For Sale. Unique silverware setting. Each piece a guaranteed true mismatch. One-of-a-kind collector’s edition. You could be the proud owner of this unique set. This is part of my silverware collection. After 15 years of no woman in the house, I do believe I’ve amassed the mother of all spoon sets. Except I could not find a matching pair so I could practice playing spoons.
I claim the record for non-equivalent forks and knives without trying. Yeah, I’ve seen bigger sets, but they were displays and I said I didn’t try, that means this hodgepodge is random. That’s scary. And this is isn’t half of what’s lurking in the drawer.Here’s the housing stats for 2010. In Florida, there were 171,704 foreclosures, of which 42,000 or so were repossessed. (Remember, the banks don’t have enough lawyers to repossess them all.) Very few of these have hit the market and there are still ads for houses priced in the millions in the newspaper every weekend. I read somewhere the practice of putting the real estate agent’s picture in the ad originated in Florida. I would not be surprised.
And to end some other speculation, the beginning price of a Smartcar is $13,240.00, forget the $12,490.00 quoted by dealers. They lie. There is a mandatory $750.00 “destination” fee. For the base price, you get a 3-cyclinder 1.0L motor, manual 5-speed with no A/C. With A/C, the cost rises to over $14,000 and fully equipped can run you over $20,000. Incidentally, the car ranks way down at 28 out of 33 cars in consumer satisfaction, making it an optional toy rather than serious transportation. Top-rated mini-car? Ford Fiesta.
Call me a dunce, call me nekulturny, but I’ve been making cucumber sandwiches all wrong. According to tradition, they are supposed to taste better depending on who sliced them and how. Dang, I’ve been adding curry, mayo, pepper, and even cheese. Then I find out I’ve been leaving on the bread crusts. I did slice not diagonally into triangles, couthless am I. I’m so provincial I could not detect any difference in the taste.
But I did detect a difference in terminology. What the British call customs, I call sitting around watching what other people do. Really, I mean, triangles? No seriously, I find a lot of English culture amounts to doing finicky things to prove those who with inherited wealth have the leisure time to nit-pick. Are not cucumbers what economists call an inferior good? The more money you make, the less of it you eat.
To take my mind off my sub-par sandwiches, I re-wrote the html code for the robotics blog (it seems my publisher does not like CSS). I programmed a table of contents and standardized the various sections. I have conducted 15 experiments, and unlike some, all of these are documented, diagrammed and published for the world to see, warts and all. The search engines can’t find them, being an offshoot of this big blog, so I’ll be looking at a second publisher.
I decided to tackle the termite infestation of my desk. It is taken apart into pieces so that every square inch of wood that is not laminated or painted is exposed to the air. Then on goes a coating of anti-termite paste over every surface of plain wood. Even so, generally you have to catch termites during the swarm phase, which should be soon. Sadly, the desk is going outside to serve as a work bench, as experience says you can never be certain about termites. I would have fumigated years ago when I realized the Florida room was bug-ridden, but I left it for people smarter than me and it never got done.
Over the past two weeks, I converted an old pair of speakers to battery power so can practice my vocals again. Yep, I was getting rusty. Since the sorrowful demise of Limewire and not yet having made friends with anyone who downloaded all the tunes in the world, I’ve been practicing along to Floyd Kramer piano scores.
This produced an unexpected result. The French neighbors came over and asked for a copy of Conway Twitty’s “Make Believe”. They actually said they never realized what a beautiful song it was. I didn’t have the vocabulary to tell them it wasn’t a recording, it was me singing. Interesting, and like I just said, unexpected.
Last, bingo was a flop. It happens, and during prime cruise season, half the clientele can be gone for up to two weeks. In the end, I ordered a large ham and pineapple pizza, and stayed up past midnight. Drinking tea and reminiscing about Judy Minty and the Prairie Dog Inn on 17th, Southwest. Both of us would say we hung out there, but in reality we only went there together nine times during our entire love affair, and two of those were birthdays. (The third birthday, my twentieth, we went to the “Keg and Cleaver”.)
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