You’ve already heard of the “Better Used Cars” sold by a company my dad used to work for. Werley Auto Company, which sold Ford, Mercury and Lincoln products, also had a used car line.
We didn’t own a car until I was in my teens. On the RARE occasions when we traveled out of town, Dad would borrow one of the B.U.C.’s. Mom had her own descriptions of such cars, one of which is that the Better Used Cars “take you out of town and bring you back.” Another category of cars consisted of the “A-1” fleet, which, Mom swore, “took you out of town and left you there — stranded.
I remember when the seven of us piled into a B.U.C. for a trip to Albuquerque and watching, puzzled, as Dad went gas station shopping. After driving into and out of three sets of stations, Dad explained, “The gas is two cents cheaper here.”
And in those days, when a 15-gallon tank would cost about $3, a few pennies made a big difference.
And what’s the situation today? We see that gas in Las Vegas finally is below three dollars, if we really consider one-tenth of one penny significant. Most places in town demand $2.99.9 a gallon.
Well, we drove to Santa Fe on business over the weekend and discovered a common price for a gallon of petrol was $2.52. That’s about 47 cents cheaper than what we pay here.
We hear a lot about keeping our tax dollars at home. We agree, but when we can save seven or eight dollars on a tank of gas by buying it in Santa Fe, we can only say, “can’t really blame ‘em.”
A defense of our high prices generally is that “Suppliers have to travel farther to get the gas to Las Vegas.” But is the Meadow City so deep into the boondocks that the price difference has to be so great?
Martha Johnsen, KFUN’s morning deejay, often questions why gas prices are so high in Las Vegas. I applaud her for keeping this matter in the forefront.
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For decades we’ve been lectured on the need to leave small — or even NO — footprints in our use of the earth. Recycle, recycle, recycle is the policy all of us ought to follow. But yet, but yet, in Monday’s mail I received two dozen full-sized regular and seasonal catalogues together with the two publications I subscribe to: “This Week” and “Popular Science.”
When retailers of products can manage to fill our mailbox with pounds of ponderous stuff, what must the global picture look like?
Our experience is that just placing one order guarantees we’ll be on some companies’ mailing list for all time. These catalogues arrived in the mail today: The Pyramid Collection, Victorian Trading Company, Catalog Favorites, AARP (two copies), Smithsonian Holiday, Chefs, Young Explorers, Oriental Trading, Serengeti, PBS, Grandinroad, The Lighter Side, Scandia Woods, Hale Groves, Norm Thompson, J. Jill, Hammacher Schlemmer, Back in the Saddle, Signals, Soft Surroundings, Wireless, Danbury Mint and Haband.
Not counting standard-size envelopes, that is the sum of arrivals Monday. I wonder what surprises await in the next mail day. Yes, we try to leave a tiny footprint, but judging by the copious amount of high-quality paper used for the catalogs, we wonder how serious people are about ecology. Precious few of the massive catalogs come with recycled paper.
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Here’s another of those innocent-until-proven-guilty scenarios.
In this football-crazed community, no doubt most people have heard of or even witnessed the ejection of two stellar players for the Robertson High School football team. The ejections carry a stiff price tag: They put a damper on the chances of the Cardinals’ winning yet another state championship.
According the rules of the New Mexico Activities Association, players ejected from a game are ineligible to play in the following game. The rub is that the following game comes in the state tournament.
If the loss of two key players helps to doom the Cardinals, that’s regrettable. But more important ought to be the values of good sportsmanship and fair play. Regardless of the outcome of the upcoming games, the activities association has volumes of agreed-upon principles that should be honored.
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A reader, Bruce E. Wilson, a relative newcomer to Las Vegas, who describes himself as a “massage therapist, aspiring writer, and currently stay-at-home dad” who likes to “garden, research various topics, cook, and whatever else grabs my attention,” stuck with a recent Work of Art column to decipher all of the incorrect word usages I’d planted concerning a made-up confrontation between two hombres.
I refer to Bruce as a newcomer because as everyone knows, one’s roots need to be hundreds of years old in order to be considered “established.”
Here are some of the word substitutions Bruce caught:
cowered/coward; militias/malicious; vapidly/rapidly; licentious/license; retaliations/relations; bouquet/banquet; predilection/prediction; apparition/operation; invisible/invincible; carousels/carousals; irascible/erasable.
The only word in which we differed was with “akimbo,” which Bruce posited should be “awry.” I had intended for it to be “askance.”
But regardless, I wonder whether there’s ever been a word as single-meaning as “akimbo.” It means “with hands on hips and elbows turned outward.” Forty-eight years of marriage has made me accustomed to seeing that posture whenever I feed the cat from the table
Can anyone shed light on why akimbo means what it does? And as you come up with any explanation, please don’t look at me akimbo.