Good morning, Gentle Reader! I know, I know: “What’s good about Monday?” Well, I suppose it depends on your perspective. If you still work for wages, perhaps a certain dreariness is to be expected. On the other hand, if you work for no wages, as does your humble Curmudgeon, it’s just one day among seven: as pleasant or vile as any of the other six.
But we do have some interesting material for you, so have a look:
1. Energy.
The most recent estimates I can find of annual American energy consumption hover around 94 quadrillion British Thermal Units (BTU). If you prefer the metric system, which I do under these circumstances, that’s approximately 94 quintillion joules: 94x1018 newton-meters.
If you have no feel for such magnitudes – and who does? – that’s a whole honkin’ lot of energy. Threats to various portions of our energy-supply system have people looking at all sorts of adjustments and alternatives. Here’s a very interesting one:
By dropping a nuclear reactor 1.6 kilometers (1 mile) underground, Deep Fission aims to use the weight of a billion tons of rock and water as a natural containment system comparable to concrete domes and cooling towers. With the fission reaction occurring far below the surface, steam can safely circulate in a closed loop to generate power.
[...]
Deep Fission’s small modular reactor (SMR), called Gravity, is designed to stand 9 meters tall while remaining slim enough to fit inside a borehole roughly three-quarters of a meter wide. The company says its modular approach allows multiple 15-megawatt reactors to be clustered on a single site: A block of 10 would total 150 MW, and Deep Fission claims that larger groupings could scale to 1.5 GW.
This is an exciting prospect. However, if we divide that 15 megawatt output into the 94 quintillion joules yearly consumption, we find that that little reactor would have to labor for 6.26 trillion seconds to meet the annual consumption figure. As there are only about 31 million seconds in a day, it appears we’d need more than one. About 200,000 of them, in fact.
That’s a lot of reactors and a lot of uranium in a lot of mile-deep boreholes. A lot of regulatory bodies to sweet-talk. Well, no doubt someone is working on it.
2. Marketing.
The summary below of chain-gas-station / convenience store Buc-ee’s marketing and design strategy strikes me as the greatest stroke of commercial genius since the drive-through fast-food place:
Did you know Buc-ee's business model is essentially based on our bladder? pic.twitter.com/URlF2amMCA
— Sovey (@SoveyX) November 19, 2025
That struck me very nearly speechless. (If you’re a regular Gentle Reader, you know that nothing strikes me completely speechless, but this came close.) But like most great insights, it’s perfectly simple once you understand it.
Buc-ee’s target customer profile is a woman in an automobile. The entire thrust of its design was to cater to her. She might not be alone, but her presence is the key. So attracting women commuters and women traveling with their families were the Buc-ee’s target. The results speak for themselves.
There are no Buc-ee’s in the American Northeast. Maybe someday. They actually sound like they’re worth patronizing for any reason or none. Hint, hint, Buc-ee’s management!
3. Relations Between The Sexes.
You’ve probably seen images of “bachelor pads” that look like this:
In truth, that’s a rather upscale “pad,” but it will serve. Such living arrangements have been the targets of sarcastic women for decades. But what if it’s trending upward, owing to the declining interest in marriage and family among men?
Please view it to the end. This gentleman has thought through the implications of at least some “men going their own way.” If young Smith were to elect such a life path early enough, he could reach his mid-forties in a state that makes retirement achievable then and there. Yes, he would forfeit marriage, children, and the possibility of a McMansion, but those are goals no one is required to pursue.
No, it doesn’t appeal to me. Nor would it have appealed to me when I was in my twenties. But it’s an open choice that some men, at least, will find palatable, with the consequences the video delineates.
Women plaintively asking “Where are all the men?” (Variation: “Where are all the good men?”) should ponder this. If you want to mate, you must make the lifelong bachelor / early retirement choice depicted above less appealing to men than mating with you. As you can’t change us... well, what does that imply?
We have choices, too.
That’s all for the present. Have a good day and perhaps I’ll be back later with another serving of drivel. Until then, for best results in living, adhere to the mighty Precepts of the late Nelson Algren:
- Never eat at a place called “Mom’s.”
- Never play cards with a man named “Doc.”
- And never bed a woman who’s got more troubles than you.
Smart guy, wasn’t he?
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