At a stop light near Palm Desert, top down in the MINI. A gold PT Cruiser convertible pulls up alongside us.

PT: Hey, nice convertible!
Me: Yeah, you too

I bought Civilization IV last night, something to keep me busy at my San Diego residence during the upcoming winter months. But, to my dismay, it seems like my laptop isn’t up to the job - rather than lush green tundra and rolling ice fields, my people were moving around a totally blank background. So now I’m stuck, I can’t return the game and I don’t have time to play it at home, so either I wasted $50 or I need a new computer for the loveshack.

The price of gas might seem to be going down but it is still a staggering $2.80+ for the el premo variety here in CA. And now Exxon Mobil announces a whopping $9.9 billion profit for the last quarter, up 75%. So the whole country is suffering, people can’t make ends meet because of high gas prices and Exxon is living high on the hog. Forget the price gouging dealer on the street corner, these are the *!%@ers who should be taken to task. Now I know this is just capitalism at its finest but there should be some moral responsibility out there, shouldn’t there?

Enough ranting and moaning, here are a couple of pictures from a trip I took with my Dad to Marwell Zoo last month; to see all of them go to this Flickr photo set.

 

So here’s a hot topic where I live right now - should stores employ people who can’t speak any English? There are an increasing number of sales assistants who only speak Spanish and its getting to be harder for non-Spanish speaking people to get jobs, even McDonalds wants bi-lingual people. It has generated a lot of letters in the press: Anglos takes the view that this is America and the national language is (American) English and if you come live here you should learn to speak it; the Mexican view is that their culture is being suppresed and they should be able to do what they please. Of course it makes sense to hire bilingual people when your customer base is at least 50/50 English/Spanish speaking but I can’t see that it makes any sense at all to put a non-English speaking person on the front line.

But lets face it, in 20 years time California will be 90% Hispanic so maybe I need to drop the French (thanks British school education!) and learn Spanish.