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In 2004 Hawaii became the first state in the United States to institute a cap on wholesale gas prices that the two oil refiners, Chevron and Tesoro, can charge. Hawaii’s prices have typically been the highest in the nation, with recent highs of $2.93/gallon, and the law was passed in an attempt to bring the prices down, or at least keep them from skyrocketing.

Enter Hurricane Katrina. With a large percentage of the United States’ oil passing through the devastated region (or rather, not passing through), gas prices on the mainland have skyrocketed. Experts are saying that Americans could see $4 gallons of gas in the near future.

But hold on a second, Hawaii gets 80% of its oil from Asia and the other 20% from Alaska. Surely Hurricane Katrina won’t have an effect on Hawaii’s gas prices. Or at least, it’ll have a lesser effect than on the mainland, given that the supply of oil to Hawaii isn’t slowing down — the price of the oil will surely go up, but Hawaii won’t be hit with a shortage.

Ah, that’s not the case. See, the gas cap law was written such that the cap will be tied to the wholesale price in three markets on the mainland: New York Harbor, Los Angeles, and the Gulf Coast. And guess what’s happening to the wholesale price in those markets?

Skyrocketing!

Of course, the cap on wholesale prices only sets a maximum price that the refineries can charge, but they would be stupid to not sell at the maximum price. I mean, that’s almost pure profit.

As state Senator Ron Menor, the chief architect of the law, said, “Hawaii prices will better reflect the prices that are being charged on the mainland and the world market.” To which I think the gas-buying public in Hawaii says, “Thank you very much, Senator Menor, thank you very much.”

Before I get started, I’m going to give you the opportunity to duck out right now. I know that some people get offended by gallows humour, and this post is gallows humour. If you read this post and take offence, well, screw you, I warned you.

Right then, let’s get to it.

Top Ten Songs in honour of Hurricane Katrina:

1. Going Nowhere - Andrea Parker (dedicated to those stuck in gridlock trying to evacuate)
2. You Could Feel The Sky - Boards Of Canada
3. Breakin’ Up The House - Colin James and the Little Big Band
4. Look Happy, It’s The End Of The World - Matthew Good Band
5. A Common Disaster - Cowboy Junkies
6. It Can’t Rain All The Time - Jane Siberry
7. Alert Status Red - Matthew Good
8. Evacuation - Pearl Jam
9. When The Levee Breaks - Led Zeppelin
10. New Orleans Is Sinking - The Tragically Hip

Also, I hear that the mayor of New Orleans has declared a fatwa against Katrina and the Waves.

For the longest time I was the only member of the Joint Astronomy Centre’s Scientific Computing Group (or SCICOM — that sounds cool) with a Mac. Then a few weeks ago Tim got one. We both started using iCal to keep track of work-related tasks, and both realized it would probably be handy if we had some way to know what the other person was doing, work-wise. iCal gives you the capability of sharing a calendar, but you need to publish your calendar to a WebDAV server in order to have other people subscribe to it. There’s no way to publish your calendar over Bonjour, unfortunately.

Enter CalTalk. CalTalk allows you to publish your calendars locally to be picked up over Bonjour by other users of CalTalk on your subnet. It’s a piece of cake to use — you just run it, select which calendars you want public, and wango, you’re done. If you want to subscribe to someone’s calendar, you just run CalTalk, select the person’s name, then select which calendar you want. iCal will keep track of synchronizing the calendars to whatever frequency you want. As long as everybody who publishes their calendars runs CalTalk continuously, your calendars can keep up-to-date.

Now I can see Tim’s work schedule and he can see mine. Now we just need to have a generic SciCom calendar so we don’t have duplicate entries.

CalTalk - 5 golden calendars out of 5. It does one job and it does it well.

You remember Pai, don’t you? She was one of the cats left by our ex-neighbours after they vacated their house because they didn’t pay any of their bills. You remember how she got pregnant and had kittens, right? We managed to get rid of three of them (no, not in the Pat Robertson sense, they got adopted), leaving us with Pai and the last kitten. Luckily for us, a friend of ours was going to take them both as soon as she returned from vacation.

We’d been keeping them in one of our bathrooms for ten weeks. While Alice and I were busy celebrating our anniversary last weekend, Pai apparently beat up on the last kitten a little bit and one of our roommates threw her out for the night. We brought her in Sunday, but apparently the male cats in the neighbourhood were excited by the presence of a female in their midst… One wouldn’t stop running around outside yowling. I guess these male cats are rather hard up for some action.

Monday morning I picked up a coupon from the Hawaii Island Humane Society to get the spaying done for half-price. If the cat’s pregnant or in heat, then spaying costs an extra ten dollars, but otherwise it’s a reasonable $35. Thursday morning roommate Jenna and I dropped Pai off at the vet, and went back after work to pick her up. The veterinary assistant told us that Pai was a couple of days pregnant (that slut!) because her uterus was a little swollen and had some nodules on it and that it’d cost an extra ten dollars.

Then she did the unthinkable: went into the back room and BROUGHT OUT THE UTERUS TO SHOW US. Right there in a tin, swimming in some kind of pinkish fluid (I guess that would be uterus broth) was this pink tuber-like thing. And then she picked it up. No, not with a set of tongs or anything sane, she just went and picked it up with her fingers to show us these nodule things. It was all I could do to not get ill. She took it back into the back room and while she was gone Jenna and I just stared at each other.

It’s hard to describe the faces we made at each other, since I don’t think there’s really a standard expression for “Oh dear God we didn’t need to see cat uterus right now and have crazy vet assistant pick it up and show it to us.”

I was perfectly willing to take the vet assistant’s word for it that Pai was pregnant. I would have gladly paid the ten dollars without having to go through the uterus viewing. I would have gladly paid an extra ten dollars to not have the option of the uterus viewing, frankly.

You may remember the launch of Campaign Screw You HELCO! back in May after we hit a bill of $225.47 for 29 days of usage, an average rate of 29.9 kWH/day. CSYH! was instituted to get the rate of electricity use down to 25 kWH/day.

After turning the hot water tank’s temperature down to a toasty 130 degrees Fahrenheit from a blistering 160, and a concerted effort to use the clothesline instead of the dryer, June’s bill was a low low $181.50, or 21.1 kWH/day, shattering our target.

July saw poor weather, which meant more use of the dryer, and correspondingly July’s bill hit $195.41, or 23.2 kWH/day. Still below our target, although the increase in usage was a bit of a concern.

Enter August. The forces of fast clothes drying took a blow when their Commander In Chief stopped pumping out hot air. That’s right, our dryer broke. It runs fine except for the heating of air bit. This forced us to use the clothesline (or take our wet clothes to a laundromat), and as a result, our August bill was a record low $164.81 and we used 18.0 kWH/day.

We’ve had lower bills (April’s was $151.26) and lower usage (February’s was 16.3 kWH/day), but April’s bill only covered 30 days instead of August’s 32 (August had a lower electricity usage) and February was when we first moved in and weren’t running a lot of electrical appliances like computers or dryers or washing machines. And in April Alice and I weren’t here for three weeks, we were back in Canoodia.

Screw you, HELCO!