RyeBlog

I know, the weather is starting to get colder and sandal days seem a thing of the past, but maybe if you start on a pair of these now they will be finished by spring.

Sock monkeys are one thing when they are creatively made from a pair of socks and represent a toy of some sort. When you start to create hats that look like a sock trying to be a monkey, that’s where I would draw the line.

Just in time for Halloween, here is a wig for any one who wants to go as a gum drop or a Lego with colored hair.

I’m holding out for knitted hub caps. Fuzzy ones.

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:

• Gas prices around the country are dropping precipitously
• Utah gas prices are dropping slowly
• Utahns are paying 20 to 30 cents more per gallon than the rest of the country

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.

Look at the data for yourself

The sensationalist media seems to prey on the uninformed public being too busy to actually look at the data and think for themselves.

One Simple Explanation: Utah prices lag the national average by a few weeks

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 not just Utah

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.”

In Conclusion

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?”

What else would you really wear when you are grilling in the chilly fall months? A sweatshirt? That is so last year . . .

Uh, the UKTOTW took a little break there at the end of summer, due to laziness being busy. With colder weather coming in now there are more Ugly Knitted Things than ever, and that means more pictures for UKTOTW to share.

Here are the much anticipated Parts II and III of the UKTOTW Pet Clothing Line - The Cat MuuMuu and the Guinea Dress

The cat muumuu is for all those “big boned” cats that want to hide a little of the pudge they’re been accumulating beneath their fluff. With a drawstring waist, it can be expanded to accomadate even the laziest of cats.

The cutesy guinea pig dress reminds me of a phrase . . now let me thing of how it goes . . oh yeah, it’s something like, “You can dress them up, but you can’t make them cute.”

I have a little map down in my sidebar that puts red dots for all of my visitors. Sure, my blog has been rather dead recently - but I have a backlock of about five hundred articles that Google seems to love… and as a result I get lots of visitors on a daily basis. (200+ a day is usual)

Google loves me so much that it will send people to me when they search for crap that isn’t even on my blog! (I can’t tell you the last time I posted a PayPal coupon code - but probably twenty people a day come here from Google looking for them… Sorry to let you down folks… Don’t blame me - Blame Google!)

Yes, I have analytics tracking and I have a good idea of how many visitors I get each day… etc. - but ClustrMaps really seems to think I get a ton of visitors:

Here’s a verbatim copy of an email I just got from them:

Dear ClustrMaps user,

Although we do not want to monitor the ClustrMaps service too heavily, we have noticed that the number of visits per day logged on your site http://ryebrye.com/blog/ by our counter recently was 33970, which exceeds the normal daily allowed limit of 2500.

We try to treat the limit in a very lenient fashion, especially given that there can be local peaks or spikes in internet traffic. However, for anyone going over that limit on a fairly consistent basis, we send out this message.

If it helps put things in perspective: I don’t get even get 33970 visitors in a month - let alone a day… I think they are on crack.

Nuked Soap - video powered by Metacafe

This is another video where the commentary may actually be better than the video itself.