Have you noticed that the sizes of the sandwiches sold in fast food joints have gotten smaller recently? For example, although the size of the bun on Burger King’s “Whopper” hamburger still lives up to its name, the beef patty has shrunk until it’s little more than a caricature of what it once was. And Wendys is even worse. They have not only shrunk the size of their chicken patties, but the buns as well.

Of course smaller portions aren’t neccessarily bad given the way the typical American wasteline has gotten larger in recent years (mine included), but one would think that smaller meals would command lower prices. Such is not the case however.

Even as the sizes of fast food meals were being reduced, their prices were growing much faster than the rate of inflation. What this means of course is that we consumers are getting less product for more money, and in a period of extremely low inflation that simply makes no sense. But in today’s world few things do.

I’m constantly amazed at the ingenious ways marketers come up with to entice consumers to part with their hard-earned money. The scams employed vary all the time as folks finally begin to catch on, and it’s always interesting to see what angle they come up with next.

Right now the ploy of choice seems to be something along the lines of “Order right now and we’ll send you a second widget absolutely free“, and then the announcer quickly says in a hushed voice: ”Just pay separate shipping and handling.”

The first time I heard that pitch on a television commercial I thought “Now what sense does that make? That little widget is about the size of a candy bar and weighs about two ounces. Why on earth should they expect me to pay double for shipping and handling for a product they’re gonna let me have for free?”

The answer of course is profit. If the fast-talking announcer can talk you into paying $12 “separate” shipping and handling for an “extra” widget that costs them something like $3, they just made a fast and easy $9. And since they’ll just toss that second widget right into the same box they’re shipping the first one in, that $9 is pretty much pure profit.

What amazes me even more than the ingenious scam tactics these companies come up with is the fact that people actually fall for them - and in large numbers. One would think it would be easy to see through the thin layer of smoke that veils this scam, but apparently not.

Oh, by the way, if you like this blog post I’ll let you read two more for free! Just send me $10 shipping and handling. Don’t worry, you’ll be getting almost as much for your money as you would if you purchased a pair of those widgets from the fast-talking TV announcer!

Well, it’s springtime again, and around here that always means having to pick up a ton of sycamore branches before the first mowing of the season can take place. Lots of the gnarled branches fall to the ground every winter, but the gale-force winds and heavy snows we had this year left a lot more of them than usual littering our yard.

As anyone with a sycamore in his/her yard will tell you, they are beautiful trees with distinctive bark and huge, plate-sized leaves. But they will also tell you that they sure can make a mess as their brittle branches break off and fall to the ground.

The better part of this afternoon was spent picking up and hauling off this year’s “crop” of sycamore branches, and now it’s time to begin the seemingly endless cycle of mowing three acres of grass once a week until autumn. It’s all fun and games until the branches start falling again – which will likely be during the very next thunderstorm.

Spammers and scammers tend to change the products they’re hawking from time to keep in order to keep the public off guard, and the “hot” product of the moment seems to be ”luxury watches”.

Lately I’ve been receiving dozens of spam emails per day offering me either a Rolex or a TAG Heuer timepiece at a ridiculously low price, offers which for some might be just too hard to resist. The problem of course is that these emails are scams.

As luck would have it there is an easy to remember axiom that can help you distinguish the scams that arrive in your inbox from legitimate offers: If the email was sent to you by anyone other than a company that you explicitly agreed to receive email offers from, the odds are extremely high that the email is either a spam, a scam, or both.

As with any product, it’s perfectly fine to buy an expensive watch online, but you would be wise to make your purchase from a company that actually pays cold, hard cash for advertising instead of flooding the world’s inboxes with tons of offers that really are “too good to be true”.

It seems that about once every month a new “favorite” pitch gets added to the bottomless spam bucket, and this month’s flavor appears to be fake diplomas. Of course they aren’t hawked as fakes, and in some cases they truly are real diplomas made available to people who haven’t earned them (in exchange for a generous fee of course), but the end result is the same either way: Crooks and fakes passing themselves off as college graduates, with a diploma in hand to “prove” it.

