Let's Fight About It Again!

I have already seen the legal drinking age change twice in my life (in 1972 and 1984) and lived through two sets of "debates" on the issue. Here comes the third debate and I'm hoping I'm cremated and buried next to the drainpipe at the church (I like to swim) before I endure another.

Like a couple who aren't happy if they aren't fighting, the College liberals have decided to take on the Reformer liberals at M.A.D.D. about letting kids drink again at 18. It is called the the Amethyst Initiative. College Presidents who sign the initiative agree it is time for a debate on the legal age to drink. Only debate, mind you. No one says they are actually for it. Being an invertebrate is a job requirement for College Presidents.

Mindful of their dignity, they couldn't just name it something plebeian like D.R.I.N.K.U.P. They had to link it to Greek Mythology. A nice girl named Amethyst was out drinking with Dionysus. This was not a good idea because he always gets amorous when he's in his cups. Just as he was reaching for Amethyst's cups, Diana turned her into a white stone. Diana always was "helping" young girls in this manner because she hated the competition. Dionysus spilled some wine on the White rock and all the rock's progeny became cheap gemstones.

Most Greek scientists like Aristotle and were either philosophical about mythology's warped logic or they were stoic and kept their mouths shut. That's why today we study about the Philosopher-Scientists and Stoics in school.

Geeze, I'm rattling on like Dionysus on his third wine cooler here.

The Amethyst people blame the current law as the cause of binge drinking. The M.A.D.D. people blame the College Presidents for "shirking their responsibility to protect students from the dangers of underage drinking". What are the poor Presidents supposed to do? Throw themselves in front of the beer wagon?

M.A.D.D. thinks that schools should start teaching about the evils of drink in the 4th grade. Here in Valdosta we have these programs already. Young children learn to get shirty with their Dad for having a martini before dinner. Dad unlearns them real quick, you betcha.

Amethyst links over to the parent website "Choose Reponsibility" where they propose that young people aged 19 and 20 should be required to take courses to obtain a "Licence To Drink". Talk about peer pressure. How could you face your peers after having flunked the drinking test?

I hate to be profane here, but my God in Heaven, when you gave people Free Will couldn't you have put them through a licencing process first so they wouldn't make such asses of themselves?

Before the temperance movement took away our innocence, kids used to drink with their parents when their parents thought they were old enough to drink. Everyone was comfortably unaware that there was a binge drinking problem because everyone was drunk. Kind of like Adam and Eve being happily and oblivously trashed in the Garden of Evil until Carrie A. Nation slithered into the place and started smashing all the bar furniture.

Kids today come to college out of a hermetically sealed enviroment called home where they can't have sex in the bedroom when they want, can't stay out all hours, can't get drunk in the living room, and have to take out the trash. After so many years of this brutal parental oppression, they escape to college and go wack-a-doodle. It dawns on them in their Junior year that the party ends when they graduate so, they start piercing and tattoing themselves silly. Pitiful. You'd get drunk, too.

The answer is to let people in college drink legally in a safe enviroment. This can be done now with no changes in laws and no classes, or licencing, or idiotic debates, or, horrors! -- draconian enforcment of the laws. The solution is found in the Federal Law in plain sight.

When I first picked up the law and found that underage drinking was allowed "when accompanied by a parent, spouse or legal guardian age 21 or older" I thought I had found the answer. Then my wife told me that if I started going to college keggers with the kids, she was going to do a Lorena Bobbit on me. That ended that.

So, I picked up the law again and there it was: underage drinking can be allowed "in private clubs or establishments". What is a Fraternity or Sorority anyway? Talk about your Greek Revivals on campus. Instead of banning alcohol at Greek Houses, you turn them into Country Clubs. Put a mini-golf in the back yard. Let the non-Greeks form drinking clubs and rent out rooms at the student union. Put the shuttle buses to work carrying everyone back to the dorm.

Permitted and encouraged, drunkeness will lose its cachet.

This idea is not without its dangers. Number one in my mind is that the Amethyst Initiative and the M.A.D.D. people will join legs to stomp the living life out of me for suggesting it. There are reasons why so many of those Greeks were Stoic.

New Things You Cannot Do

You cannot do that in Valdosta! There is something about being told "you cannot" that creates the urge to do it immediately. With that warning, here are more suggestions for our growing list of 100 Things You Cannot Do in Valdosta.

Last week's posting brought a wealth of suggestions. I've included the ones that do not duplicate others. As always, I sometimes edit to make them punchy. Picks are made by me for any arbitrary notion I have and are not subject to any criterion of reasonableness.

