Government claims to the contrary, there is serious inflation in the food sector. As an example, the price of cookies has gone through the roof. The QFC is charging $5 for a 10-ounce package of Lorna Doones. The problem extends to other baked goods too. We are being gouged not only to indulge our sweet tooth but just to break our daily bread. According to the Internet, the culprit is the sugar industry, unions, Big Oil, Nabisco, the FDA, NAFTA, wheat farmers, and, counterintuitively, Obamacare. In other words, there are too many places to point the finger. Well, arrest them all, I say, even if it would be like trying to break up an OWS demonstration. Lorna Doones are that important.

This year’s Super Bowl has been done before.

After months of playing football two teams are left standing: the New York Giants and the New England Patriots. Only problem is that the same two teams duked it out 4 years ago in Super Bowl 42 (if I have my Roman numerals right). You probably remember the game. Eli Manning against Tom Brady with Manning’s team pulling out the win at the end in a close game. There’s no change this year in the quarterbacks or the coaches—Mr. Never Smile (Bill Belichick of the Patriots) and Mr. No Fun (Tom Coughlin of the Giants).

The NFL, which prides itself on providing great sports entertainment, is staging a game we have already seen. That’s right, in the biggest sporting event of the year, pro football is basically going with a rerun. (I did read that there are several new commercials.) If you don’t think that’s a problem, you can get ready for the game by watching the movie Rudy again.

It takes too long to fly from Seattle to San Diego.

Flight time alone is about three hours and that doesn’t count the time consumed by security, baggage handling, and travel time to the airport. Three hours to go 1050 miles! I know this because I make the Seattle-San Diego fight several times a year. Substitute in a route you fly a lot and I bet the result is the same. Airplane flights take too long. Flying faster doesn’t seem to be a priority. Boeing keeps rolling out an innovative new “7” series every few years, but air speed is stuck in a time warp. There hasn’t been an increase since D. B. Cooper hijacked a Northwest Orient flight out of Portland in 1971.

What are the airlines doing about this? Nothing. Their priority is figuring out how to layer on fees without driving customers away. Well, a word to the airlines. Fees and bad service may annoy customers, but slow fights will make them die of boredom. And you can’t bring back people who are dead.

Local news shows spend too much time reporting the weather.

With weather, as the saying goes, it is what it is. Local TV stations don’t need to spend 10 minutes out of a half-hour broadcast showing fancy graphs and satellite images while droning on about convergence zones, the stormtracker, cloud cover, and Doppler radar. People just want to know the forecast. That’s all. No jargon. No B.S. If you know, tell us. If you don’t know, tell us. Just don’t spend so much time on it. Then get back to the entertaining stuff like fires, car wrecks, stabbings, and the wisdom and courage shown by elected officials.

You can’t get a good deal buying gold coins on Ebay.

You would think that with thousands of listings for gold coins on Ebay, a patient bidder might luck into a great price in a “no reserve” auction, which is how most coin auctions are structured. No way. There are too many bidders with the same idea (some of whom are probably using their office computers), and the “My Ebay” watch and search tools are too sophisticated to let any bargains slip through. In every auction I have “watched” this month, the coins have been bid to a price higher than an online gold dealer would charge. Go figure.

Who are all these bidders and how do they have so much money to invest? Shouldn’t they be putting their money to a more productive use like creating jobs? Or is the steadily climbing price of gold a comment on the real state of the union? For the record, gold has gone up about $60 an ounce since President Obama’s speech.

I’m sure you can think of more issues to add to the list.

Anyway, the man wanted no part of the drill. “Forget it,” he told the cop. “Write me up if you want, but I’m not even going to try. I wouldn’t get past ‘Z’.” The officer did and the case later went to court. I don’t have the details on how he beat the charge, but it was for reasons having nothing to do with the alphabet.

My neighbor, Jerry, and I looked at each other wondering how we might have fared in a similar situation. Then Marilyn spoke up. “I can do it,” she said. And she did, all the way through from Z to A at a quick pace without missing or mixing up a letter.

If you haven’t heard someone do this, it’s weird. You’ll recognize the letters of course (this is the alphabet we are talking about), but saying them in reverse order makes it sound like a strange chant in a language that is a dialect or two removed from English. Stopping to think about the next letter ruins the effect. It has to be done quickly.

I have no idea how Marilyn taught herself to recite the alphabet backwards or whether she says it aloud occasionally to maintain her skill. I did find a blog entry that offered a proven technique for learning to recite the alphabet backwards in less than 5 seconds. “Only a few hours of practice” the page’s introduction says. It even explains how to make your delivery musical if you are so inclined. I decided to pass.

After Jerry and my neighbor failed on the first few letters, everyone looked at me. At that point I had consumed two diet cokes and a chili dog so I wasn’t under the “influence” of anything unless you count the mind-numbing number of commercials I had seen that day. I got as far as ‘W.’

