February 1, 2013

           Here is the film crew milling around the Wayside Inn y’day. The sidecar drew as much attention back as forward. I’ve lived in several cities with the hare-brained concept that the movies bring lots of cash into the local economy, so they’ll dispatch a squad car to block traffic like shown here. That theory must explain why west Miami and east Vancouver, where they film most, are such prosperous locations. The Wayside is that beige building center right and the action appears to be in front of those red awnings, which face the west.
           I’ve been anything lately except consistent with my music and that lick from “Long-Haired Country Boy” stuck in my brain. Not the whole lick, but the part where it walks down to the IVth and the tone changes. I am informed later the instrument is a dobro. Sure. So I finally learned to play a respectable version of it on the bass.
           Back to Belize, which has not made mention here in ages. The rot of civilization has taken over if the general thrust of web pages is any indication. This is a third-word country but the ads are hawking retirement homes for a half-rock apiece. No links, you can do the work yourself. I was appalled at these phenomenal prices, obviously aimed at the less than intelligent, the type who would make a buy decision after attending a high-pressure seminar. Fortunately, you can bypass those ass-clowns and read the local classifieds easy enough.
           I had a go at it but failed to find a driving route to San Pedro (via Merida, Yucatan) on my new GPS. It will not find addresses in Mexico, although that was a touted sales feature. A driving trip is not planned, I've heard too many horror stories about people trying to drive through Mexico. Mexican place names don’t even show up in the GPS directory. Neither does Turkey, where yet another useless embassy has been bombed. This trend is likely to continue until the USA cleans up its act and shuts down all these outdated fronts for the CIA and apologizes to the world. There are few things as good-for-nothing to the taxpayer as an embassy.
           My date y’day has generated some warm compliments off the Internet. I will say only that a date with me is never the flowers and candy dinner-movie thing. I would have trouble understanding anyone who would endure such a ritual, have they no mind of their own? No, ladies, an outing with me is unlikely to follow some cornfed routine from the fifties. Get on the motorcycle, bring a little cash of your own, and wave to the people. Always wave to the people. We are sadly [for them] often the only marvelous thing they’ve seen in years and are due a reminder that not everybody born as poor as desperate as they were wound up sitting on the curb. Remember that.
           Some are wary of the sidecar, like it is flimsy or unsafe. I assure you it is bolted onto a better frame than anything present in a modern car. That is why I’ve included this composite photo showing the rear axle mount. The frame of the sidecar is 1-1/2” steel tubing almost ¾” thick. You could cut it, but you are not going to bend it.
           See the original Soviet tire pump? It still has the Cyrillic factory stamp on it. The rest of the messy gear in the back is my junk, items from the Colorado trip that proved handy on the road as I got to know the machine. Technically, this sidecar is not a Ural, because the seat has to be removed as shown to get into the trunk. The real thing has a lid that swings open to the rear, lifting the spare tire in the process. That’s the Dnerp. Or is it the other way around? Anyway, I have the inconvenient version. There is nowhere on the sidecar to stow anything handy where it won’t either be in the way or get soaked.
           At twilight I e-biked over to the market for some fixin’s and noticed Chopper is playing the Frenchie club again. I stopped outside and listened, but my aversion to being in an audience coupled with Fridays at home won out. So I sat down to ponder why I cannot design my flip-flop gate on paper. My conclusion is that the components must work together with a technology I don’t have, namely the double-sided copper board. But what I do have is a bin full of Radio Shack proto boards. Since they only cost around a buck each, I’ve decided to go ahead and start soldering until I get something that works. I learned all there is to know about jumper wire at the phone company. I’ll solve the double-side dilemma by using good old jumper wires.

ADDENDUM
           Silver is misbehaving, the prices changing almost in unison for two days in a row. The variation is only a dollar, but the odds of it doing so in a repeating, nearly identical pattern, is too much as it even matches to the same time of day. Here is the kitco of what I’m talking about. Each color is a consecutive day. You bet your hat I’m watching this blatant manipulation.
           Gold is not as susceptible, meaning it is less volatile and therefore not as likely a product for speculation. And they are still producing enough of it [gold] to meet demand, they being mainly South Africa. Look up the history of the Witwatersrand, literally “White Water Reef” in Boer. The original miners found alluvial (streambed) gold and gradually followed it uphill to find a 32 mile long seam of quartz, the white part. And embedded there was plenty of gold, within five or so years they produced half of the world supply. That’s why the English picked a fight with them. Boers (German-speaking Dutch) were supposed to remain poor farmers out in the semi-desert.
           Gold has been following suit, but there a twenty dollar swing is less than a third the same effect on overall pricing. To clarify, that means the matching twenty-dollar change in gold prices is overall only a third the percentage change of the one-dollar in silver. The pattern says something funny is going on in the world but a scan of the headlines produces no related events. If you know what gives, e-mail me.