Welcome aboard, Joskney. And Welcome Back, ‘Hammer.
June 26, 2009
Drinking and Driving is ok, in your country
Hello everyone. As this is my first tenetive step onto this blog, please excuse any breach of etiquette, crass word play, or just plain old sarcasm. That being said..
I am a people watcher. I like to observe. And when given the opportunity, sometimes it shows core morals (or lack thereof) in a sick humorous tendency of what people will do. It is akin to the young man working out on the road tempted to visit a strip club, a found wallet with cash, or the governors that use public funded trips to indulge their own happiness. No one there will know who they are, will they? These tendencies aren’t limited to just individuals, but also larger groups like businesses and governments. And here is one of my current favorites, StatoilHydro.
StatoilHydro is a Norwegian oil company. It is the largest off shore oil drilling company in the world and in the past has been reported to have involvement in a number of shady deals in Europe and the Middle East. Recently they opened a large number of petro filling stations in Lithuania. And why were these built? Was it to secure a market share of fuel sales? No my good readers these were placed for the lucrative sale of alcohol.
Until Lithuania enacted a law January 1st banning the sale of alcohol after dark, you could buy fuel and heavy drink at the same time. So when Lithuania discovered they had this alarming and rising death toll from drunk driving, so they voted to toughen the drinking laws. Since the ban there has been a drop in alcohol related accidents by nearly 50%.
But our friends at StatoilHydro though don’t care about this and in an official letter to the Lithuanian government they report that the ban has dropped revenue from alcohol sales by 43% and total sales by 23%, they “urge the ability to sell without restrictions” and that the main reason they invested in Lithuania was this alcohol selling ability and may have to enforce massive layoffs.
WELL Howdy, give me my Vodka and 3 gallons of gas!!! The irony in this story is Norway has among the strictest laws regarding the sale of alcohol. And since StatoilHydro cannot do it at home, it seems good to them do it across the water.
No one there will know any different…
Deliverance
At a twenty-odd year remove, the most striking thing about the Thriller video is how well it works as horror. The scenes of wolf howl and zombie smash are better directed than the real thing. It’s also a dance video of early vintage, so the strolling couple’s feet fall on the half-note, or on the quarter when they hurry past the graveyard–I never noticed before. Perhaps he’ll draw comparison to Mozart, another troubled prodigy who spent his later days alternatively fleeing and pining for earlier success.
In a way, Jackson perhaps lived too long. He was an object of horror and fun (captured perfectly by Smigel’s Triumph: ”On a scale of one to ten, how old is Michael’s boyfriend?”). Perhaps in decades to come, when America has gotten over its hang-ups with pederasty and disfiguring elective surgery, people will wonder what all the fuss was about. Jerry Lee Lewis hardly suffers now for having married his thirteen-year-old cousin, after all.
