Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, October 3, 1993 TAG: 9310030008
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: E-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Ed Shamy
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Hold up your two pinkie fingers. See how thick they are? That's about the thickness of each of the two steel cables - that's it, two - holding aloft the Kinsey Crane & Sign Co. scaffold at the Dominion Tower. It's something to think about next time you get to cussing your job. At least you're not 90 yards off the ground held up by nothing more than two steel pinkies.
Your mom is right: Quit complaining. You have it better than most.
The yearly turnover among fast-food restaurant employees, according to sociologist George Ritzer, is 300 percent. He was at Roanoke College last month to pitch his theory of the ravages of McDonaldization on society.
Your guidance counselor was right: You weren't the only high schooler who quit the french-fry machine after four months.
Fight promoter Rick "Elvis" Parker, the Salem Civic Center, June 1991: The prizefight was not fixed. From the time the opening bell rang to the time that one fighter lay supposedly unconscious on the canvas took as much time as it took you to read this sentence - 12 seconds.
Elvis, the fight promoter and manager of winner Mark Gastineau, says with a straight face that the fight was legit.
Elvis in September 1993, talking to Sports Illustrated: "Never, ever, ever, ever in any fights I've been associated with have I paid anyone to take a fall or take a dive for anyone."
Your hunch was right: Elvis and fixed fights seem to be a commonly recurring theme.
Shortly after the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicle started selling license plates with college insignias, it was a point of enormous local consternation that Penn State University jumped out to a quick lead.
That has long since been rectified.
As of Sept. 1, there are 2,250 Virginia Tech license tags out there; 1,124 University of Virginia tags; 1,007 James Madison University tags; 904 College of William and Mary tags; and 897 Penn State tags.
Your boss is right: You should have gone to Tech.
It takes 90 minutes for an Air Force pilot to fly an F-15E fighter-bomber jet out of Goldsboro, N.C., to Roanoke, then to Sumter, S.C., and back to Goldsboro on a training mission. That's about the same amount of time you'll spend waiting for your connecting flight in Charlotte.
Your dad was right. You should have joined the Air Force.
A couple of callers last week were hot about a 4.3-cent-per-gallon federal tax on gasoline that took effect Friday. Their beef? Gas prices all end in 0.9. If you add a 4.3-cent tax, you end up with a number that ends in 0.2. Have you seen any filling stations selling gas for 97.2 cents lately? Ever? No, the price will likely be rounded up, which means somebody (not these angry callers) will be earning 0.7 cents more for every gallon as a result of the tax.
Or will they? According to the Service Station Dealers of America, a trade group, many stations plan to add 5 cents to the price of a gallon of regular gasoline, 3 cents to each gallon of premium.
Your wife was right: You should have bought that big luxury car instead of that impractical, mid-life crisis sportster.
by CNB