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15Dec/081

Coldest city in the world? (OK, not really…)

I was on AccuWeather tonight because we're having some foul weather here in Minneapolis, and I was trying to figure out if I was going to freeze to death on my way to work tomorrow. The high today was -3. That's right: the high was a negative number. I mean, you know it's cold when your doorknob actually burns your skin, or the dog poops and it's frozen before it hits the ground. Yikes!

Anyway, Accuweather has a little sidebar applet on their homepage that lets you display the temperatures from five cities around the world. I picked what I felt were four other stereotypically cold cities for comparison purposes, but Minneapolis beat 'em all:

cold

Wussies!

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14Dec/080

Yay, I’ve got cheap gas (now if I only had a job to drive to)

There seems to be a completely non-scientific way to prove that low gas prices equals bad economy. Consider figure 1:

"Ah," you say. "This is good. Low gas prices are good for everyone. Hooray!" False. Low gas prices are bad for everyone. Consider figure 2:

The graphs are not directly comparable—even with my vast (read: half-arsed) Internet research, I couldn't find anything over the same period of time. But you get the idea...as gas gets cheap, we Americans lose our jobs, and the economy tanks. Which brings me to figure 3, the Dow chart:

Again, the charts don't lie. I can only imagine how dire the situation will be when gas gets below $1.00/gallon!

So please, OPEC, listen up: start screwing us over again at the pump so we can get our jobs back!

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