One year ago today: August 15, 2015, classic gif.
Five years ago today: August 15, 2011, down to $112.83.
Nine years ago today: August 15, 2007, the Peruvian bookkeeper.
Random years ago today: August 15, 2012, welcome to Colorado.
MORNING
It’s notable that searches on the unique name of this blog no longer produce any hits on most of the top browsers. That’s Millennial marketing for you. Corrupt it even if it is free. The only browser that picks up this blog today is Google, and you have to spell it absolutely correctly. The same search produces numerous duplicate links to the similarly titled “Trailer Park”, whose readership is a fraction of mine. I warned you what would happen when outfits like Google take over. These companies are not founded on solid respect for what is inherently right.
The Panera is even worse. Both places make the cashiers double as servers. Hence, if five customers in a row order toast, the sixth customer is going to be waiting at least fifteen minutes. And that is the most exciting activity in this town to report. There is just not the population base here to support anything above gronk level. I am normally the only person in Starbucks reading a book, although you get your laptop crowd. But that isn’t the same.
Meanwhile keep reading today cost me $450 plus change. One of the items was again that non-residence tax on automobile registrations. That’s not accurate, it is only the name that I call the tax, but I was hit once before when I got towed when Wallace was here. The tax has nothing to do with traffic infractions or police tickets, it’s a tax that crops up when I need my vehicle registration. In this case, I want to sell my trailer, which is registered at the DMV. Mr. Trump, abolish the DMV by executive order. Quickly.
Those 73 questions with Vogue interviews. What do you think of them? I find them more rehearsed than a Hillary speech, though not quite as one-dimensional. (I mean, who meets Taylor Swift and asks her how many cats are in the room?) When I answered the questions I found I was unable to unwilling to respond to half the questions. I honestly don’t have a favorite author, food, philosophy, or sports team. I cannot name ten brands of musical instruments, tell you who won Emmys or Oscars, and I’m not really attached emotionally to anything I own. I’d make a pretty piss-poor interviewee for these social magazines.
My advice to teens is get off your asses, the country needs another generation of heroes and you are not it. My idea of success is the said Taylor Swift, but not Justin Beiber. And I can’t really say what I’d prefer at a restaurant if the alternative was breakfast at home. But at twenty or twenty-five, most of us don’t know what is out there so why interview them about it? Sensationalism, that’s why. And when you are twenty, every adventure is new and exciting and who cares about consequences longer-term than tomorrow morning or noon at the latest?
Owl moth.
NOON
Y’know, all the parties that responded to my Craigslist ad for this place were a bunch of flakes. Of the people who come to the door, I have a built in response I perfected years ago. They all want to know what price I would take cash and I respond, but I won’t talk cash unless they show it to me. On that basis, I got a good offer today but she wants to think about it. I know this place is small. You get what you pay for.
The book is my Darwin story, I’m about half-done. See addendum for progress. Still no word from the south on the situation with the truck. I’m still running the Craigslist ad for this place and it is amazing how persistent some people are about trying to engage me in a conversation. I deduce they have illusions that in person they are clever enough to wrangle a better deal, a popular misconstruction. Around me anyway. Again, I can only talk cash when it is sitting in a pile between us.
Trump. I tend to agree with his assertion that he would have a commanding lead over his opponent if the media were truthful in their reporting. It has been evident the establishment-controlled press is anti-Trump and I’ve commented often how they like to portray the race as neck-in-neck, hoping to encourage a few more votes out of people who still think there is a chance Trump won’t win. The message is please vote against Trump because the margin is so narrow your vote could be the tie-breaker. Nonsense, in a fair election, Trump is head and shoulders over the insiders.
Now you see the ring I’m holding. You have to hold that at a constant tension to accelerate the motor to speed and then drive down every back alley in town. Keep off the main roads. These Florida pricks can sense a mile away when you have car trouble and instantly start cutting you off, splashing you, tailgating with blasting horns, and generally being total douchebags on you.
