Six months’ post office box fee: $29. When I first opened the box in late 2001, the fee was $19. That’s about a 50% increase in less than seven years, and further proof that the cost of everything is rising faster than wages.
Filed under: Cost of Living, Current Events on July 3rd, 2008 | No Comments »
Eight summers ago milk was $2.99/gallon; gasoline was less than $1.50/gallon. As prices for gas have steadily climbed since 2001, I imagined there would be a point at which milk would cost less than gas. In fact, I thought that $4.00 would be that threshold. Not so: milk is now $4.25.
Filed under: Cost of Living, Food on June 8th, 2008 | 1 Comment »
Prices for oil took their biggest leap ever today, to $138.54. Gas is already well over $4/gallon at most stations in Gainesville; $25 put only a half a tank in our Beetle a few nights ago. These high fuel prices are making everything we buy more expensive.
I have no proof, but I am making a prediction: these high oil prices are a scandal waiting to be uncovered, quite like the high energy prices in California in 2000.
Filed under: Cost of Living, Current Events on June 6th, 2008 | 1 Comment »
Today is Miriam’s birthday, and although I want it to be the most super-special day ever, the reality is that she and I are both at work. On this date in previous years we have been in Venice (2001) or Miami (2006), or even in honeymoon bliss. It’s a sorry testament to the weak Dollar ($.64 to the euro) and the unprecedented high price of gasoline ($4.01 in Gainesville this morning) that we are unable to make as many pleasure trips on our own dime. Miriam’s work, fortunately, is making up the difference, and later this month we’ll be in Chicago for a few days. Later this year we may go to South Carolina and Washington, D.C.
On the plus side, however, we are among the very fortunate who have been unaffected by the housing crisis, or the recent budget cuts at the University of Florida that have cost many their jobs. We can still afford to have dinner out with friends and if I wanted to I could probably have the good root beer that comes in glass bottles.
So, Angel, happy birthday. I promise that on some future birthday I’ll give you a kiss atop the Arc de Triomphe.
Filed under: Cost of Living, Special Occasions, Travel on June 2nd, 2008 | 1 Comment »
A three-panel painting by Francis Bacon (not the philosopher, unfortunately) entitled Tryptich, 1976, has sold at auction for over $86 million. Although I certainly know what I like and what I don’t, I can’t claim to be an art expert by any means. I’d love to hear from someone who is an expert who can defend such an astonishing price for what I consider a completely underwhelming painting.
Maybe I just need more education. I recognize that the more you learn the more you can appreciate things that once appeared to make no sense. And I am apt to defend abstract music that others may call noise. Towards the end of the semester, as I was leaving a class in the Music Building, there were a hundred identical metronomes set up on a brick wall, all clicking away at different tempi. It was György Ligeti’s Poème Symphonique. There are no actual instruments, and, by its very nature the music has a huge degree of unpredictability and every “performance” will be different; the metronomes swing back and forth until they stop, at different times depending on how much they were wound. I wouldn’t compare it to the Missa Solemnis, but for what it is it’s okay.
Of course, nobody can put a price on a hundred clicking metronomes. And if they could, it wouldn’t be $86 million.
Filed under: Art, Cost of Living, Music, Musings, School on May 15th, 2008 | 1 Comment »