When in Valdosta DON'T ...

• expect Dexter Sharper to let a chance to run for office to pass him by.
• look dumb founded when someone asks to hold your pen, or ask why. Just let them have it; they'll give it back.
• ask where the VSU Stadium is located.
• try to buy beer after 2 in the morning.
• be such a lush that you run out of beer at 2 in the morning.
• admit you are a Democrat.
• open a new bar. Nobody messes with Rockin Rodeo...nobody.
• use your blinker.
• feed your baby milk. Put Coca-Cola in the bottle! It's a tradition!
• put your shopping cart in the cart drop-off. Leave it anywhere.
• tell a girl that you are from Moody AFB unless you are a pilot.
• look at the "I hate bugs" billboards.
• make fun of the "I hate bugs" billboards. It's the owner's daughter!
• expect to make good wages -- unless you are from out of town.
• ask if it is incestuous to slow dance with your daughter at the Father/Daughter dance.
• diagonal park downtown, even if your little car will fit in that box.
• expect the lights to stay on after the first lightning strike.

You can propose your additions to the list by clicking on the comment link. Comments require that you either have a gmail account or an OpenAccess account. If you have neither, clicking on the comment link will give you a chance to do so.

The ones I pick for further consideration will be featured in a Daily Egg post and comments will be invited. If you survive that round, on the list you go. Picks are made by me for any arbitrary notion I have and are not subject to any criterion of reasonableness.

Little Orphan Title Town Trophy

Success has many fathers but failure is an orphan - ancient proverb coined by someone unknown, but ancient.

The ESPN Title Town trophy has an embarrassment of fathers. The City wants it for the City Hall Lobby. The quasi governmental Valdosta Lowndes County Convention and Visitor's Bureau wants it for the James H. Rainwater Conference Center. All the schools want it to rotate among their various trophy cases which means Valdosta High School might have to dust those three walls worth of trophies for once.

All these different "stake holders" are to meet to discuss the Solomon's question of how to divide this baby. Absent tin shears and acetylene torches, the only fair solution would be to license anyone who had a legitimate claim to pay the manufacturer $10,000 to make them one of their very own.

Whatever solution they agree on will not be acceptable to someone and that someone will call in to our local "Rant and Rave" newspaper column and give us all the benefit of their knowledge. I am looking forward to making fun of them.

The first question that comes to my mind about the traveling option is which one of our myriad Insurance Agents will get to insure the $10,000 trophy against damage when it gets dropped as it is toted around from place to place. The second question is: who gets to pay the insurance guy?

I have my own pet solutions. You knew that was coming, didn't you? Feel free to suggest your own in the comments section.

• Cut a hole in the top so that you can pour beer into it and pass it around at parties it ala the Stanley Cup.


• Keep it at the hospital for terminally ill patients to touch.


• Put it up at the college so that only people who go to VSU Blazer Basketball games can look at it.


• Hold a new Title Town contest by selling it on eBay and go back to being Winnersville. Use the proceeds to give Jessie Tuttle speaking lessons. They hand the guy the trophy on national television and all he can say is hamana hanama stutter yada yada.


• Give it to whatever football power wins the State and/or National Title that year. In case of a tie, put the head administrator of each school in a cage for a wrestling match to the death. Sell tickets to the match so we can give Jessie Tuttle more speaking lessons.


• I know, I know what you are saying... Open Bible School doesn't have a football team. We'll let them touch it once in a while as compensation.


• Ask Santa Claus to put one in every one's stocking this year.


• Build a glass sarcophagus on the courthouse lawn and put it there. Every year have naked athletes hold it over their heads and parade it through town. Didn't the Greeks do that?

Years and years from now, when no one is left living who cares, we can put it in the Lowndes County Historical Society and Museum next to those old pictures of Doc Holiday. Our progeny can then wonder what all the folderol was about.

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Update 8/23/08

After a long meeting, they agreed to ignore all my helpful suggestions and put the Trophy in the Conference Center. Schools will be allowed to borrow it for events.

Most interesting is that a full-sized Plexiglas replica can be had for only $600. You'll see that in a trophy case coming soon. My worry is that the trophy clearly has the year 2008 on it. Will we have to do this all again next year? OMG!

Throwing Gasoline on the Fire

Good Morning class. Open up your economics books to Chapter Four, commodities.

Gasoline is a commodity. That means that no one's gasoline is that much different from anyone else's gasoline. Yes Bobby, even Chevron with Techron. These are known as marketing additives. These are used by the marketing departments at large oil companies to convince management that they should keep the marketing department.

