Passing Gas

According to the results of a visitor poll at the CNN.com website just after 4 p.m. (Central) today, about 85% of more than 340,000 respondents have no travel plans for the Memorial Day weekend. Apparently, a lot of folks are staying close to home. They may be going to a nearby park for a picnic or a nearby beach for some swimming or a friend's house for a cookout, but if they're going anywhere, they're going places within easy driving range of home.

I wonder if many Californians are traveling this holiday weekend. Gas prices in California are among the nation's highest, and the unemployment rate exceeded 10% several months ago.

You can relax a little, though. No one is suggesting that we will witness a repeat of last summer's $4 gas prices.

Even so, California's in a lot of financial trouble, but the special election this week didn't do much to resolve it. As the Los Angeles Times wrote this week, both liberals and conservatives can apply their own special spins to the results, but it's clear that program cuts will be necessary.

The Times didn't think the results suggested a philosophical shift. Intead, the Times suggested the vote reflected the influence of "high unemployment and scarce cash."

Still, the prudent thing for a Californian to do these days is keep personal spending down. If that is what a lot of Californians are doing this weekend, I wonder what that's doing to the tourist attractions sprinkled across the Golden State. Between joblessness and gas prices, there has to be less disposable income than those attractions are accustomed to.

Speaking of gas, Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were known for the banks they robbed, but they preferred to rob gas stations and stores — I guess they were willing to swap the higher yield one could expect from a bank for a greater likelihood that there would be no security officers on the premises of a store or gas station.

Bonnie and Clyde, who lived in this area before launching their criminal careers, achieved something of a folk–hero status during their brief lives, which came to an end 75 years ago today when they were ambushed near their hideout in Bienville Parish, La. The six members of the posse fired approximately 130 rounds.

Here's an interesting piece of trivia. In Bonnie and Clyde's day, gas stations were called "filling stations." At least, I know that is what they were called here in Texas. I remember my grandparents, who lived in Dallas, always called them "filling stations."

My parents, who were small children when Bonnie and Clyde were killed, grew up with that phrase, but they must have been coming of age when the terminology began to change. So my memory is that they alternated between the two phrases until, at some point, "gas station" took up permanent residence in their heads.