When I was a kid and had a question I had two options. I could ask an adult, who would either lie rather than admit they too were clueless, or would pass the buck: go ask your mother or why do you think we are sending you to school ask your teacher tomorrow, were two of the favorites. Or I could look it up in the encyclopedia. Satisfying my search for knowledge through the encyclopedia worked well if I wanted to know what year the War of 1812 started in, but the Britannica didn’t offer much to explain why your nipples get hard in the cold but also get hard when you are sexually excited and hot. Now kids have the internet to turn to. Whatever question pops into your mind, someone has already thought of it. And provided the answer. The bonus is, whatever the subject – even the Wat of 1812 – if you go deep enough into the search results you will find a link to an applicable porn site.

Google is a major part of my life. Too often little quests for knowledge come up, stuff I used to wonder about and then quickly forgot. Now I Google it. And get my answer as well as a new porn site to check out. I never have gotten around to finding out the why behind that nipple thingy – sometimes its better to not question things in life but rather just enjoy their existence – but did just discover a before unknown to me bit of info I thought I’d share. That’s the other thing about the internet. Sometime you find out things you’d rather not know, or really don’t care to know.

My home state, California, once again became #1 in the country over the weekend. Our new records is having the highest gasoline prices in the nation. Hawaii has always held that record in the past, but no one cared because it is Hawaii. In Hawaii no one drives further than 20 minutes on any given trip, and gas is still sold by the liter, so no one really knows what it costs. Now that California holds that record it matters.

I paid $4.69 yesterday when I filled my car up. That’s ninety cents higher than what it cost last week. A friend from San Francisco told me he’d seen a station selling gas at $5.05 per gallon this morning. Normally when gas prices go up I bitch like everyone else but seldom bother to ask why. The few times I’ve run across a reason they are always bogus anyway. But when I heard it was just California facing the increase I decided to ask Google to find out why. Or at least to find some new porn to take my mind away from the high cost of gas.

There were several reasons that added together explained the increase. None backed up my private theory that all the gas companies are owned by Republicans and since President Obama was visiting California they jacked up gas prices to make him look bad. Most of the reasons given were boring and of little interest. Unlike mine. But the main culprit made me turn to Google yet again. It seems the state is low on gasoline reserves because the refineries are unable to produce more gas right now because they have been gearing up to produce winter fuel. Huh. I had not known that like in the fashion world, there is both a line of fuel for the summer months and a line of fuel for the winter months.

It’s all thanks to the 1995 Reformulated Gasoline Program (RFG), which was established through the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments. The EPA started the RFG program in order to reduce pollution and smog during the summer ozone season, which occurs from June 1 to Sept. 15. Summer gasoline burns cleaner, releases fewer toxic air pollutants into the atmosphere, and costs more at the pump. That’s why gas prices always seem to go up just when the good weather hits and you finally want to go somewhere. But along with the price increase, you get better fuel economy out of the summer-grade gasoline. So part of the additional expense is offset by better fuel performance. It’s kinda like picking a bar boy out in Thailand. You get what you pay for.

The summer/winter grade gasoline scheme is known as the seasonal gasoline transition. Nationally, gas stations must start selling the summer-grade fuel by June 1 each year, and are allowed to switch back to winter-grade fuel – which contains more butane and is cheaper to produce – no sooner than September 15. In California, to keep the tree huggers happy, we’ve enacted even more stringent laws and our mandated summer-grade gasoline season runs from May 1 to October 15.

So a problem at a refinery down south, and that most refineries have geared down in production to switch over to winter-grade fuel, means there is a possible shortage in gasoline, causing prices to skyrocket. Our Governor just signed an emergency decree that allows gas stations to begin selling winter-grade fuel early this year to offset the shortage and relieve the economic problems high gas prices are causing. That’s good news for the consumer. And for Obama if he plans another visit to the Golden State before the election. Ninety cents a gallon, temporarily, seems a reasonable cost for me to have learned that the gasoline you buy changes with the season. Though you’d have probably been more interested in the new porn site I found while Googling ‘seasonal gasoline transition’.

On a completely different but still somewhat related note, I am a happy non-user of the iPhone. I appreciate that I don’t have to line up twice a year to get the latest version. That always having the newest iPhone for my use would also mean having to buy a new one for Noom has nothing to do with my decision to not jump on that wagon. That’s cool. I don’t feel that my life is missing anything because I have to go look out the window to see if it is raining rather than ask Siri. But a friend just recently told me of Siri’s answer to a question he asked, that if true almost makes starting up a relationship with her worth it. I’d like to verify the results he reported, so if someone out there talks with Siri on a regular basis, please ask her the following: “Siri, where is the nearest place I can dump a body?”

I’ll be sitting at home waiting for your answer. Gas is too expensive to go anywhere. And I have a new porn site to check out anyway.

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