Can anyone tell me why gasoline costs twenty cents less in Waycross than it does in Valdosta? The owners in Valdosta are criminals? OK, next... the owners are greedy scumbags? Not quite, anyone else? Ah, Mr. Rose ... No I don't think the white people have conspired to give African-Americans AIDS and raise their gas prices. White people are paying the same gas prices as you. Not what you heard? Well, trust me on this one, Mr. Rose.

Look in the book people! Did anyone read the book? Thank you Miss, did you all hear that? "the law of supply and demand". A commodity responds nearly perfectly to the law of supply and demand. Get too much of something, the price goes down. Run short of something, the price goes up. No that's not illegal. No politician has ever succeeded in outlawing the law of gravity or the laws of supply and demand. It just is what it is.

What was that? Why doesn't the oil company just keep the price the same because their costs did not go up? Let's look at places where they do just that. The governments of China, Russia, India, Venezuela own their own oil companies. They did not raise gas prices with the world price. They did this to keep their citizens happy and docile.

No, the US doesn't drill enough oil to be able to pull this off and even if we could, we shouldn't. Because people, look over at the wall, Milton Freeman's quote, read it after me. "There is no such thing as a free lunch."

Here, look at this chart. If you price under the market price then demand goes off the chart. Supply? You can't make enough gasoline to supply an infinite demand. You have shortages. They have shortages in all those countries. Their people are sucking up so much gasoline that they are having trouble getting enough to sell for dollars. Are the people grateful? Of course not, the people think that the gas shortages are caused by greedy rich people. Yes, they blame the rich, just like you.

Now, People, People, I am surprised at you. No politician EVER got elected by telling people that gas prices are their own fault. There are reasons politician lie to us. Yes, Mr. Nicholson, we can't take the truth.

Now where were we, oh yes, the Convenience stores charging less in Waycross. When the price of gas was rising did the gas stations make a lot of money? How many believe that? Well you're all wrong.

When prices go up quickly, stores have to raise their prices even faster; otherwise they will not have enough cash on hand to buy the next tanker load of gas. Any dollar in profit they make is eaten up by the rising replacement cost.

Gas stations make money when the price of gasoline goes DOWN. They lower their prices slower than their suppliers do and finally recover the profit that they lost when the prices went up. No, making a profit is not a bad thing Mr. Engles. Really, Marxism went out with the Berlin wall, remember?

Waycross is the home of the corporate headquarters for a major gas jobber and convenience store operator. They are lowering their prices in lock step with their supplier rather than slowing. Why? They got tired of the local paper calling them rude names for selling gas at the market price when gas prices went up. Basically, they purchased some peace and quiet in Waycross and made their profit in other towns.

Mr. Engles if you continue to made rude noises when when I mention profit I will have to ask you to leave.

The next time you go to buy gas, remember this. While you are bitching about gas prices in Waycross you are also paying $3 dollars a gallon for bottled water and $5 a pound for chips. I thought so, you never even noticed.

OK, for next week. I need 2,000 words on why people are so ignorant about the price of gas. I believe you are all experts on this matter already.

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Yes, there are actually facts behind this prissy post. Go to Inside the Nest if you are not driving or operating heavy machinery.

There is a silly poll related to this post somewhere on the left side of the page. Results will be inserted in the archive article of this post.

Comments are welcome. Please click on the comment button below.

A Few More Things You Shouldn't Do in Valdosta

The most endless feature of this column is the quest to come up with a list of 100 Things You Cannot Do In Valdosta. The list currently stands at 50 items after a long-overdue pruning to get rid of out of date items, politicians who were hounded out of office, or people who died and ruined our fun.

Here are some items I am thinking of adding. The silly poll hanging out somewhere to your left on this page will let you vote on the ones you like best. If you want to add your own, vote for other and the software will let you add one. Comments are also allowed. With all these options, we do limit you to one set per customer.

• Start a brawl (or join one) at First Friday Celebrations downtown.


• Tell Reverend Rose you are not the son or daughter of a slaveowner.


• Hack the Valdosta Daily Times website during an election.


• Name a Parking Garage after Former VSU President Ron Zaccari.


• Tell your friends you know where the Olive Garden is going to be built


• Ask what are those big pointy things are outside of the arts center

Send me your suggestions!

You can also clink the link for comments at the end of this post or click on the envelope icon to send me an email. Do you get the idea that I want you to react to this?