When this 2000 cartoon appeared on the Web site in 2008, gas prices were hovering around $4 per gallon. In recent weeks, gas prices fell to near the $1.69 price that flabbergasts Arlo above, and drivers were elated. Perspective is everything, no? The situation depicted here is totally factual; as a boy I loved raiding the “service stations” for bundles of maps, and most of them never complained. On a tangent, I went into a Shell station yesterday looking for a bottle of bleach. (Why isn’t relevant.) Almost the entire store, and this was a sizeable one, was devoted to snacks! I know this comes as no revelation to you, but it is brought home when one searches for quotidian inedibles. No wonder we’re getting fat.
88 responses to “Very Tiny”
GR 😉 just because I saw it on the left, and I like it, always did.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpGEeneO-t0
Must have been left behind on National Go Bra Less Day….
https://i.chzbgr.com/full/8574006528/h7EEE634C/
Travel day; gotta boogie. L8R.
Debbe 😉
40+ years ago when I was a LORAN (precursor to GPS) transmitter technician in the Coast Guard we had a Chief who told us that “There is coming a day we will have these receivers in cars and trucks”. I looked at the receiving equipment the size of a small truck and said “sure we will”. Even the high tech solid state equipment for aircraft was the size of a suitcase.
He was right.
I now have it on my handheld smartphone. I still prefer paper maps though.
TruckerRon, Sorry I wasn’t clear. The Feds required all the interstate markers changed to the metric measurements, not the state highways.
Old Bear, I have seen many photos of trucks whose drivers didn’t pay attention to height warnings. The pics tend to show up on those “fail” sites.
Debbe, yep I read it. Cleaning a chicken house and talking about stars/planets. That’s the way to handle it. Put the body on autopilot and let the mind go where it will.
Interesting. I mostly drive in NY and CT but all the highways (interstate and otherwise) seem to have sequential exit numbers rather than mileage related numbers.
that makes me think, I think, here the exit numbers are sequential, but they still refer to the miles from the border of the state, like some numbers may be missing ? is that right?
Debbe, yes, it is Orion’s time, I don’t think I’ve even been out to see it yet, but with the days getting shorter I won’t miss it
So, why when one is young is it complementary to say that they “have an old soul” yet when one is old it is good to be “young at heart?” Wouldn’t it just be better to be one’s self at whatever age you happen to be?
It was some years back that they changed the numbering on exits in the Dallas area. I was driving up from Conroe to visit my brother in McKinney, on the north side of Dallas. I-45 / TX 75 goes up to Dallas and then while the road continues it is suddenly Central Expressway or something and the numbers used to start at 1 and go up to 40 something at the exit I took for my brother’s home. This trip they changed to reflect mileage rather than numerical sequence. Overall I liked the change.
Re Yellowstone, here is the blog of an author of a YNP guide now in its 4th ed. [Disclaimer: I’ve known her husband, now prof emeritus of geology, Brown Univ., since 7th grade.]
http://www.yellowstonetreasures.com/author-blog/
Peace, emb
AFAIK the interstate highway system uses miles for exit numbers. In some areas, like Los Angeles, they add letters when more than one exit happens between mile markers. I seem to remember them going as high as J in one very confusing mishmash of interchanges.
Speaking of maps, GPS, etc. – http://qz.com/524795/the-us-navy-is-reinstating-the-ancient-art-of-celestial-navigation-to-fight-a-very-modern-threat/
Those gas station road maps were my travelogue to the world beyond that wrong-end-of-the-telescope view I had from growing up in south Florida. Except for wearing a rut between Miami and Augusta, Georgia (from which both of my parents came originally), we did not travel unnecessarily. And so grabbing road maps of states and cities I had never set foot in was a treat and a free education.
Back in the 1950s and 60s, as the Interstate Highway system was being built, maps would include proposed routes as well as showing those under constriction, usually with estimated dates for their completion. I made a point of looking to see that a new section of I-95 or I-85 had opened on schedule comparing the ‘old’ 1960 map to the ‘new’ 1961 version.
