I like the sports section of the newspaper. It blots up any rain that gets on my bicycle seat. That’s all it is good for. My aversion to sports is not all-encompassing, I have definite reasons for not liking certain sports. And the ones I dislike most are those which falsely claim to be a game of skill and sportsmanship. I find very few contact sports that live up to that image. Let me tell you about my background with softball in grade school.
I already told you how I was the smallest guy in the room (also the smartest). I learned quickly skill counts for nothing when even the girls outweigh you by forty percent. (Most of them still do, ha-ha.) It would be shallow to say I’m just sore because I didn’t score the winning goal. Phooey, I never could care less who “won”. What I really didn’t like was the favoritism of the umpires, which I spotted after five minutes into any game. Or that nonsense that even if you prove the umpire wrong, his decision stands. That ain’t sportsmanship by any standard I know of. When you are wrong and stick at it, you are incompetent.
Nor was I the only one that spotted crooked umps—so did the other players. But as long as they “were on the same side”, that was that. I remember one play, whatever it is called, where the runner is between bases and the basemen throw the ball back and forth, until they catch him. This was grade school, I mean, but that’s where such values are learned. I’ve said before I went to schools with enough sports gear for the town, but no microscopes in the lab.
The problem was, the basemen were blocking the baseline, so while I could easily made it by running against a throw, I could not do so without leaving the baseline which was an automatic out. I argued with the ump, proved in the rulebook I was right, and he gave me an F. That’s one of only two grades I got in grades 1 to 12 that was not an A. The other was also phys ed, another F for “non-cooperation”. For demonstrating the umpire was not just wrong, but a stupid liar as well. But twixt you and I, it was worth it.
What? You want to know the other incident? Well, it was when I was at bat. The pitcher would throw inside and the same ump (different school year) would call it a strike. He was a real prick, Robert Roy, who would not let kids wear their glasses to bat, guaranteeing a strikeout. But I proved the pitches he was calling strikes could not be hit without striking the ball with the batter’s knuckles. So, I guess you could say I don’t like sports at least partly for the way I was exposed to it. It would be more accurate to say that unless I’m being paid, my descriptions here show how little tolerance I have for shitbags. And there are no shortage of those in phys ed class.
A guitar player friend of mine sent me his interpretations of music. It’s nice, but what is it with guitar players and obscure versions? That, I will never fully understand. It is as if they don’t realize there are certain unquantifiables that make a song a hit. Something changes in the brain cells of 99% of guitarists because they are drawn toward these strange, usually slower, long and drawn out reissues of the original. And in the process, they change what made it a hit. When somebody likes a remake of a hit, I got $5 to bet you that somebody is a guitar player.
Examples. Marc Cohn and “The Letter”. It’s lousy and I don’t like it. He almost falls asleep himself. Shawn Mullins and “House of the Rising Sun”. Shawn, why didn’t you just rewrite the whole song and get it over with? I guess when these guys spend twenty years memorizing murky guitar chords, eventually they will shoehorn them in somewhere. Until today, I would have said who the hell are Cohn and Mullins. Funny, while I could name you a thousand tunes off the top of my head, I only know the name of one bassist: Carol Kaye. There is something about guitar playing that turns men into male groupies.
Blog rules say the leg surgery is a topic today. I can barely walk on it. While nothing has gone wrong, the procedure seems to get a little more aggressive each time, and now I find out there may be more sessions. Worst side effect? The veins that are bypassed remain in place as tough cord-like ribbons for up to six months. You can’t see them, but you feel them and they are annoying.
I’m considering lowering the sidewalls on the camper from 21” to 16”. I’ll make a test run first, probably around the lake, but the general appearance of the camper is that it is heavy and it isn’t. The total weight without the solar panels is just under 300 pounds, which is good. However, the height draws attention and this is not something we want off stage. See addemdum for details.
Florida and ants. I’ve sprayed the perimeter with the six-month strength and as of y’day still found some slow moving types inside. I don’t use chemicals indoors, so where are they from? Insects are part of your package when you live in Florida. The best you can do is keep back the more obnoxious ones. Remember, the pesticide also works on you, just at a slower rate.
I’m still getting bad battery time on the Android. Others, generally much younger than me, don’t seem to notice. Possibly they are too young to know that batteries used to last months, not hours. This means every bingo show gets cut short, at about three hours. The crowds are smaller as well, there was no season again this year. If it was my game, you know what I’d do for cheap advertising until the crowd returned? Guarantee a pot of say $40 on every game. It costs, but it would be instantly effective. Right now, on slow nights, the pot runs around half that. You also get nights where one person wins three or four games due to the smaller crowd.
ADDENDUM
The 21” height of the camper is too much. It causes the overall appearance to be “stocky”. Therefore, the height will be lowered from 21” to 16” but that is the new height and that’s semi-final. The trailer will then look slim, but must be opened or “expanded” to make it habitable. Fortunately, this flexibility was built into the design. I make the [saw] cut tomorrow. Unless you can do better. Otherwise leave me be, but if you have great lady-objects, give me a flash.
It [the camper] looks too heavy. I don’t know, in a pinch, if I could sleep in 16”. Here is the logic, follow along. My feet will get 11” to maneuver, my knees being well back from there will have plenty of room. As we shift back toward my shoulders and then head, space would increase toward 32” of potential
Some readers like the numbers, so here are a few of those. A follow-up test on the Honda generator this afternoon discovers that it can’t even handle the GPS addition, much less the sidecar and camper. At the target 55 mph, the Honda alternator supplies only 11.9 volts of the required 13.67 volts. Actually it does better intermittently, but like my next real girlfriend, that isn’t nearly good enough.
What I’m hoping for is the (by now) club standard of overbuilding everything will cover for the loses in actual usage. Hey, mechanically, I just got off the boat. When I tore the seat and backrest out of the sidecar, I smelled a lot of mold and general mayhem in the small, humid, unattended compartments. This additionally explains the hefty tray of soaking materials located in my kitchen as of late. I disinfected everything including the jumper cables.
The novel situation gets mentioned here, and today was a record for readership. I like that not as a measure of popularity, but because I know this blog cannot retain readership except by supplying the goods. I don’t know if you have a blog, but the counters are funny in that they don’t know if it is ten readers, or one reader ten times. I estimate 60% of the hits here are unique. For that matter, this is the only blog I know that tells dumb-asses to get lost and don’t come back.
