Weekly rant...with numbers

More pics of the High Museum from last Friday night. Nothing much to rant about today. Not much sensational stuff going on, so business and international news trickled into my head. Some of it stuck. And got kinda chewed up.

HOME IMPROVEMENT

Home Depot 4th quarter earnings - $16.81 billion (1,890 stores)
Lowe's for the same quarter - $8.55 billion (1,087 stores)

Yikes! That's a lot of lightbulbs! I hear that HD plans to expand with 175 more stores in Canada and Mexico and with their first in China. (HD employs over 300,000 "associates". I'm not one of them.)

IMPERIALISM

Of course I cringe when I hear Bush pronounce "nuclear", but I also find it grating and belittling in this "we-are-going-to-war-whether-you-like-it-or-not" environment to hear him call Germany, France, and Belgium "our friends". And yesterday? When he said there were no plans to attack Iran, but all options "were on the table"; how did he think that was going to sound? It sounds to me like "we definitely/probably aren't going to attack Iran...tomorrow". (The White House budget includes $75 billion for the Pentagon. I'm not included in the budget.)

MARTHA

The domestic doyenne gets out of the big house next week; will her return be announced by changing the help column in MSLiving from "Ask the editors" back to "Ask Martha"? (Magazine circulation is 1.8 million copies. 1 is for me.)

WHOLE PAYCHECK

When is Trader Joe's coming to the ATL to give "Whole Foods" some competition? Until this great specialty food store opens locations south of Virginia, thank goodness for "Your Dekalb Farmer's Market"... (Whole Foods has 166 stores; YDFM has one. Last time I went to WH, I spent $35 on stinky cheese; the last time I went to YDFM, I spent $20 on an entire week's worth of groceries).

EVIL

Now the Pope is weighing in on gay marriage as the "ideology of evil", adding one more target to W's "Axis" that is ripe for attack after Iran and North Korea... (50% of my friends are "evil").

LOTTERY

Georgia has had a lottery since 1992. During it's first year of operation, $1.1 billion worth of tickets were sold. That's a per capita sales of $164.81! In it's first 11 years of operation, it sold $21 billion in tickets, or $3148 per person spending $5.50 per week on what dad likes to call "the stupid people tax". Where did this money come from? Where would it be today if not for this government-sponsored re-allocation of funds? Here's the part I love: Math. If someone were to put $5.50 into an account bearing 5% interest every week for 11 years, that $3146 deposited would have grown to $4192.

But I guess that wouldn't be any "fun". (In the past 13 years, I have spent $6 on lottery tickets as cop-out, quickie gifts.)

One inarguably positive consequence of the lottery is money for scholarships. "Since inception, more than $3 billion has been appropriated and distributed to more than 830,000 HOPE Scholarship recipients."

I just love the word appropriated - it's the same word they use in the Louvre and the British Museum when describing how a non-indigenous piece of art came to be at that institution during a period of colonialism or war; as in "Napoleon appropriated the Rosetta Stone". (Fittingly enough, the British, in turn, appropriated it from the French and it now lies in the British Museum.)