Sports outlook

Does everybody have so much money except me that they don't care about these ridiculous gasoline prices? What bothers me is that it's costing me too much to drive to Kansas City to watch the Royals and I'm forced to do the TV thing while sitting in Nevada. I can't afford driving any distances to do that which I most enjoy, which is attending ballgames.

The same thing holds true for those of us who enjoy watching the Nevada Tigers but can ill afford many trips to McDonald County.

One of the great cop outs people use and have been using for a long time is that gasoline is costlier in Europe than it is here. Well, the last time I checked Europe was Europe and The United States is The United States. They are different in so many ways.

Europe is small and our country is huge by comparison. The cities in Europe are compact and here it seems that half the population resides outside the city limits.

Let's use this example. I have gone to Baltimore to watch the Royals and Orioles probably three times in the past. Now, if I lived in Paris and decided to drive east the same approximate distance I would go through Germany, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Poland and into Ukraine, all the way to Kiev. Such trips are probably possible over there for soccer fans where all the larger cities have big stadiums.

Where is the outrage? A few weeks back several thousand women gathered in Washington, D.C. for this huge pro-abortion rally. The last time I checked, abortion was no longer an issue. All that was decided years ago. Why couldn't these women have gathered to protest the high gasoline prices they paid to get themselves to Washington in the first place.

About three years ago there was this big row because they wanted to open what many said is the greatest oil reserve in the world. The only problem is that the oil was up on the north slope or somewhere nearly inaccessible in Alaska. The animal rights people got it stopped because they thought a pipeline might bother the caribou herds. That just shows you that caribou are, to some folks at least, more important than humans. I have nothing against animals and am particularly fond of dogs. However, I feel that animals should be entitled to the same rights as humans when they start paying taxes.

It has been stated in the past few days that the projected cost of gasoline will soon rise to $3 a gallon. That means if you have a 20-gallon tank it will cost you $60 to fill up. Good luck!

And don't forget that with the rising cost of fuel, all consumer goods will go up because they are delivered by vehicles that use fuel.

You people who live in one place and commute to another will soon be too poor to have any extra money to go to ballgames. Is this the death knell for high school sports where increasing fuel costs will cause the dimunition of programs.

And I sit here with all the time in the world to do nothing but gripe because I can no longer afford to drive to Kansas City to watch the Royals and must be content to use the TV, which is hardly the same.