Dean Martin – "Houston" (1965)

Saw a dollar yesterday

But the wind blew it away

(As the following post demonstrates, 2 or 3 lines would never let a dollar bill blow away!)

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Games like Sudoku and Wordle may be entertaining, but they don’t help a lick when it comes to saving money at the gas pump.

If you want to have more fun than a barrel of monkeys and save beaucoup dolares at the same time, you need to download the free Marathon Petroleum app – it turns a trip to the gas station into an enjoyable and challenging game of skill.

I’m assuming, of course, that you live in an area where Marathon gas is sold.  Fortunately, there are Marathon stations in the overwhelming majority of states.  (The ones that don’t have them – like Arkansas and Vermont – are states you don’t want to live in anyway.) 

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I recently returned from a group bike trip in upstate New York and needed to fill my car up.  So I headed to the Marathon station that’s closest to the 2 or 3 Lines World Headquarters building, which usually has the best prices in the area.  

A gallon of Marathon 87-octane regular currently costs $3.619.  Marathon’s 89-octane midgrade gas – which they call “Marathon Plus” – is going for $3.899 a gallon, while 93-octane premium is priced at $4.299.

Most gas stations have only two storage tanks – one that contains the lowest octane gasoline that is offered for sale (usually 87) and one that’s full of their highest octane fuel (usually 93).  If the station sells an 89-octane midgrade gas – which most stations do – it simply mixes two parts of its 87-octane gas with one part of 93-octane gas.  (If you add 87 + 87 + 93 and divide the sum by 3, you get 89.) 

You can do the same thing yourself.  Let’s say your car’s manufacturer recommends 89-octane fuel, and you need 12 gallons of gas to fill the tank.  You simply pump eight gallons of the 87 and then pump four gallons of the 93 – which gets you the same result as pumping 12 gallons of the 89-octane midgrade.

Why would anyone do that instead of just filling up with the midgrade?  Because it usually saves money.

Today it would have cost me $46.79 to put 12 gallons of Marathon Plus into my car.  But eight gallons of regular plus four gallons of premium cost only $46.15 – a savings of 64 cents.

Marathon’s midgrade is usually more fairly priced than the 89-octane fuel at other stations.  (If I had gone to my local Exxon or Shell station today, my savings would probably have been two or even three times as much.)  So I often don’t bother mixing my own midgrade gas when I go to a Marathon station, choosing to spend a little more money in order to save time – I am a very busy man, after all.  I’m also very old – so my time is valuable!

Today, mixing my own resulted in my saving a lot more than 64 cents – thanks to the Marathon app.

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I’m a member of the Marathon Rewards program, so I get five cents off every gallon of Marathon gas I pump.  But because I have the Marathon app, I get text notifications about other special deals almost every day.

The Marathon Rewards app

For example, Marathon is currently offering an additional five-cents-per-gallon discount on premium fuel.  If I had pumped just midgrade today, I would have gotten the usual nickel-off-per-gallon discount.  But by mixing my own 89 octane fuel, I qualified for an additional five cents off each of the four gallons of premium I purchased – ratcheting up my total discount from 60 cents to 80 cents.  (Which meant I actually saved 84 cents – not just 64 cents – by not simply filling up with midgrade.)

In addition, I got a text earlier this week offering an extra five-cents-per-gallon discount if I filled up anytime during the July 4th weekend.  That means I earned an additional 60 cents off – boosting my discount from 84 cents to $1.44.

But wait – there’s more!  

If you fill up any time in July, you get an extra two-cents-a-gallon discount if you fill up a second time before the end of the month.  So if I buy ten gallons next week, I’ll pocket another 20 cents.  (Marathon adds another two cents to your savings each time you fill up in July – so the second fillup saves me four cents a gallon on my third fillip, a third fillup saves me six cents a gallon on a fourth fillup, and so on.)

On top of that, Marathon is offering $3 in rewards to anyone who fills up 15 times before the end of 2026.  I’ll easily hit that number, so that three bucks is money in the bank for ol’ 2 or 3 lines.

