gasolina

This is an article from CNN (in case you couldn't tell, most of my daily distraction reading comes from the most read/e-mailed lists...) bringing light to the practice of driving to Mexico just to get some cheaper gas.

Power to the people who live close enough by to do this; I'm sure someone out there is jealous.

I'm glad that the daily news keeps us informed as to the state of things (like our border hopping desperados)...but sometimes I wonder how necessary it is to bring to light that the gas price today is a cent higher than yesterday. I'm a bit tired about hearing about the gas prices going up...aren't we at the point where the news should report if something is out of the ordinary? Something that is noteworthy, nay, newsworthy? There was an article about a week ago about how the prices went down by a cent or two; that was exciting enough. But it's back to going up, up, up.

And it's been going up, up, up for a few years now. What is the public's obsession with hearing about the gas prices?

I'm starting to realize that media manipulates and caters to the audience more than I really thought it did. Not only do we get articles about the normal newsworthy events, tragedies, interesting health news, etc...but we get articles that fuel our misery and complaining. People like to complain. Is this not universal? I mean yes, some people feel guilty for complaining too much sometimes (and some feel no guilt at all). But in the end, there's someone you vent to...even it's your blog. Or cat. Or it's all inner monologue.

We don't really need to know every week that the gas prices are still going up. It might be nice to know if they're going down, but even so, unless you're really into tracking the economy through gas prices (which you can do yourself going to the pump down the street) it doesn't need to be written about. It's an easy way for a news sites and stations to churn out a blurb about a single number statistic and fill up some time and space. And for people to have more to complain about. With statistics they can relate to!