Sunday, July 7, 2013

It Was Really Hot

Sacramento is just now recovering from a week of 105+ degree weather.  Yeah, every day for a week.  I cried.  I whined.  I refused to go outside.  The air-conditioning went on at 10:30 AM. and stayed on all day and into the evening.  It was awful.  It reminded me of one reason I want to go home to the Bay Area.

Another reason is the weird social climbing that goes on here.  No one who lives here should be doing any social climbing.  I mean, this is where you live when you (a) work for the State or (b) can't afford to live somewhere nicer.  But our city mothers and fathers are okay with a dinner on the Tower Bridge that costs $175 a ticket.  This in a community where 20% of the households get the energy discount for low-income people from our local power purveyor.

I've never been into the "yuppie" aspects of locally-grown healthy food.  I remind people that, as the late Eric Hobsbawm pointed out, it was not the automobile that changed the world, but the Model-T.  Worse than that, this construction keeps people from realizing that a lot of fruits and vegies are very cheap at the Farmer's Market.  Cheaper than at the grocery store, fresher, and often grown without pesticides.  But if everyone figured this out, then it wouldn't be a positional good and they couldn't charge $175 for a dinner.

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