Comparisons

Here's a few things I have observed lately.

First up, here's a picture I have been wanting to take for a long time, ever since I first saw this. I was stopped in traffic on I-35 so grabbed the opportunity. They transport new trucks by piling them on top of each other and driving the bottom one. I looked as I went past afterwards, they're attached by wooden blocks, bolted on to the truck frame underneath. There's four trucks next to me here, and there's three more in a separate batch up ahead.



Meanwhile, due to a slight mix-up in Cabelas the other week, I walked out of there with a box of shotgun shells that was a little more perky than the ones we usually use. They'd wrongly marked the shells with a sale price - or put them in the wrong place - I don't really know, but they ended up having to give me a $140 box of shells for $59! Now, our usual shells have 1 and 1/8 oz of shot pellets inside and a certain amount of powder. These expensive chaps (on the left) had 1 and 1/4 oz and some kind of souped up powder in there, and look at the amount of brass they need to contain all this extra energy! The normal shell on the right is a lot lighter. And yes, you can really feel the difference when you let one of these off. Packs a lot of punch. We actually ended up trading most of the ones we had left with Neil for some normal rounds as we like our shoulders without gunstock-shaped holes in.



Lastly, how about these Creme Eggs! I saw some in the garage over Easter and grabbed a couple after making sure they were actually imported from Cadbury UK and not some nasty Hershey's knockoff. (Big difference, you know.) I looked at them and thought they had got smaller since I last saw them.

Then on Easter Sunday, it was Alex's birthday and Tamzin and Allan had invited us to his party, so we were over there for the afternoon. Cara was just back from the UK where she had been doing a supply run and amongst lots of other UK foods, had brought us back an Easter egg! Thanks, Cara! And it happened to be a Creme Egg one... which contained normal UK eggs.

They don't look a lot different here I know, but the UK egg on the left feels noticeably bigger and heavier in your hand than the import egg on the right. (The battery is a AA for size comparison, no, we don't eat those). I am a sad git and weighed them, the UK egg is 42g and the import is 36g. So obviously Cadburys are keeping back as much of the good chocolate as they can, or trying to save on shipping costs, or both.

So if you see green on the foil, it's an import, and I guess you can feel good about eating so much less chocolate, in fact it must be good for you ;-)