Cycling Pleasures

(I am dedicating this column to my "baby sister," who was the only one not along on this trip.  That is only because she was still five-and-a-half years from being born at the time it took place.)

With gasoline prices rising and conservation on most peoples' minds, wouldn't it be fun to get around like much of the world's population does - on a bicycle?

Well, I know that you can't get very far on a bike unless you're willing to expend a lot of time and energy.  And with few exceptions, there are no bike lanes to allow for cycling over long distances.  Vehicular traffic is also hazardous to your health on a bicycle, as was demonstrated by the British couple, Peter Root and Mary Thompson, who were recently killed in Thailand after cycling through over 27 countries since 2011.

I'm harking back to a past time when bicycling was not so dangerous in this country. In fact, I'm going to take you back to another time when gasoline was pricey and scarce, WWII.

My father wasn't able to serve in the military during the war, but he did two jobs that were equally important: he served as an air-raid warden, and he worked at the Bell Aircraft plant near Niagara Falls, NY, where he helped build P-39 Airacobra fighter planes.

My grandmother lived in a little town about 50 miles from our home in Buffalo.  With rations on fuel, we had no way to drive to her house to visit her.  My father decided one summer day in 1944 to get out the bicycles and pedal our way to Grandma's home.

I was 5-years-old and had just recently learned to ride my little bicycle with its 20-inch wheels. My two brothers were 7 and 8, and they both had full-sized bikes.  My little sister was only 2, so dad had her in a special seat behind his handlebars on his bike, and mom had her own bike with a picnic basket.

So, five bikes and six people started out on an epic journey from Buffalo to Peoria, the town where Grandma lived. 

Being the littlest bike rider, and owing to the smaller diameter of my wheels, I had a hard time keeping up with the rest of the family, so my two brothers had a rope that they used to tow me when I got too tired of pedaling.  I don't recall how often that was, but suspect that I was towed more than I pedaled.

There were no motels in those days, so the trip was to be completed in one day come hell or high water.  50 miles on a bicycle in one day was monumental, especially since we're talking about the old balloon tire bikes with no gear shift - one speed, as fast as you can pedal.  We didn't have any safety equipment like helmets, either

The long and the short of it is, we didn't make it all the way to grandma's.  We did get as far as the city of Batavia, about 10 miles short of our goal.  We got a lift from an uncle from there in his farm truck.

Our family bike trip was written up in the Bell Corporation company newspaper, complete with a photo.  I, of course, have no memory of the trip, but it must have been quite a feat in those days.  I doubt that you could get kids to do that today, and maybe it would be as difficult to talk a parent into it.  Oh, for those days gone by when we used to be able and willing to perform activities like a 50-mile bike trip.

Here is the original picture with caption as it appeared in the August 12, 1944 edition of Bell Aircraft News.

That's me on the far left with my little 20-inch bicycle. It looks like my dad had the 
skinny tires on his bike as apposed to those fat tires on the rest.

Oil Forever (Revisited & Revised)

(If you failed to see the whale in the glacier calving video last week, I invite you to view the video again and see what you think of that sight not even being alluded to by the narrator. I thought it was phenomenal. But I digress...)

I wrote a column over five years ago which I titled, "Oil Forever."  In that column, I posited that petroleum is: 1) not truly a "fossil fuel," 2) available and waiting to be discovered all over, or in this case, under the earth, and 3) a renewable resource.

If you went to school back when I did, you were taught that oil came from dinosaurs. In fact, Sinclair Oil actually used a dinosaur as part of their logo.  However, logic dictates that oil could not have come from decaying dinosaurs or any other animal.  It exists in all areas of the earth, all climates, all geological formations and at all depths in the earth's mantle.  There is no way to explain how it could have gotten there.

Here is a quote from that original column:

Another interesting fact is that oil is found in the strangest places.  It is all over the Middle East, except in Israel, and maybe Jordan and Syria. I don’t think any of those countries are in OPEC.  (Well, maybe it just hasn’t been discovered there yet.)

That fact has since been revised.  Oil and natural gas was discovered in January of 2012 off the coast of  Israel.  The amount is fantastic, too.  Some estimates are as high as 250 million barrels of oil plus 1.4 million cubic feet of gas, making Israel a major player in the oil and natural gas producers of the world. 

As to the renewability of petroleum, there are many documented cases of oil wells that went dry, only to begin producing again after a period of several years.  As further proof, if you drive this country as I do, you will see many oil pumps out in the fields along our highways. Many of those pumps are dormant, but that is only a temporary part of the cycle. They are all productive; they just don't pump 24-hours a day.

Now I'm going to make another wild theoretical assumption.  If you believe in the biblical creation of the heavens and the earth, why not also ascribe to God the endless supply of energy to support mankind? 

