Here’s a robot from the fair. I’ll leave it as an exercise to figure out why no way this was created by high-school level brains. I can spot several inconsistencies from here. You can see at once the appliance is too top-heavy for fighting. It is supposed to extend the arm shown here with the paddles and up-end the opponent. But siege towers only work when the other side never thinks of a grappling hook.
Have you seen Brazil advertising for immigrants? Their government studies sound a lot like our government studies separated by five generations. They say they don’t have enough immigrants to build their nation. They must throw open the borders. Immigrants? I can think of 63 million they can have right now. Lord knows we ain’t using them.Batteries for the eBike. Wow, talk about expensive. And I’m buying wholesale. The basis of the expense was trying to find units that were not remanufactured. A week of research reveals the battery you think is new and a bargain may be neither. Nor is there an easy way to tell. We discovered terms like OEM and factory issue are meaningless. I finally wound up paying a $27 premium on a $38 battery to order direct from the manufacturer. And I need two batteries.
Ah, the Sherlocks among you ask why the sudden upgrade of the eBike? It’s called forethought. Want more on this brand of thinking? Okay. If we take a holiday in JZ’s truck, the newest parts will be the tires. What if we wind up 500 miles away and something goes kaput? Ah, now you’re thinking. The original bike batteries claimed 400 recharges and I got less than half that. But the range was 23 miles. When it’s said and done, taking the bicycle along makes tremendous sense. Good thing you thought of it.
Here’s something a little less savory. I bought a textbook to see what is being taught in school these years. Everybody does this occasionally, I’m certain, not just parents. It was a biology text. I’m only on chapter five (of forty-seven) and it is already scary. You talk about racial and social bias. This book starts shoveling it at the student right from the front cover.
No final judgment is made before I finish the entire book, but if you don’t think your kids are being indoctrinated, you had better see some of this. The book is blatantly misleading, such as an entire section dedicated to downplaying the fact that for anything else it may be, AIDS is primarily a disease of male homosexuals. The diagram depicts one baby and one older white lady, with the caption that the virus “can attack anyone”. No mention is made that irresponsible personal behavior remains the greatest vector in how the disease is spread.How did I detect the bias so quickly? I didn’t. I was on page 65 before I noticed something amiss. If it takes me that long, the old pattern-matcher supreme, that’s saying something. Sure enough, I flipped back to examine the 14 pictures so far that depicted any (and, as it turned out, all) activities where two students were in physical contact. [Photo cropped.] There it was. Always a black male touching a broadly smiling younger white female. I don’t mean nuttin’, I’m just sayin’.
There’s more. I normally flip to the end of the chapter and read the test questions before covering the material. Good students always do this. Sure enough, certain types of answers were preferred. Even the multiple choice selections ensured anyone who chose the strictly correct answers would fail. The impetus was to channelize the student toward “acceptable” standards. Your tax dollars at work.
Somebody is propping up the silver market. For the past ten days, the price keeps slumping down toward the $28 mark, only to jolt back upwards toward $29 within the hour. The downward pressure is unmistakable, I’d like to see a real drop into my buy range. The yellow arrows show the asymmetrical nature of the goings-on.
The onrush of practice for the audition this Saturday begins. Some emails have been referencing the obvious questions. If you can play, why aren’t you already in a band? Why did your last bass player quit? What are your motives to play in a band? How often do you play out? Same questions you’d expect from kids, but it is the repugnant state of the local C-list that causes such mutual suspicion. The South Florida room is 99% time-wasting guitar-addict no-minds. That list has been ruined by commercial posts and guitarist in-fighting.
I’m learning 60s Stones tunes that are completely new to me. Eg., “We Got A Good Thing Going”. Then again, some of it is so bad no wonder I never listened. I’m trying out for an established band, making it my task to learn their material. It’s just that I’m playing more Buddy Holly now that when he was a star. And, except for their two fast songs, I really do not like The Doors.
Last, I'm seeing the phrase “moaner-droner-groaner” in print more and more often. Aha. I’ll have everyone know that I coined that phrase entirely on my own. And it anyone cares to find it, the first instance of its use is somewhere in this blog. Sigh, just another step toward immortality as we know it.
ADDENDUM
Value. That’s my response to questions why I rode all the way back to the laundromat for the “Titanic” book. “Life of Pi” upped my annual tea consumption trying to keep awake, while “Titanic” I’ve read cover to cover around four times now. It is fiction [that was] originally meant as mildly biting satire about how money corrupts the view from the top. It reads as imaginary conversations depicting the different classes of passenger on the liner. One could enjoy it for the plot, but it is its sharpness of the issues that always fascinated me.
My peers would probably choose “Pi” as the more modern work, but is it now? “Titanic” is one of many books in my life instrumental in learning that I did not belong in the social group into which I was born. Such books told me I was not alone in drawing the correct conclusions about poverty, education, and happiness. Work is not the answer, and hard work is for those so stupid they have no choice. “No man on his deathbed ever wished he’d spent more time at work.”
Long before I’d ever had access to books on such topics, I had independently (as a child) drawn many (but not all) of the same conclusions as the wealthy and educated. I knew at eight years old that the banker lent you the money but took none of the risk. I knew better than to wait for my “peers” to make decisions. I was aware that a good life was largely dependent on distancing oneself from the classes of people who drag you down, particularly if that means your own family.
That is why you should read “Titanic”. You see, while it was written so long ago (1940), and concerned the issues of 1912, it is brimming with extremely accurate precognitions of how America and the world would turn out right now today if they didn’t smarten up. The dialogue reveals facets of history not found in regular works. Like the warnings of corporate greed and irresponsibility if America entered WWII. How the rich would keep on building weapons after victory. This is no idle guesswork from the author, every prediction in this book came to pass fifty and sixty years later. I find that amazing.
It covers the rise of the credit society and why it would collapse when the “war generation” died. (That’s what we nowadays call the baby boomers.) The way stocks and bonds would soon control banks rather than traditional deposits. Why Germany was forced into extreme nationalism by the British (it was they who borrowed millions they couldn’t repay, not the Germans they pinned it on). It’s there in detail. The futility of ever civilizing Africa. The rise of Asia as the world market after we foolishly sell them our technology. The book has no major omissions in describing the continuity of events we are experiencing today.
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