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Last but not least, I used my Discover card to purchase gas today.

You routinely get a one per cent rebate on all your purchases using the Discover card.  But each quarter, Discover offers a five per cent rebate on specific purchase categories.

For example, in the first calendar quarter of this year – January 1 through March 31 – you got five per cent back if you paid for your groceries with a Discover card.

In the second quarter, restaurant purchases earned a five per cent rebate.

And in the current quarter – which began on July 1 – you get five per cent back when you use your Discover card at the gas station.  

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Let’s review the bidding.

1.  If I had simply purchased 12 gallons of 89-octane gas today, it would have cost me $46.79.

2.  By instead mixing 87-octane regular and 93-octane premium in a 2:1 ratio, I saved 64 cents.

3.  By being a member of the Marathon Rewards program, I earn five cents a gallon on all my purchases – which means I saved an additional 60 cents by buying 12 gallons of gas today.

4.  By taking advantage of the special discount on July purchases of premium fuel, I earned another 20 cents.

5.  By taking advantage of the special discount on all purchases over the July 4 weekend, I earned another 60 cents.

6.  By taking advantage of the bonus two-cents-per-gallon discount for all July purchases, I earned another 24 cents.  

Put it all together and what do you get?  I reduced the per-gallon price of the 89-octane gas I bought today from $3.899 to $3.709.

By using my Discover card to buy gas today, I reduced that per-gallon cost to $3.524.

Which means I saved $4.50 on my 12-gallon purchase – that’s close to a ten per cent savings.

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I want to end this post by asking three questions.  

First, is my arithmetic correct?  

Second, why do I go to such lengths simply to save a relatively insignificant amount of money on a tank of gas?

Third, why did I write this post?  Did I really think my readers would find it useful or entertaining?  Or did I write it for some other reason?

Feel free to respond to those questions by using the contact form on the 2 or 3 lines website.

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You might think that I picked today’s featured song because Marathon Petroleum is headquartered in Houston.  But you would be wrong.

The company originally known as Marathon Oil was headquartered for many years in Findlay, Ohio.  (Don’t feel bad if you’ve never heard of it.  I’d never heard of it either.)  

U. S. Steel bought the company in 1981, and moved the corporate headquarters to Houston.  But Marathon Oil’s refinery division – which was renamed Marathon Petroleum – remained in Findlay.

Marathon Petroleum’s Findlay, Ohio headquarters

“Houston” – which was a hit for Dean Martin in 1965 – was written by Lee Hazlewood, who wrote Nancy Sinatra’s biggest solo hits (including “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’,” “How Does That Grab You, Darlin’,” and “Sugar Town.”)

Sinatra and Hazlewood also recorded a number of duets.  The best-known of their collaborations is “Jackson,” but the most interesting of their duets is the wonderfully weird “Some Velvet Morning.”

I’ll have to feature “Some Velvet Morning” in a future 2 or 3 lines post.  I kind of wish I had featured it today.  Too late now!)

Click here to hear Dean Martin’s recording of “Houston.”

Click here to buy that recording from Amazon.

Alice Cooper – "Elected" (1972)

I never lied to you

I’ve always been cool

I wanna be elected!

“If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, again” is a proverb you’ve probably heard many times.

The Canadian humorist Stephen Leacock rejected that adage:

There is an old motto that runs, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.”  This is nonsense. 

It ought to read “If at first you don’t succeed, quit, quit at once.”

If you can’t do a thing, more or less, the first time you try, you will never do it.  Try something else while there is yet time.

It’s too bad that billionaire David Trone didn’t listen to Stephen Leacock.  If he had, he would have saved a lot of money.

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Saying that Trone spends money on his political campaigns like a drunken sailor is probably not fair to drunken sailors.

If you were as rich as David Trone,
you’d be laughing, too!

Trone knows drunken sailors, by the way – he and his brother Robert own Total Wine & More, which operates 250-odd liquor superstores in 28 states.  The company’s 2023 revenues exceeded $6 billion.  