Radical? Of course it is, but it makes perfect sense if you consider that everything God created has a regeneration factor. And if you cannot accept creationism, believe in the science of regeneration.

For example, let's examine the plant-animal renewal of carbon dioxide and oxygen. We breathe oxygen produced by plants in photo-synthesis, and the plants receive carbon dioxide produced by us when we exhale breath.

Okay, at the risk of being declared a kook, or something worse, I’m, going to go out on a limb here and make a prediction:  We are never going to run out of crude oil.

Since I’m making predictions anyway, let me go further a field and pose a theory:

The earth makes oil on a continuous basis.   It makes it due to the great pressure and heat in the mantle.  Most of it pools in depressions in the earth’s crust, of course.  How else do you explain that, although oil has been extracted from fields in the Middle East and other oil producing areas, they haven’t even started to run out of it?

           

If you have a difficult time grasping my concept and accepting the theory, think about this:  Where do all natural resources come from?  Consider water, for instance, and ask yourself how it is that the major lakes and rivers in the world never seem to run dry.  

I grew up near the Great Lakes, and I’ve been alive for almost 75 years.  All the water that has flowed from Lake Superior and Lake Michigan through Lake Huron, lake Erie and Lake Ontario and up the St. Lawrence River into the Atlantic Ocean has been doing so unabated during all those 75 years.  And that is just a drop in the bucket when compared to the time it has been going on and the vast number of water systems similar to the Great Lakes.  It boggles the mind!

So I ask you again, why is petroleum creation any different?  We don’t know where it came from, nor can we surmise that it is a finite supply.  We do know that any commodity—such as oil, or water, or food—that is declared to be in short supply creates more demand and higher prices. That might be the key to why there are always scare tactics and urban legends about shortages and scarcity of any commodity.

So I leave you with this... The glass isn't really half empty, it is half full!  In my humble opinion, it well never be empty, so I guess I must be an optimist extraordinaire. I hope you are one, too.

Glacier Calving Phenomenon

I received the same message twice last week from different people.  The subject was Glacier Calving, and both messages included the same video of approximately five minutes in length.  Nothing was mentioned in the accompanying text about any strange phenomena within the video footage, probably because the video is a strange event in itself.

I noticed something about halfway through the first viewing that didn't appear to relate directly to the ice break up.  I finished the viewing and then went back and watched it several more times to be sure I saw what I thought I did.

To set this up, I'm going to introduce the video as it was presented in the email message:

A GLACIER  MOVES
On May  28, 2008, Adam LeWinter and Director Jeff Orlowski filmed a historic  breakup at the Ilulissat Glacier in Western  Greenland. The calving event lasted for 75 minutes and the glacier retreated a full  mile across a calving face three miles wide. The height of the ice is  about 3,000 feet, 300-400 feet above water and the rest below water.  An area approximately the size of Manhattan calved. 

I'm not going to divulge what the strange sight is, since I don't want to influence your viewing, but I will tell you approximately where it occurs; at the 1:30 mark. From there forward to the 2:00 mark, you might see what I saw.

If you do not observe the same weird thing as I did, you're welcome to email me and I'll give you some other clues.  However, I believe that you will see it if you pay very close attention. If not, either my vision needs correcting, or you just can't believe what appears in the middle of an inland glacier.

Now, click on the link I provided above to watch the video and prepare to be amazed!

The Lottery...Grrrrr!

I filled my car’s gas tank a few days ago, and when I went in to pay the cashier for the gas, there was a man in front of me buying lottery tickets.  He spent at least five minutes buying several different kinds of tickets. I guess there are what they call scratchers, and then there are others where you have to recite numbers and the clerk inputs them and prints out a ticket.  Those tickets must be the ones that you try to match to numbers that are broadcast every night on television. He took his sweet time transacting the purchase, and he left with a scowl on his face. I think maybe he blamed the clerk for his poor luck.

It wasn’t the first time I’ve been stuck behind a slowpoke playing the lottery, and there have been times when I’ve had to wait in a line of them to pay for my purchase or get my change.  I just hate that.

I have to admit that I have very little knowledge of how lottery is played, but I see the signboards and the ads on TV that promote it and tell how many millions of dollars are currently available to win. I also sometimes watch the idiots in their tuxedos reading off the numbers as they appear in front of me on the television screen, as though I can’t read them for myself.

What I do know about the lottery is that it is a total scam, and the chances of winning are about 1-in-5 million, but even that is probably a low figure.  It could be 1-in-20 million, or 1-in-a-billion. The point I’m trying to make is that the real chances of winning are astronomical.

It doesn’t increase your chances to buy 5 or 10 or even 100 lottery tickets.  That just makes you a bigger sucker.