It’s hard to believe that people actually fall for these types of scams, but fall they do or the spammers would have to look for another line of work. Perhaps it’s greed, perhaps it’s naïveté, or more likely a little of both, but spam is profitable because far too many among us are all too willing to take the bait. When will the gullible among us finally learn their lesson about dealing with such lowlifes as spammers and fraudsters? My guess is never, and that leaves all the rest of us having to wade though hundreds of garbage emails a day just to retrieve a handful of legitimate messages.

There are plenty of opportunities available for earning a real diploma, but they don’t come easy…or overnight. Legitimate online college degree programs abound, but just like the diplomas earned by attending brick and mortar colleges and universities, earning one requires dedication and hard work. No spammers need apply.

When I was a kid my mom could go to the grocery store most any time of the day or week and buy a fresh loaf of bread. There was a Kerns Bakery just down the road in Bristol, and all the local stores sold their bread, cakes and other bakery items just hours after they came out of the oven.

But several years ago that wonderful bakery closed its doors, and ever since that day it’s been easier to find an honest politician than an honest-to-goodness fresh loaf of bread. I have picked up loaves that had just been brought in off the truck, only to discover that they were already hard enough to send you to the ER if you happened to drop one of them on your foot.

Back in the day there were local bakeries in most cities of any real size across this great land, but as the industry consolidated via mergers, buyouts and bankruptcies, they literally became few and far between. And of course that has turned out to be quite a bad thing for us consumers.

The “old” bread that the bakeries used to sell in their thrift stores was fresher than the “new” bread that Kroger, Wal-Mart and the other grocery stores try to pass off as fresh these days, and it drives me bonkers every time I try to find a loaf that won’t chip a tooth at the very first bite.

We humans have made great strides in many areas of our lives in recent years, but when it comes to the very staple of the American diet we have gone backwards in time. It saddens me to know that my granddaughters will likely never have the pleasure of biting into a truly fresh slice of bread.

From my perspective, setting up a brand new PC should be about as simple as taking it out of the box, connecting the cables, and installing whatever software programs you plan to run – but nothing could be further from the truth. These days most new computers come from the factory with trial-ware, adware and tons of other “stuff” clogging up the hard drive, which usually makes the system run as slow as a turtle that’s taking an afternoon nap.

I spent the better part of yesterday afternoon and evening getting a new HP notebook ready for use by its new owner, and the process was almost as time-consuming and tedious as performing open heart surgery and balancing the national budget at the same time.

First, I waded through and discarded a long list of trialware and adware that was wasting over half of the available hard drive space. It’s no wonder that PC’s are so inexpensive these days since virtually every major software company on the planet pays the computer manufacturers big bucks to preload their hard drives with trial versions of their programs. And in my opinion, the worst of the worst are the pre-loaded trial versions of ”security suites”.

All too often a pre-loaded anti-virus app will expire, leaving the owner completely and unwittingly unprotected from the horde of threats than come in via the Internet on a daily basis. Many novice PC users simply have no clue about the importance of keeping their anti-virus subscription paid up and their threat definition files up-to-date. They naively think that if their computer is running an anti-virus app, they must be protected. Obviously, this is not the case. The first thing to be removed from this new notebook was the pre-loaded trial version of Norton Internet Security (I replaced it with the free, newly-released Microsoft Security Essentials).

After all the garbage had been cleaned up, I paid a visit to the Windows Update site to download and install all the updates that were ready and waiting for this brand new PC (that was running a brand new installation of Windows). Even with my lightning-fast cable Internet connection and a speedy new CPU, it took about an hour and a half to download and install all the updates – and that didn’t include the ones labeled “Optional”!

