Gonna Have To Face It...

I know I'm putting a great big "freshness dated" sign on my forehead by saying that I can remember when MTV stood for "music television" and furthermore I have clear and distinct memories of the gallons dial spinning slower than the dollar dial on a gas pump. Heck, I can remember when there were dials on gas pumps, not these fancy-schmancy LCD readouts that whirl madly as the price of gasoline continues to creep into new and bizarre territory.
How much is too much? I've ruminated here in this blog before about the relative absurdity of the price of this and that. I have made the connection between the price of gas and the price of cigarettes. A pack of cigarettes runs somewhere between three and five dollars a pack, so we'll just call that four dollars for twenty cigarettes (don't start whining about "half-price" cigarettes on the Internet either) - that would make each cigarette worth twenty cents. This makes R.P. McMurphy's assertion (while playing poker in the day room) to Martini in "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest" that "If you break it in half, you don't get two nickels, you get shit. Try and smoke it. You understand?" Now you could get at least a dime for half a cigarette, so the exchange rate is going nowhere but up. My point is this: Smoking cigarettes, while causing death and birth defects, is still not so expensive that people have stopped doing it.
Pinhead George has told us that America is "addicted to oil." Watch us flinch mightily as we raise the pump nozzle to our tanks and listen to the distant whine of fossils finding their way into their final incarnation. Buy a hybrid and console yourself with the joy of getting forty to sixty miles per gallon, you can even use the carpool lane! It's still using gasoline.
What are we to do then? A new study finds that the supermassive black holes at the hearts of some galaxies are the most fuel efficient engines in the universe. "If you could make a car engine that was as efficient as one of these black holes, you could get about a billion miles out of a gallon of gas," said study team leader Steve Allen of the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology at Stanford University. I guess that means it's up to a Cal Berkeley engineer to figure out how to get one of these babies underneath your hood for the 2008 model year.