There is another aspect to the lottery that I hate.  The majority of people who play it are poor, elderly, minorities, or a combination of all three.  I have no proof, but I’ve heard radio talk show hosts say that there is actually a concerted effort to target the poor and the elderly for lottery tickets.

Of course there are some players who are well off, or young, and many are Caucasian.  I know some of them, and when asked they tell you that they play for the fun of it and they enjoy the gamble that they might strike it rich, even against all the odds. Well, that’s okay if they want to waste a few spare bucks for the thrill of it.  I usually jokingly thank them for paying taxes for me.

Okay, let’s suppose that someone actually does win that big jackpot, several million large.  What happens then?  There have been studies done on jackpot winners, and the news isn’t good.  Most go on a spree.  Then they try to help friends and family—boy, do they learn of new friends and relatives fast.  The studies usually find that within two years of the windfall, the winner is worse off socially and financially than they were before they won.  Some have gone bankrupt, and others have committed suicide.

Unless a person is already an investor and has a good financial plan, most do not know how to handle a big settlement. Those are not the kind of people who would ever play the lottery in the first place, either. So very few lottery winners have a better life from their good fortune. Winning only adds to their misery.

I don’t know why, given the track record of lottery winners, anyone wants to play that stupid game in the hope of winning. And I certainly wish they would quit tying up the lines at every gas station from here to Timbuktu.

Severe Weather Where?

I’ve been visiting friends in Kansas City this past week, and the weather here has been a severe change from what we experience in Georgia.  First, we seem to have brought rain to the area after they’ve been in a seven-month drought.  Then the rain turned to snow, a two-inch total and almost the first snowfall of the winter for them.

In the middle of the week we got a call from our daughter back in Augusta.  It seems they have also had some storms there in our absence, and Cathy lost power for a few hours. Even more worrisome, some trees in the small glade behind her house were blown over. Fortunately, they didn’t fall toward her fence or house.

That same storm included a tornado that hit the town of Adair, Georgia and killed one of its residents.

Why did I bring all that weather-related information up?  Well, it got me thinking about a topic I’ve had rolling around in my brain for a couple of years that concerns severe weather alerts that we hear on radio and see on TV.

Whenever there is a severe weather alert broadcast, the meteorologist always refers to the counties involved in the alert. If you’re watching television, there is usually a scroll bar with all the counties involved accompanied by a small weather map with the affected area highlighted. 

Question:  Do you know what counties surround you?

When I’m driving and I hear a severe weather broadcast, I have no idea where that storm is unless it is in one of the counties that comprise the Augusta metropolitan area.  Those are Richmond and Columbia Counties.  I also know that McDuffie County is just to the west of us—good information to know, since most storms track west to east. 

If there is any other county affected, forget it.  I haven’t a clue whether the weather alert applies to me or not.  Now, that ignorance could be critical and life threatening.

The friend we are visiting has a 4X6-inch, laminated map of the counties in Kansas. It is there to assist when the weather service issues a warning. It came from the local police department, I guess I don’t have to tell you that Kansas is always in danger of getting severe weather during tornado season.  Most of the Midwest is, and lately, the rest of the country has also gotten a lot of severe weather.

If you cannot get a laminated map from your local police or sheriff department, there is a way to produce your own county map.  Go online and type into your search engine the words, “(state) Counties Map” without the quotes.  Substitute your state at the beginning. Once you have the map on screen, copy and reduce it to whatever size you want and then print it. 

Since this is a life saving tip, I recommend that you pass it along to all your family and friends.

There is one other aspect to this severe weather topic.  I used to live in Omaha, another city located in what is known as “Tornado Alley.”  I took the advice of our local weather team and bought one of those weather alert radios that broadcast alerts from the National Weather Service when a storm is in the area.  It turned out to be a huge inconvenience, because it would wake us up in the middle of the night to alert us to severe weather in a 100-mile radius—usually at the outer limit and nowhere near us.  Needless to report, that little radio was relegated to the trash.

Tax Season Advice

I cannot pass up this opportunity, which only comes at this time of year.  We are approaching “tax season.”  For some it falls between January 31–about the earliest you can get copies of all the documents needed to file–and April 1.  For others, it starts on April 1 and can run up to midnight on April 15, the last deadline to file taxes without penalties for dollars you owe to the IRS.

This year it is even more critical to get advice on stretching your paycheck, because the tax breaks that were allowed to expire to avoid the fiscal cliff included some that affect every single taxpayer, not just the wealthy.  People are beginning to learn that they get less take home pay, and that is only going to get worse as the new health care law kicks in this year and next.