Do I need one of these?

I watched him “plow” his mother’s driveway for a few minutes this afternoon. Her driveway is steeper than mine but not as long. He had the whole driveway almost cleared by the time I got there. The work looked a lot easier than attacking the job with a conventional snow shovel especially given the weight and volume of our rain-saturated snow. Sadly, he didn’t offer to shovel me out when he was finished at his mom’s place.

I haven’t seen any wheeled snow shovels for sale at the local hardware stores and home centers. The shovel shown in the photo sells for $109 with free shipping. It has a 36-inch blade and a great marketing name—the Snowcaster. It’s also made in the USA. If you live where it snows and that doesn’t convince you to get one, the product description might:

The Snowcaster stores easily and takes up little room in your garage, just hang it on the wall. The wheeled shovel design greatly reduces the risk of back and heart injuries associated with snow shoveling. The Snowcaster revolutionizes snow shoveling by outperforming many snow blowers and is 3x faster than shoveling. It is environmentally clean, quiet, and almost maintenance-free.

So should I buy one and store it in my shed only to watch it gather dust? It doesn’t snow much in the Puget Sound area, at least at sea level. I haven’t been snowed in since last year and probably won’t be snowed in again this winter. Still owning one might make me feel more in control of things when bad weather does hit. That or a macho 4-wheel-drive truck.

Last Monday I dropped my truck off at Trew and picked up the rental, a 2011 Dodge Caliber. (The Caliber looks like a small crossover SUV, but it’s classified as an entry-level compact four-door hatchback. Still it has a lot of standard features that I wish were in my 13-year-old truck. Time for new one?) I ran a few errands around town in the Caliber and parked it in my garage on Tuesday night. It’s been there ever since as I’m snowed in—big time.

I deliberately didn’t park it at the top of my hill because I don’t want to be tempted to drive it before the roads are reasonably clear. When the storm hit yesterday, Friday looked like a safe bet for that. Now I’m thinking Saturday at the earliest. Meanwhile there are 6 inches of snow on my driveway. Without chains even a front-wheel-drive car like the Caliber isn’t going to make it up the hill until there is some major melting.

So I’m hoping Trew doesn’t call me anytime soon to say my truck is ready. The insurance company stops paying for the rental as soon as the repair job is done. Trew is closed on weekends. If I don’t hear from them by tomorrow, I should be able to keep the rental at no cost until Monday. By then our January weather will be back to normal—cold, wet, and dark, but no snow, at least at sea level. Besides, I don’t want to tempt karma by driving my newly repaired truck in the snow.

Front door drift

The knife-edged drift was caused by a strong wind blowing from Dyes Inlet down the length of Mud Bay. When it hit the north end of my house, the wind split and was funneled between the side of the house and the steep hillside that borders the front parking area. At its highest point the drift is 30 inches tall. All that snow had to come from somewhere, and as the photo shows, the flat part of my driveway is almost clear. There’s plenty of snow left on the steep part though, so I’m snowed in at least until tomorrow.

Big wheel keep on turning

When State Route 106 was realigned in 2003, the Dalby Waterwheel was no longer in public view. The Dalby family donated the waterwheel and the land for its new site to the Hood Canal Improvement Club. With some hard work by volunteers, the waterwheel was moved in 2005 and is once again visible from the highway. As part of the job, the Hood Canal Improvement Club installed a large sign that summarizes the waterwheel’s history.

Only a small portion of Dalby Creek is diverted to turn the waterwheel so it runs year round, even in the summer when the creek flow is much lower. Although it no longer provides electricity, the Dalby Waterwheel is still an important symbol of the source of green power in the Pacific Northwest.

Here’s an excerpt:

A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 5,300 times in 2011. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 4 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

My opinion of what’s “good” is subjective. The criteria I use to judge a book include great writing, an interesting subject, professional editing, a compelling storyline, and, mainly for fiction, a lead character I can identify with and perhaps learn something from. Books with a local (Northwest) setting have a slight advantage.

The list:

• Dan Barry, Bottom of the 33rd (N, c. 2011) – Veteran sportswriter Dan Barry recreates the era and portrays the trials and dreams of Triple A players in a recounting of the longest professional baseball game ever played—a 33-inning 3-2 win by the hometown Pawtucket Red Sox over the Rochester Red Wings in 1981. Hall of Famers Wade Boggs and Cal Ripken Jr. played in the game.
• Philip Connors, Fire Season (N, c. 2011) – From his perch atop a fire tower in southeastern New Mexico, the author writes about firefighting, weather, nature, and how he passed the time as a fire lookout. There are no maps; he relies on words to take us there. A writer to emulate.
• Dave Eggers, Zeitoun (N, c. 2009) – A Syrian-American named Zeitoun paddles a canoe around New Orleans in the wake of Katrina helping people who stayed in the city only to be imprisoned in a system that held people without bail, charges, or a hearing.
• David Goodwillie, American Subversive (F, c. 2010) – Goodwillie’s male lead, a blogger, gets involved with modern young terrorists who want to wake up America, through bombs, to issues like Iraq, big oil, complacency, and more. Set in New York City and Vermont.
• Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken (N, c. 2010) – World War II survival story of Louie Zamperini, whose B24 crashed in the Pacific on a search mission in 1943. Conditions on the raft and in the Japanese POW camps were so horrifying I almost had to stop reading.
• Donovan Hohn, Moby-Duck (N, c. 2011) – The author gets caught up in the search for and tracking of 28,000 plastic bath toys (floatees) that spilled from a container ship in 1992 near the Aleutians. Notable: the politics of beach cleanup, physics of big waves.
• Rex Pickett, Vertical (F, c. 2011) – In a sequel to Sideways (2004), the now-famous Miles and his friend Jack take a wine-fueled road trip to deliver his crippled mother to her sister’s home in Wisconsin. The medical procedures aren’t for the squeamish.
• Keith Scribner, The Oregon Experiment (F, c. 2011) – A professor moves to Douglas, Oregon (Eugene?), to teach and research anarchy and secession. His pregnant wife has an amazing sense of smell. The characters are sharply drawn, but it’s a good story with a great setting.
• Peter Stekel, Final Flight (N, c. 2010) – The author’s investigation of the 1942 crash of an Army-Air Force training flight in Kings Canyon National Park includes his informed speculation about how the crash occurred. One frozen airman was discovered in 2005. Stekel found a second in 2007.
• Hill Williams, Made in Hanford: The Bomb that Changed the World (N, c. 2011) – Williams was in high school at the time; his father was the editor of a local newspaper that helped keep the government’s mission secret. The difficult process of enriching uranium is explained in layman’s terms.

I also read three books about the Amanda Knox case. I can’t recommend any of them, but I can say that after reading them I am convinced that she didn’t help murder her roommate in Perugia.

At the time the fastest way to get to and from work was to take the Virginia Beach-Norfolk Expressway, a toll road that cost $.25 each way. Tolls were collected at a central toll plaza which had a half-dozen or so exact-change lanes and several booths where you paid an attendant. In the exact-change lanes, you tossed a quarter into a hopper and then waited for a control arm to lift before driving through. The expressway had a few exits before the toll plaza. At those you paid 10 cents into an exact-change machine as you left the expressway. Payment was on the honor system as there were no control arms or attendants.

A 25-cent toll seems quaint today, but back then everyone I knew hated paying it. The worst part was that there was little recourse. The alternate route—Virginia Beach Boulevard—was a heavily commercialized four-lane highway. Each time you took it to avoid the toll, you would sit in traffic at its frequent and lengthy traffic signals vowing to never make that mistake again. Days, nights, or weekends didn’t matter. It was always a better use of your time to take the expressway.

One of my housemates drove the expressway every day but almost never paid the toll, thus earning the Toll Road Bandito moniker. His simple justification for not paying was that he believed all roads should be free. Plus he wanted to keep the money. To get a free trip he would tailgate the car in front of him in one of the exact-change lanes and then speed through before the control arm descended. A weak buzzer sounded to note the violation, but there were no high-tech cameras to record evidence of the crime. The only time he paid up was when a police car was parked at the toll plaza.

The traffic ticket for not paying the toll was around $17 if you were caught. At one point we calculated that he could get a citation every day for a week and still be in the black.

Much as I disliked the toll, I didn’t have the nerve to copy the TRB’s technique at the toll plaza. My biggest protest was to occasionally toss an IOU into the 10-cent machine at one of the tolled expressway exits.

Fast forward to 21st century all-electronic tolling with its windshield-mounted transponders, overhead tolling equipment, online accounts, variable pricing depending on the time of day, cameras that photograph your license plate, and a program that mails you a bill if you don’t have a registered account. There are no toll booths and no exact-change lanes. The only thing similar to the old Virginia Beach-Norfolk Expressway toll road is that drivers dislike the tolls just as much.

The new system is complicated and will have some glitches, but it’s probably a bad bet to think it won’t work when you are crossing the bridge. I wonder if the Toll Road Bandito could find a way to consistently beat it.

Cat patrol at high tide

To avoid any hint of plagiarism, I revised my original photo caption, which quite accurately said “It was a dark and stormy morning.” That’s the Mud Cat in the photo. Normally he likes to patrol on the top of the bulkhead but not this morning. For the record it was a dark and stormy morning.

King Tides are higher-than-normal tides that occur once or twice a year in the winter when the moon is at its closest point to the earth and the gravitational pulls of the sun and moon are acting together.