My Xmas present got here early. My semi-annual physical was at dawn, and my condition has completely stabilized. Sorry if you are not interested, but blog rules this was the event of the day. Except for my old ticker, I’m in pretty good shape. I’ll have to celebrate soon. Heart patients are candidates for liver trouble and diabetes, neither of which appear to be any menace to me. Ride that bicycle and live!It’s rare, but my doc and I talked politics. I know she does not ask others such questions, but I detect I must be a much clearer thinking individual than she is used to. The bottom line is that I’m not getting any worse or developing any of the [other] symptoms associated with either a bad heart [which I have] or bad living habits [which I don't have], such as the onset of diabetes frequent with my situation. I’m operating at 45%, and here to tell the tale.
I’d give anything to go back to work for three of years. Throw a couple hundred grand in the bank, that’s what I’d do. As it stands, I get a $13 raise in January, monthly for 2012. I stopped to buy three bananas and the lady ahead of me, in apparent perfect health, spent $463 in food stamps, in one shopping trip. This may be commonplace in Canada, but it irks me here. The system does not distinguish between those who cannot work and those who cannot find work. Those who fail to acquire and/or maintain adequate job skills should not get more money than those who cannot work.
The problem with those American laws that protect the weak from the strong is that the same laws inadvertently protect the stupid from the smart. You can figure it out on your own, but I do not like that situation. I’m not saying the smart have a right to commit crimes. But I mean things like the plywood law. (You cannot stockpile plywood and price gouge the twits who wait until the hurricane is on the horizon.) The system encourages mass stupidity by not punishing it. Fortunately, stupidity is punishment enough on its own.
I wrote to California for more electronic parts. I believe I have exhausted all the free or low cost tutorials on the ‘Net. Those who I considered experts just months ago now seem fallen behind because they learned electronics before the integrated circuits came along. So I asked the people out west, if I write a decent beginner’s manual, will they sell it?
Next, on to a drum box. While I still know I’ll have to build my own, until that time I need something I can use. That means one of the sleazy products on the shelves, a Korg, an Akai, or a Roland. All junk, as I’ve pointed out. But I’m far closer to building something that works than ever. Maybe one day I’ll modify an existing unit. I can run the display part, you know.
I’m reading “Warlord” and liking it. It came out a year back, a novel about the newest terrorist threat, American and British prisons. The Islamists, being Arabs, were being thwarted, so they’ve begun terrorist cells in the nations’ prisons. It is easy to brainwash the younger convicts that government is the great evil. It is fertile ground indeed, and proves the Bin Laden types are nothing like the camel-jockey imbeciles the CIA likes to portray. Yes, they are savages, but damn smart ones.
Worse, western nations have no protection against this internal threat, and the US/Brit immigration policies have allowed the establishment of the largest Muslim communities outside of the Middle East. We can only hope they blow up politicians and not civilians. Never forget, the terrorists are not out to win battles, rather to bankrupt us. And they are succeeding as only cowards can, by avoiding individual combat. That’s why the most hated American weapons are not the most feared ones. (The Arabs absolutely can’t stand the pilotless (robot, remote controlled) US drones. Terrorism doesn’t work on machines.)
And filament lights don’t work on the scooter. I replaced the license plate lamp, a dirty job but painless in lieu of the $275 citation I've heard they hand out. The bulb was too small to replace with an LED, but I’m thinking on the problem. That, and I’m thinking about the fact that my vested and fully-funded pension fund just reported an actuarial value of slightly over $3.5 billion. That’s three thousand five hundred million dollars. I won’t define actuarial value, but for Social Security it is probably some negative number.
