Brand new support socks are harder to get on or off than ones you’ve owned for a while. So, today I learned, don’t wear your newest support socks to the podiatrist.
Minnie Mouse is getting a blue pantsuit with black polka dots designed by Stella McCartney to replace her iconic red dress with white polka dots. It’s to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Disneyland in Paris France. News reports say it’s the first time Minnie has been outfitted in pants. Probably the majority of women, at least in the western world wear pants more often than dresses, so I guess it’s past time. But maybe Disney should have given pants to Donald Duck first.
I can’t help doing math in my head. I can’t do it as fast as I used to, but I’m still compelled to do it. This is sometimes troubling, especially concerning advertising. There’s a phone app that refunds users money, up to 25 cents per gallon, for each gallon of gas purchased. Because the commercial says “up to” I imagine there are conditions.
The ad says the user sometimes gets back $200 – $300 a month. Here’s where my math head kicks in. If he gets 25 cents per gallon, and the car gets 20 mpg, that means he has to buy 1,200 gallons of gas a month to earn $300. Remember, the ad says, “up to 25 cents per gallon.” If those numbers ring true to you, to hit the maximum means the driver has to drive 24,000 miles per month! If the rebate is less than 25-cents for some of those gallons, the miles driven have to be higher.
Is that a lot? Yes. Last time I saw figures the average motorist drove 12-15 thousand miles a year. That number is probably lower now because of the pandemic. To break it down farther, this hypothetical driver must average about 33 mph, all the time! That’s seven-days a week, 24-hours a day!
I guess someone must have pointed this out to whoever wrote the ad copy. The latest ad for the app features a different character, a woman, who claims to save $200-$300 A YEAR! Using the same parameters, that’s still about 28,000 miles a year. If it works as now advertised, it sounds worthwhile to me. It is much more doable, but still hard to accomplish.
About ten years ago, I noticed and remarked that MS Word’s spell-checker recognizes a lot of proper nouns, for example, Asimov, and Mandelbrot. At that time, I was happy to report it didn’t recognize the word Kardashian. It does now! The decline of western civilization progresses.
