I still find it annoying

...that at least 50% of the calls I receive on my cell phone that are not from cymrullewes are wrong numbers.  This is a symptom of the problem that there are no never-previously-issued phone numbers left any more, except in not-yet-in-use area codes.  All "new" phone numbers are recycled, and there's no way to globally purge or update all the old outdated records and Rolodex cards out there.

More cell phoniness

As I've previously alluded to more than once, a large proportion of the calls I get on my cell phone that are not from cymrullewes are wrong numbers.  Most of them are attempts to reach a William Brown, who operates a business called Precision Networking, but who moved from New Hampshire to San Antonio, Texas a few years ago, and never bothered to update many of his business listings in this part of the country.  (Sudden side thought:  it'd be amusing if it was to turn out that this was the same William Brown I once worked with at a former employer in California.)

So anyway, I've received two such wrong-number calls this morning.  The second one, when told about Mr. Brown moving to San Antonio and not updating his listings, replied "I can beat that!  He's shipping his boat to my boatyard, and didn't even bother to tell us!"

Speaking of the intersection of phoniness and annoyances, dafydd points to a GeoTimes report which confirms something I've long asserted — in our modern technological society, "Daylight Savings Time" may "save" daylight, but not only does it not save energy, it actually increases overall energy usage.  Although DST saves on lighting power consumption, the saving is outweighed by increases in power consumed by heating and cooling, by a sufficient margin that overall electrical power consumption increases by 1% to 4% when DST is implemented.  (I predict that this disparity will become more pronounced as incandescent lights are replaced by more energy-efficient lighting systems using as much as six times less power.)  Overall, residents of the State of Indiana paid a total of $8.6 million more for energy after Indiana adopted DST in 2006 — and $1.6 million to $5.3 million more to clean up damage from related increases in pollution.

The Department of Energy (DOE) is currently conducting its own study of the effect of the 2005 extension of DST on energy use.  Although Congress passed the 2005 law, it also required that DOE study the extension’s impact, and retained the right to repeal the extension pending the results.  The study, begun in late 2007 after DOE finished compiling data on hourly electricity use from utility companies, will be completed at the end of June, according to DOE spokesperson Chris Kielich.

Tell you what.  How about instead of repealing the extension, we just repeal DST all together?  Then we can all just set our clocks once AND QUIT SCREWING AROUND WITH THEM.  The fact is, we are in very large measure no longer a strictly daylight-driven society.

"We're in Denial"

At least one Republican gets it.  Right up to the point where he says McCain is The Answer, anyway.