a slight amount of demand which has, in turn, stretched out the lag time of gas prices in Utah because they can’t move their supply as quickly, and therefore they are stuck trying to sell off the old gas that they bought at two-week-ago prices for a longer period of time)
It’s conventient to go on a rant about how we are paying higher than the national average - but anyone who passed high school algebra should know that when you have an average in a population with any variance, you are going to have some values above the average and some values below it. That’s why it’s called an average.
In the above graph, the national average has little red triangles on it to make it easy to identify. From the above graph, you can see that a lot of regions are paying above the national average - and the West Coast (the top line) is worse of than the Rocky Mountain region.Note, some regions seem to overlap - which is what makes it look like there are more regions paying above the average than there are paying below it. I didn’t slice the country into regions, I just used ones that the government already had.
According to the logic of the media - only people living in the Lower Atlantic, Midwest, or Gulf Coast regions of the country are not being “gouged” by “evil oil barrons.”
If you are a member of the Utah media and are tempted to continue going off on this topic - please be aware that eventually the quiet thinking members of society will get fed up and expose you for the idiots you are. This is a non-issue. Go find someone abusing puppies or something to talk about, and stop wasting my time telling me how I’m being “taken advantage of” and showing clips of random people at gas stations answering the question: “Which do you feel: violated, or gang-raped by the big oil company that is stealing food from your starving children’s mouths?”
This blog entry is being written from 11,877 feet above sea-level and transmitted over the air via the magic of GPRS. (my phone has awesome signal from up here - probably because just about every cell phone tower in Utah Valley is within line-of-sight from here)
The hike up here is strenuous. The last few miles are definitely the hardest part of the hike. My butt hurts worse than a drunken sailor in san Francisco (they have uncomfortable bar stools over there)
There is another peak to the north of here that is slightly higher - up until 1970 this south peak was listed as the highest peak, but by then the trails already went up to here. If we really wanted to prolong this trip by a few hours, we could head over there, but I will save that trip for when I am actually in shape.
I’ll post some pictures later.
On tonight’s amazing race, the groups traveled to Utah. After a quick trip to Monument Valley, they traveled to Moab.
On the way there, the Weaver family managed to severely tick me off by constantly trashing on some of the most beautiful scenery in the world. (At one point, they also trashed on Mormons - what a low class family. The funny thing is - this group wonders why every other team hates them.)
In the most unbalanced detour ever, they had two options:
If you have to even think twice about that, you have never rappelled before. A 225 foot drop would probably take me no more than 30 seconds to rap down. A 6 mile bike ride in 30 seconds may be possible - if you bike 720 miles per hour - but it is not likely. (Biking faster than the speed of sound is not a likely possibility - unless you are Jason Graham)
After the detour, the teams traveled to Heber and talked to a bear. (How did they find that bear for the show? Strange) On the way there, the Weavel family continued trashing on Utah - this time by picking on the mountains.I think that slowly throughout the show, the Weaver family is making everyone in the country mad at them by trashing on their stomping grounds. If they haven’t trashed on areas you enjoy - don’t worry - they will.
I started laughing when I saw them take some route I’ve never heard of to try to get to Park City from Heber. They were thinking about taking 40, but they decided on some roundabout road. There was no way they could turn their car around because they were pulling a huge trailer. They will definitely be in last place because of that boneheaded mistake.
I’m still watching it - so I will update it when it is done. (this blog was brought to you by the power of the blackberry)
Update: The Weavel family was dead last, but unfortunately it was not an elimination round. In the discussion with the host, it almost sounded like they wanted to quit. I wished that they had - but they didn’t. One more week (at least) of this annoying white-trash family from Florida.
Today was the Primary Program for our ward. For those who are not familiar with this - it means that instead of having a regular meeting, we have a well-orchestrated presentation put on by the leaders of the children. It’s a lot of singing, and a lot of kids saying two or three lines at a time. Today I made several observations. First: Our primary is huge. Second: There are a lot of unusual names in our primary.
Before I say any more, I should point out that I did in fact enjoy the primary program. It was a well put together program run by a very on-the-ball primary organization.
Since the program had the names of all the kids in the different classes printed, it was easy for me to figure out just HOW huge our primary is. I created a histogram while I was in Sacrament, but this one from Microsoft Excel looks a little bit sharper. I also counted how many unusual names there were and calculated the percentage of unusual names. It was a smaller percent than I would have expected - but I guess it goes to show that strange names just jump out at you. Here is the breakdown by age, and strange names. Add the two numbers together to get the total number of kids in that age group.
Totals: 124 kids, 30 strange names (25% of our kids have strange names)
1997 seems to be a significant year for our ward. The number of kids per-year more than doubled that year, and has remained that high ever since. (At least judging from these data.) There could, of course, be some kind of deathmatch that our primary has every year at the end of the eighth year where half of the kids are killed - that could also explain the sudden dip in numbers.
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