Trone set a record in 2016 when he spent $13.4 million of his own money in an unsuccessful attempt to win the Democratic primary election for Maryland’s 8th congressional district.  No one had ever spent more money to lose a race for Congress.  (He got 35,400 votes, so his cost-per-vote was about $378.)

His estimated net worth is $2.5 billion, so dropping a mere $13.4 million didn’t discourage Trone.  When 2018 rolled around, he ran for Congress once more – but in Maryland’s 6th district instead of its 8th.  (Trone didn’t have to change his address to run in the 6th district – members of Congress don’t have to reside in the district they represent.)  

Trone outspent his Republican opponent by a 10-to-1 margin and cruised to victory in November.  He then  easily won re-election in 2020 and 2022.

He probably could have held on to his congressional seat for as long as he wanted to.  But when one of Maryland’s incumbent U.S. Senators announced his intention to retire in 2024, Trone decided he was just the man for the job.

That turned out to be a very costly mistake.  Trone spent a whopping $62.5 million seeking the Democratic nomination for that Maryland Senate seat, only to lose to Prince George’s County Executive Angela Alsobrooks.

And it wasn’t even close.  Alsobrooks beat Trone by a 53-to-43 margin.

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But even a second expensive defeat wasn’t enough to teach Trone a lesson.  This year, he decided to run for his old 6th district seat.

Perhaps he thought that April McClain Delaney, the woman who took his place when he tried to move from the House to the Senate, would politely step aside for him.  But she quickly disabused him of that notion.

Like Trone, Delaney is a very wealthy person.  (She obtained her wealth the old-fashioned way – she married a very rich guy.)

The two candidates go way back.  Delaney’s husband John represented the 6th district in Congress from 2012 until 2018, when he resigned to run for the Democratic nomination for President.  (You weren’t aware that Delaney was a candidate for President in 2020?  You’re not alone – his poll numbers were infinitesimal.)

Who took over Delaney’s seat in Congress?  None other than David Trone.  The Delaneys supported Trone’s candidacy, and Trone returned the favor by endorsing John Delaney for President.  But friendship went out the window when Trone tried to claw back April Delaney’s 6th district seat.  

Delaney speculated that Trone had  decided to run against her because he was “a bored billionaire.”    

But Trone said boredom had nothing to do with it.  “If I felt the congresswoman was doing a good job in representing the district and the Democratic Party, I would definitely have not run,” Trone told the Washington Post.

Because there no real policy differences between the two candidates, I can’t help but believe that the whole kerfuffle was about ego more than anything else.  (If there’s something I know a lot about, it’s egos.  I may not have a Trone-sized bank account, but I’ll match my ego to his any day of the week.)

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The fight for the 6th district Democratic nomination was the most expensive Congressional primary campaign in history.  Delaney spent $7.5 million of her husband’s money in hopes of holding on to her seat.  Trone topped that by shelling out a cool $25 million.

Nevertheless Delaney ended up prevailing by a 44-38 margin.  (Six other wannabes shared the remaining votes.) 

Just under 21,000 votes were cast for Trone, which means each vote cost over $1000.

Because Maryland allows a candidate to win with only a plurality of votes, we will be spared the spectacle of a runoff campaign this summer.  One can only imagine how much do-re-mi Mommy and Daddy Warbucks would go through in such a contest.

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When I wrote about Trone’s expensive defeat in the 2024 Maryland Senate primary, I noted that I was old enough to remember when it was the Republicans who had the advantage when it came to buying elections.  But now it’s the Democrats who have a big edge in campaign spending.

According to Open Secrets, a nonpartisan research group, Democratic candidates for federal office in 2020 heavily outspent their Republican opponents:

Biden’s campaign became the first to raise over $1 billion from donors.  Biden’s cash advantage over Trump helped him pepper swing states with far more campaign ads.  Biden also received more help from super PACs and “dark money” groups. 

Trump’s campaign raised $774 million.  Trump raised over half of his money from small donors giving $200 or less, a stunning figure no other presidential candidate has matched. . . .