Somewhere in a box in a closet here, I still have a 1964 Shell map of Florida on which I had laboriously traced and colored in with a pen all my travels around the state.
Thanks for re-kindling that memory!
Wife and I just got back from a round trip, Chicago to Denver on I-80 and all the signs were in miles. Didn’t see anything in kilometers. We used a GPS to find the wedding site in the foothills of the Rockies and “sweet lips” took us right there. She does get irritated when I stray from her prescribed route.
Oh….trip was for Granddaughter’s wedding.
TruckerRon, I think that the exit numbers in LA are only for easterners who expect them because the natives ignore them. All exits have the name of the street they take you to, and that’s what everybody uses. I’ve never understood what good the numbers were because they don’t give you any information about where you’ll be once you’re off the freeway.
The value of the exit numbers? For one thing, combined with mile markers, they allow you to judge how soon you need to move to the exit lane (sometimes on the left!) even when it’s your first time in that area. Another benefit is you don’t have to read the names of the streets, just the numbers to know if it’s your exit or not… sometimes streets have very similar names. Here in Utah going south on I-15 in a 10-mile stretch are the following exits:
Center St
University Parkway
Center St
University Avenue
The two Center Streets are respectively in Orem and Provo. University Parkway crosses I-15 in west Orem; University Avenue begins at the south end of Provo. If you were delivering a load of carpet up from Los Angeles and told to take the Center Street exit, wouldn’t you prefer to be told to take exit #265?
TruckerRon, your mention of similar names reminds me of the problems navigating both Atlanta, where it seems every 3rd street is Peachtree something, and Nashville, where Old Hickory is everywhere. And as for the numbering of exits, from what I saw when looking for the proposed kilometer change, apparently there is no hard-and-fast rule. Some exit numbers and mile markers are close, some number sequentially from border to border, and these spurs and bypasses number from their beginning. No wonder Helen Wheels, Alice and Hal get testy.
Old Bear, you have a new to you car, a ” P U ” ? Please explain.
I did a little research (Wikipedia 😉 ) and it seems that several exit numbering schemes now coexist since it would cost money and confuse people to change the really older systems to match the current one. So, in some areas the exits after a toll plaza have the plaza’s number plus letters (like 8A, 8B, etc. between plaza #8 and plaza #9). Only the Interstate highways were forced to move from purely sequential to the mileage-based system; that came about because the purely sequential system was torpedoed by the addition of new interchanges.
State highways and toll roads have their own rules regarding numbering… and I detest Nevada’s “mile markers” which are based on county lines, used mostly to mark bridges and drains, and are too small to see from a big rig’s seat. They’re OK for the county work crews needing to clear out a ditch, but useless for navigating.
Charlotte in NH, PU equals Pickup, not the new car smell. I am having trouble getting to the comments. I had to go to my history, pick my visit from this morning, and click on it to get in here. Using Google Chrome, by the way.
Mark: Good to know it’s not my laptop only. I’ve resorted to going to the unavailable comments p., copying its URL, then putting that in place of my server’s URL and clicking Enter. Pain.
OF due 1752-1812 CDT. Had to erase its URL to get here. May be available in ‘Next’ Comments or the one before that.
Peace, emb
Dear Mark, thank you for getting me out of the puzzle. I imagined it was some make of car and coundn’t think what it could be!
Sorry you are having problems, hope they go away soon.
Roses are Red
Violets are Blue
If Skunks had a college
They’d call it P.U.
😀
I will have to look the next time I am traveling in NY, MA or CT. I am going by I81 and I90, both of which don’t seem to mark their exits with mileage numbers. OTOH, I90 is mostly a toll road and the exit numbers reset as you cross state boundaries.
Charlotte in NH, you’re welcome. And if they were a make of car, they would probably be a Fiat or member of the Chrysler group. From what I’ve read online, they are having lots of quality problems. Too bad, because the Fiats look like nice little cars. And I hate to see the American company struggle.