Month: February 2007

Due Diligence

I went to a couple sites to find some perspective into average home size in the United States to possibly shed some light on the concerns regarding Al Gore's electrical bill.

Google Answers responded to a question about average home size in 2002. The average U.S. home size in 2001 was 2,300 square feet. I realize this is five years ago, but it takes some time for the majority of the country to upgrade the size of their homes, so I would suspect the 2006 number to still be below 3,000. Google Answers also listed their sources for determining the answer.

Green vs. Machine

I actually escaped chatter about Bald Britney and Deceased Anna Nicole for a whole five minutes, and heard about something that may have some relevance to something else. It was difficult, but it actually happened.

Some no-name right wing group attacked Al Gore over his electricity bills, saying they are 50% higher than the national average.

Yet they don't say how Al Gore lives in a 10,000 square foot house. I could count on one hand (with fingers to spare) the number of people I know personally (do mySpace friends count? cus' I haven't been to too many of their homes) that live in such homes.

I think this blog is too small for the smear machine to try to extract from my brain all the people I know personally to cross-reference their names in some super computer that will match this info up with their property tax bills and compute the square footages (footages? feetages? overall square footage was better, but this sentence was on a roll like I haven't had in awhile, so let's get back to it, shall we?) of their homes just to get to the number six and call me a liar. I doubt they would do their due diligence to be certain I don't have six fingers on my hand, because a bell curve would probably show that the likelihood of me having five fingers on the other hand would fall within two standard deviations.

I am not going to do my due diligence, cause I'm sensing the inherit truthiness in claiming that Al Gore's home is at least 70% larger than the national average. Elementary school students could make the clear determination, that indeed, even while making steps to ceonserve energy, Mr. Gore would still have a bill much higher than the national average.

Can he not be an advocate for green energy because of this? Rush Limbaugh apparently believes environmentalists want to downsize the American lifestyle. If Rush makes a claim that Gore should live in a smaller home, he would contradict himself? Walking contradiction occasionally do such things, by the way. I'm just sayin' is all.

I'm pretty sure Rush doesn't live in a glass house.

And, I'm just wondering, are our electric bills public knowledge?

Blogs I've read reporting on this include:

The Anonymous Liberal

Seeing the Forest

Crooks & Liars

Minimum Wage, Minimum Hours

It's tough enough trying to make a living on retail wages. It's despicable to see how many places shave employee hours. Yet somehow I'm not surprised to see Wal-Mart in the list of offenders. And that they even had a name for the “one-minute clock-out”. It makes you think it was a known moniker for a shady practice, one of those shady practices that continues until there's lawsuits and wrist slapping.

A New Month

How many times did you hear “I can't believe it's February already” today?

How many of these people already derailed from their diet, and have written off that New Year's resolution already? I don't know. I bet quite a few, but Vegas is busy with Super Bowl odds right now, so they're not takin my money.

Wow! I think I found an answer and it was similar to my expectations. Although the CNN article is three years old, I wonder if the percentages have changed very much.

The last two paragraphs have nothing to do with January's quick cup of coffee and back to wherever January goes for the next eleven months. January is possibly the Monday morning of the year. A month in which many continuously check e-mail, linger longer at the coffee pot or watercooler, listening to voice mails, all the while still rubbing the sleep out of their eyes, wishing for the warmth and comfort of their comforters.

I've actually been quite busy this January, and mostly if not completely in a good way. Perhaps it's a bellwether for my year. Or perhaps it's just happy happenstance.

February 2nd must be the day that the Groundhog realizes it's the end of the elongated Monday, peeks out of its hole, and wonders where January went. Sometimes he looks around for it a little bit, sometimes it goes back to sleep until Wednesday, when nobody gives a fuck about what it does.

This just in. (An article that is only one year old.) February 3rd is the date the average dieter gives up. Those struggling need to hang in just another 48 hours to break the curve. But you might not want to stop there if you'd like to reach your goal.