JP and I were ready to head south to the Keys by around ten in the morning, but we never made it. Not trusting the weather report, we could see it was going to be raining by mid-afternoon. So we had a big spaghetti lunch and went over to the Barn on Kendall Drive. It is actually half again as big as your regular bookstore. That is offset by the large foreign language section. JP was again astonished by how I talk to women without trying obviously to get them in the sack. It is just not the Florida way.
The photo is the two Jamis bikes chained together near a small shopping center where JP used to be the security guard some twenty years ago. It is rare in Florida, in that it is very well maintained, almost spotless. Real benches you can sit on. Free picnic tables in a shady central area.We rode the bikes over between rain showers, stopping along the way. I wanted to scope out a high-hat and I have a complaint about what happened then. There is a Guitar Center in the mall, but they tried to sales process me when I asked for the price. Instead of the guy being a decent American and saying “the cheapest set is around $180”, I got the runaround.
He launched into the nonsense about looking up the price, like he was doing me such a big favor. The worst was his insisting on pricing the stand and the cymbals separately. I had to tell him twice that a high-hat was a combination of the components and useless without both parts, but the jerkface could not cut off the lame sales pitch. He continually kept up that he was going to see what he could “do for me”. What a typical south Florida peckerhead. He must have asked five times if I was going to “take this on the road” and each time I asked him if it made any difference on the price. I finally walked out after hearing him mutter the prices to himself.
The guy was an absolute prick, the type that deliberately treats your simple question as a signal to launch his cripple-brained sales pitch, constantly trying to maneuver you into buying something you don’t want. Is it his job? No, not when that behavior isn’t called for. It took over ten minutes to get a single piece of information out of him, all the rest was his bullshit. I can just picture him in a sales meeting with his equally asinine boss training him to do precisely that.. Unless you say no in a way they will interpret as impolite, you’ll have to buy something. Such dipshits will not give you the time of day without trying to suck money out of you. You may think that is okay. I don’t.
You want to know the worst part of the experience? It was that the fat little bastard intentionally trying to slow things down to keep me in the store as long as possible. Even after I told him I had people waiting outside, he continued to try to drag things along. Maybe some moron-salesman theory that the longer I’m there, the more he can falsely ingratiate me into spending money? Bad, Guitar Center, bad!
The rain never really cleared for long, so JP directed us over to the Village Pub, and out of the way place with great specials. It is what some would call a “beer parlor” because that is all they sell. There is some ordinance about them being less than a permitted distance from a day care center. This is but one more example of the strange mentality of Florida, where it is okay to take the same children to an “amusement” park like Boomers where the “games” are almost exact replicas of gambling slot machines.
We got caught in there for an hour and finally rode our bikes home in the rain anyway. We got to talking philosophy and women. JP finds it very odd that I don’t mind stripper bars, although I have never go to them. I’ve said it before, that when I compare what I’ve seen in this world as far as talent, education and personality to the caliber of men that I’ve met in Florida, I am forced to agree with strip joints. There are two givens. One, that paying for it is absolutely the only way most Florida men will ever see a young pretty girl take her clothes off. Two, such men have to convince themselves all other men must do the same.Our bad luck with renting DVDs was in full force. We rented a doomsday film, “Children of Men” and a war movie, “Days of Glory”. Don’t bother, they will soon enough be boring you on the flatscreen. Mind you, I got a lot more out of the war flick, as I am very familiar with the hardships of the Arabs who served in the French army. An army that hasn’t single-handedly won a battle or a war since before Waterloo.
There were some very realistic battle scenes, although I did not care for the portrayal of Germans soldiers as the bad guys as well as the enemy. They were continually shown as booby-trap artists except where they were foolish enough to walk in tight groups through narrow streets. The equipment and uniforms were very exact, although both scenes that showed the Germans using an MG43 completely failed to show how terrifying a weapon it really was. The thing fired 900 rounds per minute creating a 100% zone of death in front of the muzzle. Further, many of the scenes on the DVD Amaray [jacket] are never shown in the film.
There is also heavy advertising for HD-DVD. My guess is it means High Definition, but only a guess because I thought DVD was already supposed to be the highest definition possible with plasma screens and such. So when it comes to formats, here we go again.
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