By: David Matthews
Time for change
When James Jones walked into the Jake Sweeney car dealership in Springdale, Ohio, this summer, he brought with him some change that everyone could believe in—$8,000 worth to be precise.
Jones pointed to a brand- new 2008 half-ton Chevrolet Silverado and said, “I want that truck.” He then plunked down his down payment: 16 coffee cans full of coins.
Salesman David Crisswell told the Cincinnati Enquirer: “He had dimes, quarters, half-dollars, silver and Susan B. Anthony dollars. It took me an hour and a half to count all of it.”
Jones, 70, said that he has always kept his personal money at home in coins because he doesn’t trust banks or paper money. “Paper money will burn,” he said, “but it is hard to damage coins. I don’t know how long it took me to save this amount, probably all my life.”
Jones’ family has become used to his penny-pinching ways. What surprised them was the fact that Jones was finally replacing his 1981 Chevy pickup. Back in January, Jones was nearly killed when the emergency brake gave out while the truck was idling and rolled over Jones, confining him to a hospital for months.
From the minds of babes
It looks like the must-have office accessory of 2009 may never see the light of day, thanks to German police.
Two 17-year-old would-be inventors had been working on the solution to the age-old problem of inefficient intra-office transportation. Isn’t there a way to make a trip to the copier on the way to the mail room after grabbing some coffee in the lunchroom without having to walk?
The teens’ solution was to surround a standard office chair with a metal frame and attach a lawnmower engine and bicycle brakes. Now you’re moving around the office and taking a client out for golf, all without ever having to stand up.
Unfortunately, police happened upon the teens testing their invention on public roads outside of Frankfurt. The chair was confiscated and the pair is being investigated on a variety of possible offenses.
Just walk away
If you don’t have enough change to buy a pickup truck, and your local police will not let you drive your office chair, it might be time to move somewhere with a higher “walkability score.”
WalkScore.com is a new website that assigns rankings to cities, neighborhoods and addresses based on the number of amenities within walking distance. The higher the walkability score, the easier it should be to get by without a car.
So why walk when you own a perfectly fine automobile?
As WalkScore.com explained, “Compact, walkable communities . . . are the solution to some of our biggest shared challenges, from childhood obesity to social isolation, from crash deaths to disappearing farmland, from the high price of gas to the architectural blight of strip development.”
Ironically, the cities identified as most walkable by the site also are some of the most congested. Here are their top five:
1. San Francisco
2. New York City
3. Boston
4. Chicago
5. Philadelphia
If you don’t like to walk, here are the site’s five least-walkable cities:
1. Jacksonville
2. Nashville
3. Charlotte
4. Indianapolis
5. Oklahoma City
