This is my CVS receipt for a $1 tube of toothpaste. It represents somebody's concept of a good idea. Bingo was okay. I'm going out for breakfast, which turned out to be the "Death Meal" grilled cheese at Dunkin Donuts, 510 calories of which over half are from fat. Think of it as a sign of recovery I can survive things like that once in a while and it's probably better for you than two donuts.
Finally, here is your picture of Forrest Gump Park. The real name is on the sign, but yes, this is where the park bench was. It was totally a prop, there is no bus stop and no bench. The church spire where the leaf floated is a block to the right side of this scene. There are 24 similar parks in downtown Savannah. And I have a partial answer to where 30,000 arts students inhabit the place.
The low brick building I saw [near the railroad museum] was only the original SCAD (Savannah College of Art and Design) campus. It seems since the first endowments, the college has gradually taken over “90 percent of the buildings downtown”. Aha, so what I may have thought was a restored antebellum mansion may have been the student rec center, and so on. If, in fact, it is true the college dominates the city in this way, it also explains a dozen other questions I had about the nature of things over there.
What happened today? I’m so nice, I’ll let you go first. What did you do? I drove the batbike over to the critical third practice with the new band. If you make that third rehearsal, you will go the distance. Any real entertainers among you know the agony of which I speak. It is no easier today than when I put my first band together at the age of 13. And even then, I knew time was running out.We ran through enough songs to do a gig, which I consider to be 32. They say more like 48. Everyone agreed in realization that if we need many more to just get out there, we’ve got the material between us. At this moment, we can play 36 tunes, which is twice (actually more than twice) as many as I ever got out of the Hippie or Cowboy Mike. I went blue in the face waiting for those people to get off their arses. Learning this new list was not easy, for a lot of it was music I considered too repetitious when I was young. And still do.
The new guys have professionalism, making the intros and outros impressively tight. There is no comping. They are old school. Fortunately, the lead guitarist knows the riffs their old bass player used, which spurs me along. (I quickly analyze the last guy’s bass lines and see where he was taking liberties. On some points, I’m miles ahead of it already.) I’ve learned 27 brand new tunes in three weeks. That’s new music that I had not played before. More than a few local guitarists should take note of that.
This new music is not “mine”, so to speak. Who recalls the Hermit’s “There’s A Kind of Hush”? I had that tune stuck in my head for hours after. The piano player is no boogie-woogie hack, but a trained English pianist, no way to fool me on keyboards, peeps. Here’s another, “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood.” I will soon be covering that one to perfection.
Where is this band headed? Who cares? Direction is the obsession of the small-minded. Get the band going first; bands are complicated undertakings. The chances of meeting anyone on the same wavelength are, if accurately measured, probably less than zero. My experience is that finding a working band is the result of exceptional luck funded by perseverance.
My new hero is the guy who ripped off eBay (Brian Dunning). I would have done the same thing if I’d thought of it. Why? Because I don’t like it when outfits like eBay and Amway pay customers to recruit other customers. That’s a conflict of interest. When somebody makes a recommendation, it should be motivated by satisfaction, not a sucker’s fee. As far as I’m concerned, Kessler’s Flying Circus discovered a valid way to beat eBay at their own dirty game.
But it shows you how big money like eBay can bend the law. Although nothing was proven against Kessler, eBay argued that it had not “intended” to pay as much as it did. They threatened him with such a gargantuan lawsuit that he pled guilty to a lesser crime that he never committed, the single most disgusting aspect of American law.
In layman’s terms, Dunning created code that secretly placed his eBay affiliate ID on your computer. If you ever visited eBay, he collected a commission. There is no specific law that forbids the practice (called “cookie stuffing”). Thus, when Dunning bypassed the detection system eBay set up later (he was under no obligation to comply with eBay on that issue), he was technically protecting his investment. The guy deserves a medal. Apparently signing a contract with eBay means they’ll sue you if you become overly successful, in their opinion.
For anyone who thinks my living in a trailer is a sign of innate poverty, first look below at the picture of my gold and silver, then read this article about trailer parks. PS, my precious metals are not stored in Florida. They are in Colorado, and only two people know where. But don’t be surprised if once again I was years ahead of the pack on economical retirement thinking—and I’m now looking to buy my own land—with a trailer on it. The rest of the world is slowly catching on.
ADDENDUM
Here is something most people have never seen. One ounce of gold beside one ounce of silver, approximately life-size on most monitors. There are no more one ounce bars of silver to be had in Broward or Miami-Dade. It’s all been bought up, poof, all gone. Except the high-premium eagles and such, but if you want to pay a $9.40 fee for a $23.40 object, you go right ahead.
The dealer price of these ounces, left to right, is $26.00 and $1,473.00. That means the traditional gold-silver ratio of 1:16 is off the radar at 1:56. While one may say gold is overpriced, this is rarely the case and it is far more likely that silver should be selling for $92 per ounce. I have no idea how silver is being held back.But what I do know is that for any manipulation to work in the long run, the price has to be kept low and then allowed to explode. While the markets get complicated, there is no getting around this fact. The only thing I need to know is that something funny is going on.
I’ve been eyeballing gold. I have no conspiracy theories about the metal, instead I assume that the market is manipulated because that is precisely how the market behaves. How about we take a cursory look at the metal from my standpoint? First, most of the “trading” you hear about in the news is paper, not the gold. There are regular rumors that the amount [of gold] on these certificates exceeds the physical gold by 100 times and nobody is policing this practice. There’s your formula for disaster.
It requires 38.1 man-hours to produce one ounce of gold. At today’s price of $1,420 (spot) that works out to an unlikely $37.27 per hour in labor costs. Unlikely, because I don’t know of anyone who gets paid that much for labor. I said for labor. Since South African minimum wage is about a dollar an hour, where does the gold get the rest of the value? I recall in the 80s when brokers said gold would never drop below $350 per ounce “because that is the cost of getting it out of the ground”.
Ah, but it did fall to less—what more proof that it was not real gold being traded, but pieces of paper instead? Most did not buy that paper from a miner, but from a gold dealer. This is all my own thinking, I don’t have the answers. But the two largest suspects of fictitious gold trading remain the Federal Reserve at Fort Knox and the Bank of Canada. Nobody has seen that gold in fifty years. It only takes seven years for a person to be declared missing and presumed dead.
What’s more, I’m not the only one to notice that in the wartime freighters returning from Europe during the world wars were lying low in the water. What were they carrying from Europe that we needed over here? Lampshades? Where is the gold? Remember Morgan Stanley being sued in 2008? They settled out of court by returning millions in “storage fees” to their clients. Think about that. The clients only got back their rent payments, they never got their gold, which the bank down to this day refuses to show them. Something about “security issues”.
And even then, the only reason the court awarded the refund is because the actual vault on which they were being charged rent in which the gold was supposed to be stored was empty. According to the Judge, the fact that the vault was empty was “a separate legal matter”. What’s that smell?
The link to Arnold's drive was so popular, I'll leave it for now. But like all external links, I cannot guaranty how long it will last.