In Senate races, Democratic general election candidates raised over $1.1 billion, easily dwarfing Republicans’ $752 million.  In House races, Democrats outraised Republicans $898 million to $763 million. 

That Democratic advantage held up in 2024, when the total spending for Democratic candidates in all federal elections was $3.8 billion compared to $2.6 billion in spending for Republican candidates – which is close to a 50% advantage.

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Times may have changed when it comes to which political party has the most money to spend.  But what hasn’t changed is that Alice Cooper’s 1972 masterpiece, “Elected,” is still the record ever about political candidates

Click here to view the fabulous “Elected” music video.

Click here to buy the record from Amazon.   

"General" Larry Platt – "Pants on the Ground" (2010)

Lookin’ like a fool

With your pants on the ground

We get a lot of two-part questions at trivia.  

The first part of the question is usually easy enough that most of the teams competing will know the correct answer.  

The second part of the question is usually more challenging – it’s designed to help separate the contenders from the pretenders.  (At one time, I might have said those questions were designed to help separate the men from the boys, and gone on to repeat the tired old joke about how they separate the men from the boys in Greece.  But I’m far too enlightened now to do that today.)

Here’s the first part of a two-part question we had a couple of weeks ago:

The contestants on this reality competition TV show, which first aired 24 years ago, included William Hung, Mary Roach, and General Larry Platt.

Most of the teams playing that night knew that the answer to that question was American Idol.  But the second part of that question was much more difficult:

What was the title of the song performed by General Larry Platt on that show? 

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I occasionally watched American Idol back in the day.  I vaguely remember William Hung, who had his fifteen minutes after butchering Ricky Martin’s “She Bangs” on a 2004 episode of the show.  (Hung quickly gained a cult following.  He appeared on all the late-night talk shows, was parodied on Saturday Night Live, and released an album that made it to #34 on the Billboard albums chart.)

But the other two names didn’t ring a bell, and I had no idea what song “General” Larry Platt might have performed.  And neither did my teammates.

(We didn’t know it at the time, but Larry Platt wasn’t an actual general – “General” was his nickname.  But at our trivia contests, the questions are read aloud – not printed – and you can’t hear quotation marks.)

We assumed that whatever he sang was a cover of someone else’s hit.  We kicked around a few guesses – “Bohemian Rhapsody,” “Sharp-Dressed Man,” and “Wanted Dead or Alive” among them – but they were all shots in the dark.

“Didn’t some guy’s pants fall down on American Idol?” I asked my teammates.  “Could this be that guy?”

 “General” Larry Platt performs on American Idol

After pondering that for a moment, our youngest team member said, “There was a song on American Idol called ‘Pants on the Ground.’ Is that what you’re thinking of?”

“Maybe,” I said.  “I just remember something about pants falling down.”

We wrote down “Pants on the Ground” as our answer.  And much to our surprise – and my delight – that turned out to be the correct answer!

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Larry Platt, who was born in 1947, was an African-American civil rights activist who was given the nickname “General” in recognition of his efforts on behalf of the civil rights movement.

(When we heard the American Idol trivia question, we assumed that Larry Platt was an active or retired military officer – we didn’t know that “General” was his nickname.  The questions are read aloud at our trivia contests, not printed – and you can’t hear quotation marks.)

Platt obviously didn’t think much of the younger generation.  “Pants on the Ground” was a jeremiad directed at young black men who walked around “lookin’ like a fool” with sagging pants and sideways baseball caps. 

Larry Platt auditioned for American Idol in 2010.  At that time, the show’s eligibility requirements provided that contestants had to be between the ages of 16 and 28.  The producers obviously recognized a good thing when they saw it and made an exception for the 62-year-old Platt.

The Youtube video of his performance of “Pants on the Ground” on American Idol has been viewed well over eleven million times.  Click here to watch that video.

Click here to listen to the studio recording of “Pants on the Ground” that was released subsequent to Platt’s American Idol appearance.  It reached #46 on the Billboard “Hot 100” singles chart.

Click here to buy that recording from Amazon.