MY APOLOGIES: Rusty over at Solarvoid points out that I spend a good deal of time here at The Passing Parade apologizing for not posting more often. In fact, if you made a study of this sort of thing, and I don’t see why you shouldn’t—if the government is prepared to pay for photographs of Jesus submerged in a bottle of day old piss then they’ll certainly finance something as silly as this—my guess is that if I spent more time not apologizing for not posting and used the time to post, I wouldn’t have to apologize so often for not posting or for trying to figure out why there are no black Amish people. Obviously, this is not a problem that many people will devote much time pondering, but it does make me wonder sometimes.

Another thing I wonder about is the ethanol in my gasoline. I don’t know why I am paying so much more for my gasoline when 10% of what I buy isn’t gasoline at all, it’s extortion money for the agribusiness lobby. The government ought to scrap this regulation, and the sooner the better, or if they are all so hell-fired insistent that we put ethanol in our gas tanks then the least they could do is supply the ethanol and the beer nuts so the public can mix their own fuel. Providing a tax break for those people who want their fuel complete with the big chunks of pineapple, a maraschino cherry, and that silly little paper umbrella is purely optional at this point, but with enough political support and a big press campaign it could happen; anything is possible, and the shift would pump a lot of money into Scotland’s economy while touching off long-dormant debates about whether you can get better highway mileage from a single malt Scotch whiskey or from a single grain whiskey, which has a higher octane, or whether you should avoid this debate altogether and buy a good American bourbon instead. As a corollary to this, no one ever bothered to answer my query about whether or not having all that ethanol in my gas tank is really such a good idea in the first place. A 10% ethanol level seems pretty high to me and I would just as soon not have a New York State trooper stopping me on some lonely stretch of the Thruway some rainy night and impounding the car because it was out partying all night with his friends and got caught driving home under the influence.