December 3, 2013

           At first, I thought they were cleverly designed condos. Look at this row of houses in Memphis. As the train pulled past, I saw light between some of them, meaning they are individual dwellings. That’s new to me and it reminds me of rows of “war houses” in Seattle, but these are much too elaborate. While trying to find one for sale, I discovered places asking $12,000 and $15,000 but could not get any data on the types of neighborhood. Strange I can’t find what this style of house is called, but love those balconies. I will contact Trent and find out.

           Just a lot of ho-hum would describe today. Waking up just as tired as when I fell asleep, so I grabbed a history book and read up on Iran. Good old Iran, the one country in that area whose borders were historical. This is the emerging empire that will throw the USA out and dust off their hands. They are the ones that could shut down the oil flow if they so decided. What I wanted to learn was their rationale for nuclear power.
           My conclusion? They don’t necessarily want weapons. If you examine Iran, the population and assets are fairly concentrated in several small regions, the majority of the terrain being rugged mountains. Thus, if they build a bomb and use it on Israel, they are inviting fatal retaliation. Rumor is the Israelis have two hundred warheads. Iran would be foolish to provoke such a war. Iran will acquire the bomb, but as a bargaining chip.
           Their real concern is running out of oil and on that count they are miles ahead of their neighbors. Where the Saudis are playboys and gamblers, the Iranians designed and built a 60 lb satellite (the launch vehicle was Russian). There you have it, who doesn’t know the quickest way to get my attention is to start a space program? My dismay at how America lost the lead is matched by my astonishment how rapidly the world copies our industry. Iran, so you’ll know, rivals us in nanotechnology and stem cell research.
           American television deliberately told the world the launch was a failure. For those interested, here is a recording of the satellite transmissions. (Well, Ken, because you also have to click on the "play" button once you get there.) It is uncoded, that is, anyone can access the data, that’s the booping sound amongst all the static. I myself do not know how to read it. The satellite crashed after a few days, but it proved the point that Iran is the leader of the Arab world and not to be lumped together with desert nomads. So there, you now know more about Iran than most of Florida.
           [Author's note: for the record, yes, yes, it is true I could build a "satellite" that beeps as long as somebody else can fling it 60 miles high for me. But that is not the point here.]
           Gold and silver are slated to plunge to decade lows in the upcoming year. You know why? Because I invested in them, that’s why. Just kidding. As low as they fall is as high as they will soar back and falling price is only another buying opportunity. I still feel the entire economy and not just the housing market is a bubble about to burst. The basic truth remains that money only has value because most people think it does. Either way it goes, the projections for 2014 are nothing like the insecurity of my situation in the past three to five years. We are back on a war footing now.
           I see that youTube has sold out. Almost every video now has an undeletable advertisement. I got two words for people who do that. Somehow Realplayer won’t download the conversion and youTube wants you to install their own converter—which I don’t trust at all. I’ll find some safe software that works, but what a hassle. Change for the sake of change is the province of losers with no concept of improvement. The audio quality of MP4 is identical to MP3, meaning there are other reasons MP4 is being pushed.
           It’s the new band music I was after, though “new” is a relative term. One tune is “Remember Walking In The Sand”, a slow blues number. Everybody raves at the fantastic Jeff Beck, but all I see is another skinny English boy with a large nose trying unsuccessfully to sound like BB King. This Eurythmic song, “Here Comes The Rain Again” is completely unsuitable for the stated aim of this band. But, they call the shots no matter how widely they miss the bulls-eye. You want people to dance, you don’t play singin’ or listenin’ music, you play dance music.
           And this Imelda May? Years ago I ran a business in a border town with the unlikely name of Tsawwassen (say tah-WAH-sen) and there was a lounge up the road. Every Thursday a heavy older lady whom I most definitely did not like used to come in and sing, and I swear she was every bit as good as Imelda May. But the consensus is that if you have even one hit song, everything you do after that turns to gold, right Melda? Your wiki profile says you play the tambourine. You know, ma’am, other than the Space Hippie and a few other Florida types, I’ve never met anyone who couldn’t.

Man, I was up late, 2:21 AM, doing a marathon learn of these new songs. It’s done, but I know in my heart it is always wrong for a band to choose music that sounds great in a studio but is difficult to reproduce on stage. There are too many distractions, unless you have a sound man, keep it simple. Another error is to choose music without regard to the role of every instrument. If the drums or the bass have weak parts, it will sound underplayed on stage, or if the musician beefs up the volume, overplayed. And I was right, there is a Db in “You’re No Good”.
           Harbor Freight, after I spent at least two days searching for and finally building my own, is now offering a set of rubber mounting brackets for their solar panels. A package of four is roughly five bucks. There you go, this item was not even mentioned but I knew it was a necessity before I hooked up a single wire. The mounts are designed for use on an RV. Gee, these engineers could save a lot of time just by asking me some intelligent questions.

ADDENDUM
           The closest food I’ve tried to Iranian is Lebanese, with JZ’s family. But during my research I see that the dominating influences on mid-east cuisine are from Iran. The only spots near here are franchises. This picture shows what I’d like to try. That, to me, spells, “breakfast”. For a coffee-drinker, I am also a great fan of tea, which I consume at around a pot per day. Thus, I became intrigued by the traditional way of brewing it in a samovar. Today, we look at the samovar, which is a Russian word meaning “self-boiler”.

           Electric samovars are new (but in Russia, so is electricity, ha-ha), the originals were an urn with a pipe running up the middle. You burn anything from charcoal to pine cones and the heat from the “chimney” boiled the water. How one boils water with pine cones is a mystery to me and I learned a samovar is never to be left unattended. The tea is brewed in a separate vessel and made very strong, then poured into tea cups. Next, boiling water from the samovar is poured over the tea to dilute it. Thus, the tea is not actually made in the samovar.
           I’ll try it, but it seems, I don’t know, a fussy way to go about things. Also, how do you make the tea consistent batch to batch? Liking predictable results is one reason I prefer tea bags over loose tea, even though I am aware bagged tea is of generally lower quality. I further like the aroma of brewing tea, but not strong tea. (Regular tea I can smell it ready from my Florida room, a good forty feet away.) I saw woodcarvings of Russians pouring their tea into what looks like a sugar cube in a spoon and sipping from there.
           Ah, that explains it. Minutes later I saw a clip from Finland where the soldiers have taken the lid off the chimney part and are feeding pine cones into the shaft. It looks like a convection blast coming out the top. It would appear three soldiers per samovar and they put the fire out before bringing the urn to the serving table. One brave fellow leaned his face over the flue and blew the fire out. The tea pot is then set over the chimney pipe and thus kept warm by the rising hot steam from the water.
           Would you like to see a video of Russian soldiers slicing bread? I was surprised to see several trials of Polish army food which looked like spam and crackers, but all the British said it was “extremely tasty”.