Remember the Damned?

Welcome to this week’s Reno News & Review.

All the horrible crap going on in the world, and I feel like trying to be amusing. OK, here goes.

First, have you seen the new Pepsi commercial? It’s the one with the guy who gets picked up by a big spherical Pepsi logo, while a song in some foreign language—it might be French—plays loudly. I was a punk rocker back in the ’70s before “My Sharona” heralded in New Wave, so I recognize the tune. I don’t understand French, so it may have completely different lyrics. The tune’s from a song called “Jet Boy, Jet Girl, ”popularized by Elton Motello back about 1977. Now, there’s a reason Pepsi plays the French song: The English one is naughty. The first verse goes “Can you tell what’s on my mind/She’s with him it’s driving me wild/I’d like to hit him on the head until he’s dead/The sight of blood is such a high/OOWE-OO-OO/He gives me head.” The rest of the song goes on to say how the singer makes his rival into a girl.

I’ve never been a big Pepsi drinker, but I can’t be the only guy on the planet for whom this commercial evokes un-Pepsi-like images.

And then there’s the other thing I’ve been thinking about in my more stupid moments. Why is gasoline still sold with 9/10s at the end of the price? If gasoline is selling for $2.56 9/10, that one tenth of a cent is 1/2560 of a gallon. Is there something wrong with my math? I’ve never been too good with fractions, but I know when I can put 24 gallons in my 23-gallon tank, they ain’t measuring to the one-tenth of a cent. So what if I buy exactly a gallon of gas to fuel my lawnmower? They don’t give me my one-tenth cent change. And they sure as hell don’t round down. That means the price is really whatever the advertised price is plus one-tenth of a cent. Can anyone tell me the point of these extra numbers? And I am not accepting, “Because that’s the way they’ve always done it.” The United States consumes 400 million gallons a day. I wonder how much that one-tenth of a cent ripoff adds up to?