Nothing But Iron: Got Gas? By Steven R. Lagman, M.D., C.A.S.W. August 21, 2005 You think this latest writing lapse is like all the others of the off season, a mere consequence of tennis, basketball, male gardening, and day jobbing. It is not. This latest lapse represents an intentional economic initiative, which is really nothing more than a lesson on the laws of supply and demand. I reasoned that if I were to decrease the supply of NBI’s, the demand would go up and I could subject readers to shocking price increases about the time I emerged from relative sportswriting hibernativity, also known as baseball season. So don’t be surprised if one day soon you are standing in line at one of Mobile’s new CGPALO’s (Combination Gas Pump-Automated Loan Officers) and you are stricken with the sudden realization that the price of NBI’s has jumped from free to $66 dollars per barrel. I know you are thinking that sounds like a ridiculously high price for crude sportswriting, and that’s because it is. But what are you gonna do about it? It’s not like you’ll suddenly stop reading about sports. You are probably also thinking that sportswriting is not typically sold by the barrel, but for $66, I will put it into any container you like. On that note, it became apparent to me in while I was harvesting my lawn with my gas-powered lawn harvester that OPEC does not control gas prices. We, as in we consumers, do. If we really want gas prices to fall, we should stop buying it. Of course the thought of that, especially in places like California, where you can’t even go to the bathroom without a freeway, is paralyzing, a fact that is not lost on diamond-studded OPEC officials. According to my calculations, if we reduced our consumption of gasoline by 14% for 94 days, which could be done if each Californian took one less trip to the bathroom per week, prices would fall so precipitously that milk would be supplanted by little red cartons of gasoline in our nation’s school lunch programs. For now, a gallon of gas will continue to be more expensive than a gallon of milk, and gas doesn’t last as long, unless you have large teenage kids with large teenage friends, in which case the rates of consumption are about even. This continues until the teenagers get their drivers licenses, at which time gasoline consumption surpasses milk consumption exponentially. As a certified realist, I realize that the idea of reducing fuel consumption is about as palatable to drivers as public smoking bans have been for nicotine achievers amongst us (more on that in another issue). That’s why it would be unreasonable to expect that people will eschew their gas-guzzling vehicles (for the record, I have one) for bicycles, sailboats, skate boards or the purity of pedestrian existence. But they will drive hybrids. Not today’s hybrids, which, I am told, are still a bit undersized and underpowered, and possibly at risk for exorbitantly expensive to repairs when the batteries fail about six minutes into the non-warranty periods of ownership. What we need is the right hybrid. One plausible solution came to me quite unexpectedly the last time I heard an expert make the gallon-of-gas-gallon-of-milk comparison. I can’t believe that I, a mere amateur sportswriter, was the first to see the hidden potential here, but now that gas is more expensive than milk, it is time to pour alternative energy research dollars into milk-powered vehicles. Finally some good news for dairy farmers. Imagine the cover of Newsweek: "Dairy Farms, The New Oil Fields." My advice to developers is to THINK BIG. Americans don’t want a milk-powered matchboxes or sardine (anyone even eat these things anymore?) cans. We want SUV’s, or in newer terminolgy, S-Mooooo-V’s. If it were my job to invent new vehicles, I would, right this minute, be sitting in the office of Riley Large (pronounced Lar-JAY), CEO of Hummer International, pitching my idea for the Hummer H4 Hybrid, a massive can’t-park-that-here vehicle powered by four different fuels: milk, banana peels, coffee grounds, as a back up source for accelerating up those steep hills, plutonium. One of the reasons I would choose the Hummer, beside the fact that it has H’s like the word hybrid, is that it’s the only vehicle this side of a Navy submarine thick enough to meet EPA standards for mobile nuclear reactor safety, and also because nobody knows how large milk combustion engines will have to be. I heard a rumor–well, really, I heard it from my cousin and he heard it from his friend’s sister at school–that the technology for milk-powered hybrids has actually been available since the 1950's, but gas companies bought all the patents and concealed them in unmarked milk cans in the dank basement of Detroit’s Fuel Alternatives Research Team, commonly known as FART. I suppose they knew it was the last place dairy farmers would ever think to look, especially if the dairy farmers did not know my cousin or his friend or his friend’s sister. If the concept of milk-powered vehicles stalls out, there is always Fuel Direct Deposit. FDD is a government-sponsored program where your weekly paycheck can bypass the bank entirely and be directly deposited into the account of your favorite oil company. You can’t beat a convenience like that. You might wonder what any of this has to do with sports. I am sure there is a connection, for example, um, yeah, it cost us a day’s worth of my son’s future college tuition to drive to my in-law’s secluded north woods cottage where I can sportswrite without interruption. Colleges collect tuition to fund athletics programs. Cottages have sports too. Yesterday, for example, I shot baskets for 45 minutes on O’Neill Square Garden, the concrete half court our families installed up the hill several years ago. (Hey, just because it’s secluded doesn’t mean we ignore basic human needs.) Besides that, ticket prices to professional sporting events will likely increase as the cost of transporting multi-millionaires from venue to venue increases. Ticket prices would have increased anyway, but now there will be a convenient excuse for it. I will let you know if I discover other connections between sports and high gas prices, but in the mean time, you’ll find me driving around the state in a late-model gas-powered Mercedes Benz, dressed like an Arabian Knight, making too-good-to-be-true offers on dairy farms. ______________ Nothing But Iron is an amateur sports column, which often includes the author’s views on sports, however, the author reserves the right to comment on any subject, including subjects on which he has no expertise, in which case he reserves the right to make things up. The author discloses that he has received no funding from any special interest group, but would be willing to accept some. FART is a registered trademark, so don’t be using it at the dinner table. ©2005 DrTM Enterprises. All other rights reserved too.