NPR Books: June 30, 2008 by Airlines

Web 2.0 gas prices 

Earlier we were having a hot debate about how John McCain doesn’t know how much a gallon of gas costs. Read his blow by blow attempts to download Moviemaker here.

Gizmodo takes us down into the secret vault of Legos. Later I was waiting at a red light at that exact spot and thought to take out the camera and take a picture of the sign today.

ICANN may loosen up restrictions on domain names. Someday there could be a WebbAlert.MorganWebb -- except I don't have the 50k you might need to register the domain. Why advertise TO young folks when they can do the advertising for you?

Sprint will give you some pocket cash - all you have to do is make a commercial for the new Samsung Instinct Phone and upload it to YouTube. How long before they take it down? Uploaded it to Flickr. You can’t even go to war (something McCain is proud to say he knows something about) without gas. The prices had changed quite a bit!

What a world we live in.

Anyway, we did a little checking, found an MP3 of the interview where the question came up, verified that the transcript was accurate. All he has to do is look out the window of the famous Straight Talk Express. A president should know what gas costs, as would the CEO of an airline or car company. (Yeah, if you want to split hairs, he wasn’t asked if he knows the price of gas today, literally, just if he knew the price of gas at any time in the past. Click here!

Then I went looking on Google Maps for a Street View of a gas price sign on a station at San Pablo and Marin Ave in Albany, an intersection I go through frequently on my way to San Francisco or the South Bay or the movies. It’s a very basic indicator of what’s going on. I thought not, what single fact could you expect someone running for President to know? Lots of gas.

You could forgive him for not knowing what a gallon of milk goes for, you’d have to actually go inside a store to find out, but the price of gas is displayed prominently on street signs. Gas is ridiculously expensive. It’s like asking the manager of a baseball team their percentage (the number of games won divided by the total number played).

Bill Gates is retiring - he gets frustrated with Microsoft products too!

People need to do some soul-searching, now, and then do some damage control before this gets much worse. I can dream. Or asking a batter how many RBIs he has.