I only had two people bother me. One kept slamming on her brakes ahead of me, I swear because she could see me driving with one hand. And some local dick driving parallel to my right so I could not change lanes on the stretch where he knows all the repair shops are located.
AFTERNOON
This is a nice scene of T.Y. Park, short for Topeekeegee Yugnee, the local dialect for “Gathering Place”. Because nobody really gathers there and you can go sit in the shade with a coffee most afternoons. Like this one, where I waited on my repairs and my appointment at the DMV. It turns out I also owed some sales tax, and the lost duplicate title cost me $80. (The government office lost the title in 2011, not me.) I also ran up against that law that to register this “vehicle” they wanted me to possess a “valid” Florida driver’s license. Which I’ve never had and don’t want.
I’ll also remind you that you cannot just plant oak trees and get this gnarled grandeur. In Nature, oaks don’t grow like this. They have to be widely spaced and all other trees and bushes kept away from the trunks before they grow a canopy anything like this. It is also a reminder to the reader of how nice Florida could be if they simply enforced the existing laws about who could live here.
NIGHT
Yep, the tally is over $450 and puts me on food and water until this place is sold. You caught that did you? That’s food, not bread and water. Got that from W.C. Fields. There being no decent coffee shops left in downtown Hollywood, I took some key lime sodas over to Gabe at the barber shop for a visit. Nothing like ice cold tart key lime in the heat after the afternoon rain. He reports one of the Olympic athletes got mugged which came as no surprise. Apparently it was robbers dressed as police or so say the police. Another no-surprise.
I stayed in and drank black tea. Supper was asparagus and cheese on toast, I didn’t feel like cooking. The climate inside is good for reading but not for moving around the kitchen. I realize too well that all the nice women I’ve met since I was forty was due to chance, but at the same time those chances are not increased by sitting around at home eating asparagus. Y’know, if there is a decent woman left anywhere in S. Florida, I have not seen or heard tell of her in 17 years. That being the case, I’d rather be in the interior where at least the women are real blondes. And you can’t fool me.
Later, I plan to watch some documentaries but the amount of clickbait out there is reaching grotesque proportions. The net still needs a self-policing search engine. Or a new domain that means free and punishes those who try to get around that.
ADDENDUM
Book Five finds us well into the trip and finally beginning to see a pattern to Darwin’s discoveries. The complexity of a sailing ship voyage is becoming clearer and the trip experiences the first casualties and desertions. Charles has been sending home crates of specimens that have already caused quite a stir. The mail deliveries are fascinating, with packet boats actually arriving at correct destinations to deliver letters six or eight months late.
Crewmembers and Charles are taken ill, the ship seems to do a lot of back and forth sailing which is not explained except that it has to do with geography and maps. Long stretches are spent in port, which Darwin uses to make expeditions into new and often dangerous territory. That includes places inhabited by uneducated Spaniards who ask baiting questions. Much like modern day Mexico. “Is it the Sun or the Earth that moves?”
Most influential on Darwin is the fossils. He has already documented the extinction layers. He seems to have no opinion, but his companions, including the captain, are finding they have to conclude the earth is more than 5,000 years old on their own. Darwin still plans on being a parson but now wonders if he should write a book, as other books on S. American travels now seem shallow. It is, I think, important that the feedback he gets from England is telling him to collect certain specimens that are going to lead directly to conclusions about evolution. But not just yet.
The book is definitely picking up. At this point, I can confirm the independent sources that Darwin did not develop his theories while in the Galapagos. He was already away the Biblical version of creation was off by at least a hundred million years. He had mainly collected geological samples that showed the Andes were brittle “as a pie crust”.
I now believe his point of inspiration was a walk with a Galapagos resident who said he could tell which island a tortoise was from. This caused Darwin to quit putting all his finches in one bag because the birds from different islands had different beaks.
Last Laugh
Russian dating site photo, seriously.
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