The Washington Times states that approximately 59.3 million taxpayers received an average refund of $3,000 last year.  Those refunds added up to a whopping $174.5 billion in overpayment of taxes. This year it is anticipated that the $3,000 level will again be reached.  Those 59.3 million people fall into the early category above, because they want to get that huge lump-sum payment from Uncle Sam ASAP. (I’ll get back to that lump sum later)

The latter group, those who file at the last minute, do so because they either owe some additional taxes, or they have a very modest refund coming.  I am in that group, and I am going to tell you why we should all be in that 15-day filing window.

If you divide $3,000 by 12 it gives you a quotient of $250.  That is the average amount of money taxpayers “lend” to the federal government each month with no possibility of growth in interest or dividends.  To my way of thinking, that is very poor investing.

A better way to pay taxes is to estimate how much you will owe on April 15 and then have the correct amount withheld periodically as it is earned.  The goal is to try to be within $100 of you total tax liability when you file.

If your income is mainly derived from a paycheck that you receive from an employer, you can easily change your withholding by filing a new W-4.  Just ask your employer for the form, or you can download one from the IRS Website: http://www.irs.gov and then turn it over to your payroll department when you complete it.

There is an easy way to calculate the optimum number of allowances on the W-4.  Go to the Kiplinger Website: http://www.kiplinger.com/tools/withholding/index.php    and follow the easy steps.  You might want to read the entire set of pages there as well, since Kiplinger gives excellent advice on the subject.

Even if you were to miscalculate (under-estimate) your optimum withholding amount, you can always file quarterly estimated taxes to catch up without penalty.  The 1040ES form and instructions are also available at the IRS Website to help you. 

The 1040ES is the same form you should use to file quarterly estimates if your income is from other sources, such as self-employment, pension, Social Security, interest or stock and bond dividends.

Now, back to that huge lump sum that so many people seem to desire…  If you are one of those, you can still get that “refund” but with more bang for your buck.

Instead of making an interest-free loan to the government every payday, take the amount you have saved by decreasing your withholding and put it in interest-bearing certificate of deposit.  Some  employers even have a thrift plan that allows automatic deposits to be made from your periodic pay. 

If it makes you feel patriotic to help fund the government, buy U. S, Savings Bonds and at least get the advantage of an interest bearing bond for doing so.

You still want a big refund, you say?  Cash in a couple of the matured CDs or bonds on the same day you send in your tax forms. You won't even have to wait for the IRS to send the money.

I have an even better idea for you.  Use that $250 per month to fund a 401(k) or Roth IRA.  You won’t be able to withdraw it until you are at least 59½ years old, but it will grow at an astonishing rate to fund your retirement.  The beauty of it is that you won’t even miss it while you’re funding your possible early retirement.

You might possibly be my age, and you can no longer fund a retirement program, but you probably have kids and grandkids.  Kiplinger has some good advice on that too, titled, "10 Smart Uses for your Tax Refund."  You can apply the monthly savings to those same enterprises just as easily as with a lump sum refund.

I urge you to forward this column on to all your relatives and friends.

 

Solicitations for Donations

Have you received mail similar to what I have gotten?  Several times a week I get mail solicitations for donations that contain money. Usually it is only a penny or a nickel, but sometimes there is a dollar bill paper clipped to the letter.

The March of Dimes sends--What else--a dime. It is quite obvious even without opening and reading the letter that the inclusion of money is a mental ploy to make me feel guilty if I don’t return something in the way of a donation.

Do these mind games work?  No, not for me they don’t.  I donate to several charities of my choosing, but I don’t give to any charity because of guilt. I give because I want to help and I believe in the cause. And when I get the coin or the dollar bill from a charity that I support, I’m more likely to stop sending them any donations than I am to send along money that they might waste on some other prospective donor.

Another ploy that is a turnoff for me is when I send a generous donation to a charity or some political candidate whom I believe in, only to receive a letter thanking me for my donation, which includes a new donation form and an envelope to send in yet another donation.

Do these people think I made a mistake and didn’t send enough the first time? That I said to myself, “Oh gosh, I only sent $100, and I really meant to send $1,000.”  I am tempted to quit sending any future donations to those groups that insult my intelligence by asking for another donation immediately upon receiving one from me.

In case you’re now wondering just how cold-hearted I am, I do send money to some non-profits like the USO three or four times a year, but I do it at the time of my choosing. If I get a mailer from one of my favorites, I usually save the return envelope and pledge card to be returned when I feel up to it.

My wife and I both drop paper money in the Salvation Army kettles during the Christmas season, too. And I’m not in any way bragging about it.  I just want to establish that I am not a Scrooge about donating. My point was to show my disdain for organizations that try to guilt me into it. Other than that, I wish everyone would donate to worthy causes and not just to “take it off on their taxes.”  Beginning this year with the new tax bill that avoided that nasty "fiscal cliff," high income earners aren't going to get to take charitable donations anyway.