A Curious Little Blog

I am fascinated by the idea of the dollar store. It would not have occurred to me that there would be so many products that one could sell for just $1. Some of the items really do cost a dollar (in other stores); many of them normally cost more, but the ones in a dollar store are junk. There are, however, some really good buys as well. I bought my kids some composition notebooks there; I couldn't even find them in other stores (because it was around the time school started), but there were plenty in the dollar store, and they seem just as good as far as I can tell. One year I also got a little soap dish with decorative soap that I gave out as gifts to people in the office. It is amazing to think that they can sell items for such a small amount and still be profitable. Not only that, but many of them seem to be located in malls, which I would assume means a higher than usual rent that they have to meet. The thing with dollar stores is that you'd have to think eventually inflatio...

I read a comment recently by someone who said, "Once you can afford to buy yourself pretty much anything you want under $1000, getting gifts is a lot less fun." This is true to a point, but I think there is more to it. In the last few years, I have come to appreciate the dynamics of gift-giving a lot better. Obviously, a lot of gifts go to kids. With kids, buying gifts is simple: you buy them something that they want but cannot afford. This is not too difficult, since they want everything, and they have no money to buy it with. With adults, this principle rarely applies. You have to be quite a bit wealthier than someone to buy him something that he cannot afford. The thing is that, if he really wants it, normally he can buy it if he's willing to give up something else. If you really love seafood, you could probably afford to eat it almost every night — provided you were willing to save less for retirement or your kids education, drive an older car, or live in a smaller ...

I had to visit the library of a neighbouring town recently to get a particular book. While I was there, I noticed a sign hanging down from the ceiling that read, "Take the 'search' out of 'research! Use the card catalog." I looked everywhere, and I couldn't find a card catalog; the librarian I asked didn't know of one either. Of course, it's possible that the sign went up before the card catalog was removed, but that seems unlikely to me; most libraries that I know of have been on computer systems for years. I can't recall seeing a card catalog for over a decade. Could someone have put up that sign when there already was no card catalog available to the public? As I was selecting apples at the grocery store recently, I had to reject quite a few (more than usual) because they had bruises. It's possible that someone will end up with those apples, but it seems more likely that they will end up being thrown out. It made me wonder how much of the ...

Whenever I observe nature closely, the thing that always impresses me is the brutality of it. You watch a nature program, you see the beautiful lioness chasing a zebra — and then watch the lions devour it alive. Of course, the lions have to eat, and the zebra herd benefits from thinning out the weaker members, but it's still brutal. Every time I feed crickets to Froggy (my son's pet frog), I think about this. Let me clarify that I am not sentimental about animals in most respects. I don't like to see them hurt, but I like to eat meat and I see nothing wrong with it. When it comes to crickets, I dislike them strongly. I even have some stories about why I dislike them so much. Still, when I open the container and drop a few in with Froggy, I can't help feeling like an executioner. They seem so happy to get out, they hop around, and then Froggy pounces and devours one whole. Tonight, he happened to have a large one that didn't all go in his mouth at once, so the cricke...

I have had several occasions to curse our federally-mandated small-capacity toilets recently. One wonders under what authority the government can justify requiring certain types of toilets. Is it because toilet-makers all sell to different states? Could you set up a manufacturer operating only in a particular state to get around this rule? My bigger question, though, is why anyone would want to conserve water. I can understand conserving a lot of things, but water is not one of them. Doesn't it just get recycled by nature? How can we possibly run out of water? Maybe in a big urban area, you might need to conserve water because you don't have enough locally, and it would be expensive to pipe it in from elsewhere. Elsewhere, however, water conservation seems like the strangest idea.