09:33 – Costco run and dinner with Mary and Paul yesterday. That was the first time we’d hit Costco on Saturday; usually we go late on a Sunday afternoon. It was noticeably busier. There were relatively few carts available when we arrived, maybe 100 or so. As usual, Barbara grabbed one cart for the general shopping, and I grabbed a second to fill up with Coke. I checked out separately, and headed for the truck to transfer the Coke. When I got back to the entrance, there were people milling around because there were zero shopping carts available.
And, speaking of real inflation, the Cokes that cost $4.19 per four-pack of 2-liter bottles the last time I bought them a month or so ago, were now $4.99, a nearly 20% bump in a month.
We had dinner at the same restaurant we’d been to the last two or three Costco runs. I was surprised to see that my standard order there was no longer on the menu. I always order the same thing at any particular restaurant, which is why I don’t like going to new restaurants; I have to order something new. When I was working for the Libertarian National Committee during the 1980 presidential campaign, there was an Arthur Treacher’s Fish & Chips restaurant on the same block as the headquarters building. I had the same order there every day for eight months.
There was an interesting article in the paper this morning about a massive cheating scandal in the Atlanta public schools. Not students cheating. Teachers and administrators cheating. They were literally erasing wrong answers on test papers submitted by poor students and substituting the correct answers. There was also an organized effort by the teachers and administrators to arrange seating during tests to intersperse good students with poor students to allow the poor students to copy the answers from the good students. The upshot was that they ended up with students in middle school who were able to read at only a first-grade level. No surprises here. The teachers’ and administrators’ jobs depend on these poor students passing tests. NCLB strikes again.