Our RV Adventures

Jan and I headed down to the nearby 14 screen movie complex to finally see Wonder Woman. We normally like to wait for the crowd to thin out on big movies like this. And it certainly worked today, since there was less than a dozen people in the theater, including us.

Jan and I both REALLY enjoyed the movie, one of the best we’ve seen recently. I was especially happy to that they stuck very closely to the original comic book storyline EXCEPT for the fact that they moved the time period from WWII to WWI, or The War To End All Wars, as they referred to it at that time.

Gal Gadot was perfect for the part, and the

One unusual fact that has come to light since the movie came out is that Gadot was pregnant during the filming, while she was doing all the action scenes. But even stranger is the fact that they called her back this past November to redo some scenes . . . action scenes. At this point she was five months pregnant with a definite baby bump.

The solution to that was CGI (Computer Generated Graphics). They cut the abdomen out of her leather costume (which wouldn’t fit at that time anyway) and then covered her bump with a green piece of cloth. Then in post-production they took away her bump with computer graphics. Neat!

Gadot said later that in close-ups, she looked like Wonder Woman, but in the long shots she looked like she had been impregnated by Kermit the Frog.

Well Recommended.

Afterwards it was up to Willis to have dinner at Whataburger. YUM!

And now for Unintended Consequences Pt. II.

The city of Seattle, WA seems to be doubling down in the unintended consequences game.

In 2014 Seattle raised their minimum wage, already at $9.47 an hour, to $11, and then on to $13 in 2016, heading to $15 next year. So was the result of this that everyone made more money and lived happily ever after?

Not quite.

Restaurants have been closing at an increasingly faster pace since the minimum wage hikes, and the increase ramps up with the wage increase.

A recent University of Washington study shows that workers at the lower end of the wage increases, the ones going from $9.47 to $11 to $13 to $15, are now making an average of $125 LESS per month than before the increases.

And city tax revenues are down due to all the businesses closing.

Probably not what they had in mind.

Next up, in January 2016 Seattle instituted a $25 tax on gun purchases and a 5 cent a round tax on most ammo. They said the $500,000 the tax would raise would be used to study gun violence.  So what happened?

Well, after a number of lawsuits to force the city to release the data, they finally admitted that the tax collected was less than $200,000. And insiders say it was really just a little over $100,000. But that’s $100,000 extra, right?

Well, yes and no.

Many (most) gun dealers moved out of the city, and the one remaining large gun dealer said he’s overall sales are down 20% and gun sales down over 60%. He’s laid off employees and is in financial trouble.

But the big kicker is that while he sent them a little over $15,000 from the new tax, he didn’t  send them the usual $150,000+ in sales tax revenue and employee taxes that he normally does.

No, due to reduced overall sales, he only sent the city a little over $70,000. And now they’re losing that, because as the last dedicated gun store in Seattle, he’s leaving town too.

Don’t you just hate when that happens.

Well, maybe things got better in the city’s gun violence problem with a $100,000 of studying? Nope, not even close.

“Per the Seattle Police Department, when comparing the first five months of 2017 and the five months prior to the bill taking effect, shots fired are up 13 percent, people injured in shootings are up 37 percent, and gun related deaths have doubled.”

Ouch!

That’s about it. I’ll have some more tomorrow.

Thought for the Day: 

Scientists now say that the average person could outrun a T-Rex. And he certainly couldn’t have run down a jeep like in Jurassic Park.

Well, that’s a relief.

But apparently no human could outrun a velociraptor.

Oh, well.

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Well, we did finally leave the rig today for dinner and a little shopping.<

We headed out about 4:15 to first eat at the Golden Corral down on i-45. Jan had been ‘jonsing’ for some fried chicken, and GC has some of the best.

I like the fact that I can get a little of everything.

Afterwards we looped back around to the Home Depot so I could pick up some Plexiglass sheets to construct the air deflector for our rig’s AC cover. Hopefully it will redirect the airflow over the AC so it cools better while we’re on the road.

Then it was a quick stopover at the Kroger’s for a few things and then home.

Recently I’ve been thinking about unintended consequences and their effect on our lives. And what happens when they backfire.

You know, like in British Colonial India when the government started offering a bounty for dead cobras, hoping to reduce the deadly population. For a while it worked . . . until people started breeding cobras so they could turn them in for the reward.

Then when the government scrapped the program, all of the now-worthless cobras were released, resulting in more cobras in the wild than they were to start with.

Oops!

Or when in1859 an Australian imported 24 wild rabbits from England and released them into the countryside so he could hunt them. But apparently they could make new bunnies faster than he could shoot them, because by the 1920’s, less than 70 years later the population was estimated to be over 10 billion. That’s BILLION, with a B.

By the 1890’s they had devastated over 2.5 million acres of Australia. Today, due to heavy eradication efforts, the rabbit population numbers around 200 million.

What’s up, doc?

Another example, as I mentioned in my Trinity Site blog post the other day, are the Oryx antelope that were imported to the White Sand area of New Mexico in the late 70’s.

The original 93 have grown to over 5000, more than there in the Kalahari desert where they came from. And since they have no natural predators (lions) here, they too are tuning into real pests.

Going back in history, those of you close to my age probably remember ‘freak’ shows at the traveling carnivals that came to town.Every carnival had one, or sometimes two. That way they could charge you twice.

Modern freak shows really originated with P.T. Barnum in the 1840’s when he introduced Gen. Tom Thumb to the public.

Tom, aka Charles Stratton, who ironically was a distant cousin of Barnum’s, became very wealthy over the years, making as much as $4000 a week in today’s dollars.

Or how about The Dog-Faced Boy, who during the 1880’s was making the equivalent of $13,000 a week.

In more modern times they even had their own town in Florida. Gibsonton, about 20 minutes south of Tampa was home to hundreds of freak show performers who lived there when they weren’t traveling. They lived in very nice houses, drove Cadillac’s, and had a nice lives.

At least until the 50’s – 70’s when do-gooder’s took it all away. Citing ‘discrimination’ and ‘exploitation of the disabled’, they got laws passed restricting the shows, and then shutting them down, apparently to save them from themselves.

And as a result, many ‘freaks’, who previously had nice lives and incomes, died in destitution, in some cases, while living on the streets.

Or how about Lady Bird Johnson’s Highway Beautification Act.

Sounds great, right.

Take down all the billboards and other forms of outdoor advertising along our Interstates, giving us pristine views of green, rolling hills and landscapes. What could be wrong with that?

Well, nothing, unless you were a billboard company that went out of business and had to lay off all your employees, or a landowner whose main income was from the billboards erected on their land.

But the big hit was to all the mom and pop businesses off the Interstates. The many restaurants, motels, gas stations, and even roadside attractions started withering away when no one knew they were out there. Thousands went out of business across the country,

And it wasn’t much better for the travelers.

Was there a gas station at this exit, or a motel? Or maybe at the next one?

This is why we now have those signs at the exits listing food, lodging, and gas available at each exit. So we went from a billboard or two 50 yards right off the highway, to one or more right in our face at the exit.

Not exactly a big improvement.

I’ll continue this topic tomorrow, with more current examples. Stay tuned.

Thought for the Day:  

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