Kudos to Home Depot at Stirling and University. That’s where my scooter broke down and the manager let me park it under their service canopy overnight. He even told me where the security cams would give two-way coverage. Alas, blog policy is I can’t give a name, but thanks I say for a helping hand. He mentioned he goes in to work at 5:30 AM. That’s more dedication than I ever had. He had the knack for handling people, something I never learned. The Home Depot location was so secure, I did not even worry for a second about leaving the scooter outside overnight.Ray-B was on the line, we’ve chosen a small tentative list for the upcoming weekend, mainly so we aren’t seen as indecisive—the audience picks up on these things. At least Ray-B doesn’t kill time on stage. In another departure from the Florida norm, Ray-B is thinking about music and today he said to the effect he’s figured out the crowd just wants good old familiar tunes. Aha, that’s the exact stage I was at when I decided to focus more on country music than rock. Now he’s also noticing that bass lines are best blended into the music, not be played as loudly as possible underneath it. Another aha.
He does like jazz bass lines, that’s one of those avenues I’ve never traveled. There was no jazz music or musicians where I grew up, and by age twenty, it was Beatles, Doors, or Steppenwolf. As I explained, I will stop and listen to any music if it is being played well and I believe as a duo, we have the exact qualities needed to become not just outstanding, but a local success. I know this business, and I’m not just talking because I don’t have any time to waste. I doubt it is my influence, but Ray-B is definitely now thinking through the music to the crowd. He will soon conclude that you always give them a little more of a show than they were expecting and you can’t do that playing the standards.
Gold prices are dancing around, the type of behavior that happens just before a collapse. And it could be argued the current price is a bubble, though I subscribe to the Monex theory that the price of gold is 1/T, where T is the amount of trust people have in government money. I can’t say go out and buy gold because so many people are saying it is about to fall to $1200 per ounce. The one solid fact about gold is that you can never predict its price.
In another scumbag move by Redmond, the MS asshats have removed another useful formula from Excel. They’ve trashed the “daysbetween” formula, the one that would calculate the number of days between any two dates. Thus, you could count down by using a formula like “=12/31/2015 - today()”. They’ve replaced it with a useless “days360” abortion that is based on a year with only 360 days, and the formula will not accept another formula as one of the arguments. I mean, where does Windows even find such mental defectives?
And coffee is now $5 per package, it’s a good thing I like Maxwell House, not the cheapest but pretty close to it. A lot of research by the coffee companies went into those 11.5 ounce packages, the ones many people mistakenly call a pound. The printing says up to 90 cups, but that is near-coffee and the truth is more like 72 cups of real mud. It was a sad day in America when some jerk came up with the idea of charging extra for coffee. Yes, folks, there was a time when you ordered dinner, the price included coffee or tea, bread, butter, gravy and dessert.
The policy of splitting the “meal” up into components is a result of “efficiency” experts who graduated during the 80s and 90s. I took several of the courses as part of my accounting program when I went back to school in my early 30s. The process is called “unbundling” but my take on it has not changed: if you remove the little extras, it is no longer really a “meal”. But, no pun intended, the students around me were eating this up. I would not mind if they kept prices reasonable, for instance, the separate cup of coffee should cost 60 cents, not $1.75.
What? Don’t tell me you didn’t know they did this on purpose. Hell, yes. We were taught to overcharge on the liquids so as to advertise the “meal” itself at a lower price. We learned not to refer to the offering as “dinner”, since it no longer was, but to call it a “meal”. Steak meal, $4.99, breakfast meal, $2.99. The marketers had correctly guessed the average US diner would not have a clue he was being squeezed. And unless your favorite seafood restaurant is right on the dock, or your favorite steak house is right next to a ranch, folks, all the food comes from the same warehouse.
For one of my semester projects, I “rewired” a menu so that the customer could no longer order things a la carte at a cheaper price than buying the full item. For example, a side of toast, a side of tomato, and a side of bacon could make you a cheaper bacon and tomato sandwich cheaper than the menu item, so my task was to reprice everything to prevent that. At that time, it was a complicated task because restaurants tended to offer much larger a la carte selections where now you get a section of appetizers.
Novelty, such as I can find these days, gets mentioned and tonight I watched one strange movie. Called “Perfume”, it is about a 16th century French baby born with an incredible sense of smell. He can trace and detect even copper and glass. He accidentally smothers a girl selling apricots and becomes obsessed with the aroma of her corpse as legendary perfume ingredient and begins killing. It’s gross, he covers them with animal fat, then wraps them up, then scrapes the fat and boils it down to a few drops. It gets a little ridiculous toward the end, but still quite a departure from the ordinary.
