>>>>>There's been a lot of beefing about the price of gas over in the USA, on the UT recently. Here prices have started to come down (one garage, in 2 hikes, by 5p a ltr) but I've heard nowt of suc from the US. Is it that only the bad news gets commented on and people lose interest when times improve?
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>>>>I can't speak for the U.S., but here prices went up 13 cents overnight, and then another nickel during the day. the prices then dropped 9 cents after they realised that Ike did less damage than anticipated. Overall, an increase of 18 cents and a drop of 9 cents doesn't give me happy enough goosebumps all over to make me want to write about it.
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>>>Apparently in the US prices went up somewhere between a 15 cents and 2 dollars during and after IKE. some places came down significantly after that.
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>>>In Kansas, our prices went up about 25 cents for IKE and have dropped about 50 cents since (because the price of oil dropped to levels from a year ago).
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>>>We're still 80 cents or so above where we started the year off, so although there a lot of stupid people who are getting excited about buying new road behemoths again, other people still realize we're being screwed.
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>>Yeah. I've heard that a lot of people up here are starting to think about SUVs again. I can still remember people saying ,"Y'know, when the price of gas hits 75 cents, I'm going to stop driving." Then, of course, they changed to 85 cents when it hit 75 and $1.00 when it hit 85. A lot of people made the same insincere promises about the price of cigarettes and quitting smoking too.
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>>Which reminds me, I saw a great comic in today's Toronto Star. It shows a guy in a store looking totally scared and freaked looking at his pack of cigarettes. Cigarette are flying in the air, he has dropped the pack, and his glasses are a couple of inches off his face. The clerk behind the counter is telling another customer something like, "The government found that the warnings on the packs weren't working, so they started using a picture of Keith Richards."
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>I quit smoking in 1986. i was smoking 2 packs a day of real cigarettes (Marlboro - not the generic weeds).
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>Every few years I do the math to see how much that saved.
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>Last estimate was about half of my house value.

I quit just about the same time - maybe a year later, I don't actually remember the year for sure. I was doing about 55-60 a day - that'd be 2 packs and 5 or 10 cigs over that. I didn't smoke at the office. I smoked before I got to work, at lunch and in the evening. To say I was an evening chain smoker would be putting it lightly. The funny thing is that at the time, I was also playing the trumpet (not professionally), so my lung capacity was excellent in spite of how badly I was abusing them. Fooled a couple of doctors during checkups before admitting the truth to them.