Jeremy Herndon

I’ve seen pictures of the Smart car on the Internet, and on television, but not “for real” until today.  I was waiting to pull out of a parking lot and a large tractor trailer passed me by, followed by a Smart car.  What a huge difference in size that was!  It was a cute little thing, a bright red, but it brought back memories of many years ago when I saw the results of a little car being in an accident with a tractor trailer and it made me shudder.  I don’t know how safe I would feel in such a little car!

Tonight a group of my friends got together to eat dinner at our local Applebee’s restaurant.  That’s one of our favorite places to eat, the food is always good and it is always reasonably priced.  The only thing that we don’t like about it is that it has a “smoking” section.  We always ask for a seat in the “non-smoking” section but we still smell the cigarette smoke, which is just plain and simple nauseating to smell.  Never mind the health consequences of smoking and second-hand smoke, it just plain and simply smells nasty!  We were surprised that last night they allowed smoking; there are times when I’ve gone there and it was all non-smoking.  Maybe that’s only on Sundays.  Next time we think we want to go there, I’m going to call them and ask them when they have smoke-free dining.

I don’t understand a lot about what’s going on in the financial disaster news, but I was under the impression that this big bail-out issue was a pretty important issue, and that if the bill did not pass we were going to have a serious economy collapse that would wreak havoc with almost everyones life.  So I was very surprised to hear that the House of Representatives rejected the big Bail-Out.  I hope this is not a result of people holding out for some pork-barrel favors!   I don’t know what the other options are to the bail out package, so I sure hope that someone comes up with a solution that prevents us all from losing our jobs, and homes, and starving to death!  This is pretty serious stuff!

Well history certainly is in the making, there is no doubt about that.  Big financial corporations are failing left and right.  I have no pity on those corporations, but I do understand that if they don’t get some kind of rescue from the US the economy is going to be in even deeper trouble than it is - and that is hard for me to imagine. 

I have a few friends who claim “so what, it doesn’t effect me, so I don’t care.”  They don’t understand that as the problems trickle down they could lose their jobs and not be able to find new ones.  Without their jobs they will be unable to pay their bills, might lose their homes and starve to death.  So this is a much bigger deal than a lot of the “common folks” really understand.  I know I’m nervous about my own job!

I was reading an article on the Time.com website about how high-end high alcohol beers and becoming more popular. These beers are sometimes being brewed by smaller, less well known breweries than the mainstream breweries, and are intended to compete with wine rather than the “average” run of the mill beer. These beers often have more than twice the alcohol content than “regular” beer. One of these beers was developed by the makers of Samuel Adams Beer and has been named “Utopia” beer and sells for $140 per 24 ounce bottle. The article was talking about how these beers are “richer” and because of that people would not WANT to drink more, they would drink less.
Most of the people that I know would rather drink MORE beer, not less! I can’t imagine going to a barbecue picnic and only drinking one beer, it would not seem like a party to limit oneself to only one! After that one beer is gone and you’re thirsty again, then what would you drink? I guess this is the kind of beer one would order at a restaurant where you are only going to be there a short time.