Yea for Radio Shack giving me a $10 discount on a $14 bill, but boo on Virgin Mobile for charging me 15 cents for sending me a text that my bill had been paid. Like maybe I forgot I’d just given them some money? Today was month-end logistics and also a hunt for some silver though I know there isn’t any left. Dang, as I finally got the refund from my scooter repair shop and truly wanted a shopping spree. Also, I forgot to mention the canceled club meeting last Friday. There was no new business to transact thanks to the new band.Continuing, I’m reading my first Jewish mystery novel. Called “Moscow Rules”, it is a so-far interesting study on how assassination, espionage, bribery, and other goodies interfere with Hebrew tradition, without, mind you, halting the activities for a moment. Why, it’s the world’s fault they don’t like certain things the Jews do. If they’d learn to like them, everybody would be happy. How’s that for logic. They offend you, it is your fault.
Ah, I heard someone ask, have they offended America? Yes, but they own America. Has anyone out there noticed the distinctively un-Sicilian ring to surnames like Lansky, Shultz, and Siegel? Rothstein? Lepke? Make no mistakes about it. The top dogs in the Mafia game are not Italians. It’s Hollywood working that angle, because that’s another place owned by you-know-who. It ain’t all roses, though. There’s a reason every movie has a queer in the cast. And every third woman in the dating clubs is, well, you figure it out.
Music gets one paragraph, a standard I’ll try to stick with. Today I learned why I don’t like much Steely Dan. The bass lines are boring. At least, that is a partial reason, since I didn’t like much of his output since before I played bass. I’m also learning the Zombies. What a difference in bass styles. I could not name you a single member of either band. I’ve been poked in the ribs about a time line here. Okay, I first played bass at the age of 13, in order to teach others to play the bass in my band. But I myself did not play bass in a band until my mid-30s. By that time, I was no longer into what was left of rock music and thoroughly disliked concert-arena guitarists.
After these exhausting weeks, I’d like to get back to electronics. I’ve found happiness just making logic gates and simple circuits and one day I’ll learn how to connect these together. It’s also end of the month and everybody except me is broke, so no sense going anywhere and being the only one with money. That’s too much like when I worked for a living.
I’m finding I grab a book on electronics to relax. This has replaced history and geology as [was] my reading pastime for a good twenty years in a row. Those are subjects I like, but except for warfare, history seems slow and I’ll never be more than an upstart with seafloor spreading and Martian watercourses. There are 122,000 libraries in the US but I still prefer what I’ve got here.
Next, I reviewed what’s been written on perpetual motion this year to date. My personal feelings are that there can be no such thing, but that it is possible to build machines so efficient that they could be driven by magnetism and gravity, the two sources of energy that are not dependent on stellar fusion. That, I believe, is possible if one begins at the nano level. I’m not the first to notice how new inventions, and I mean true innovations here, seem to be roughly the same size as what they replace, a convenient fluke for machine design.
Therefore, nano will have to break that pattern. Um, let me think of an example. Thrump. Thrump. Okay, the first jet engines of the correct size and power to fly an aircraft fit into the same size (roughly) of airframe as the piston engines of the day. Kind of extend that idea to see what I mean. But nano could mean there is no reason the first super-efficient “motor” could not be much smaller. Since I cannot find any reading that looks for this, I periodically review the perpetual motion sites. All I can conclude is, “Wouldn’t that be something.”
Last, my entire contact list for gigs is outdated. None of the phones are still in service but there are websites. Personal contact is out. Something else I didn’t like was several responses to the effect that bands are now expected to play for free “to promote music in the community”. Is this for real? How about your club provide free food and alcohol to promote partying in the community? It seems every place I talked to had some recording star playing there for nothing. But, but, I know some of the people and making a recording doesn’t make you a star. Interesting, that.
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