To cap off the evening, I spent another hour or so creating a set of Restore DVD’s just in case Windows should need to be reinstalled at some point in the future (that never happens, right?). Well, you would think that the PC manufacturers must think so since they no longer include Restore CD’s or DVD’s with their new computer systems. They leave it to you to create a set of your own with a utility that comes bundled with Windows, and if you fail to do so and end up needing them later, they make you pay for a set of “replacement” discs to fill in for the set you never received in the first place.

After the final step in this long ordeal (er, I mean procedure) was finished, my friend’s new notebook ran like a Cheetah with its tail on fire. Well satisfied with the results of my labor, I hit the sack for some well-deserved rest. It’s too bad I spent the night dreaming about all those re-boots.

This is truly a sad day for all freedom-loving Americans. For some inexplicable reason the folks in charge of the iconic Empire State Building in New York City lit up the top floors of the building in red this evening to honor the Chinese communist regime’s 60th anniversary of rule over the world’s most populous nation. What kind of signal does this send to our friends and foes around the globe? That America respects the brutal regime and approves of their atrocious human rights record and policies?

This despicable event took place in the heart of downtown Manhattan, the financial capitol of the most successful free market driven nation in history. Empire State Building manager Joseph Bellina called the lights “a high honor” and said he was proud of the relationship between “our countries and our people.” It’s enough to make any freedom-loving person ill.

It’s hard to imagine our culture retreating any farther away from the pinnacle of noble ideals established by our nation’s founders than they have already, but it seems like it’s something new every day. Like I said, this is truly a sad day for all freedom-loving Americans.

This summer Cheria and I have had a great many unwanted guests on our property. I’m talking about the kind of guests who just show up and make themselves right at home, building nests and then protecting them from anyone and everyone who ventures too close with a swift, painful sting. Yeah, that’s right, I’m talking about those rascally bees.

Cheria was mowing the lawn the other day with our lawn tractor when a swarm of yellow jackets appeared out of nowhere and stung her 3 or 4 times on the hand. I’ve never seen her move so fast, and for good reason: she had just mowed over a yellow jackets’ nest that had been hidden beneath the tall grass. She hurried into the house and held some ice on the affected areas, and except for a little swelling and some moderate pain everything turned out ok.

We also had a couple of bumblebee nests in the back yard as well as several wasp nests under the eves of the house and our outbuilding. Perhaps it’s the weather we’ve had throughout the summer, but it seems like those little critters have been everywhere this year!

Using methods that would probably give the folks at PETA a major stroke, Cheria and I quickly destroyed the bees’ nests as we found them. I’m sure we’ll have a few more unwanted guests before the weather turns cold enough to drive them into hibernation for the winter, and when they do show up we’ll be ready to send them to that great hive in the sky as well.

Now let me tell you about the snakes. Well…maybe not.

“Made in China”

It’s getting harder every day to find a product for sale in America’s retail stores that doesn’t have those words stamped onto the carton. Many stores used to proudly display signs that read “Made in America”, but those signs are rarely seen these days. How sad.

In roughly two centuries (a mere whisk of time in world history) American engineering and American workers built the world’s most successful economy from scratch, but today that same economy is in a shambles. Gone are most of the high-paying manufacturing jobs, exported to places where human rights are largely ignored and the workers toil under conditions that most of us Americans would find appalling. Worse still, our capital is being systematically handed over to regimes that would love nothing more than to see us annihilated from the face of the earth.

Our corporations have sold out the very people who built them with their sweat, blood and loyalty, and our federal government created the environment that encouraged it under the guise of “free trade”. There is nothing “free” or fair about the playing field our liberal politicians have created for our companies to have to compete in.

Like it or not, we live in a world where we, the United States of America, are the only country that plays by the rules. And we will never again see the kind of prosperity we rightly enjoyed before NAFTA was allowed to rear its ugly head unless we wake up and start putting America and Americans first once again.

Do we really want our grandchildren to live in a world where they never read the words “Made in America”?