January 4, 2017

Yesteryear
One year ago today: January 4, 2016, the tire still leaks.
Five years ago today: January 4, 2012, send in the clowns.
Nine years ago today: January 4, 2006, a long-term search for quality.
Random years ago today: January 4, 2003, when on-line dating was still new.

MORNING
           Right at dawn, my cardinals were at the birdfeeder. It was kind of dark, but if there is a still of them munching the sunflowers, then you know the camera blind was effective. It sits two feet from the perch. Be patient, as the perch twirls around when they land on it. Hopefully, I’ll catch the smaller birds that ignore the cardinal warning chirp and have learned to flit onto the other side of the feeder and steal away one seed at a time. Either way, I’ll have footage of dawn in my new yard.

           [Authors’s note: moments later, I got these stills from the camcorder. Yes, they are blurry, but you may remember this camera. That’s the best it can do. The videos aren’t much better. It is still the most reliable camera I have for this kind of photography. It can’t be seen, but in the first picture with Mr. Red, there’s a squirrel on the wood pile and on the immediate left is the tree stump, the woodpecker wing is just visible if you know what to look for.
           That’s Mrs. Red in the second panel. On the furthest tree to the right, you can see the little white yard monitor box. Temp, motion, etc.]

           I have chores today that stop me from anything exciting. It’s a situation I’ve looked forward to, gang. I’d like to help you lead the charge, but I’ve got laundry and shopping to do today. That, and I bought a new murder mystery centered on Miami. Wait for that report. If you must know, I have a shortage of small pots around here. Finally, I went up to the Thrift and got a nice matching set. While up there, I bought one of the worst video DVDs ever, called “Solaris”.
           The good news this AM is remember that 8 foot tree stump I intentionally left in the front corner? It makes the house easy to find and it brought back the red-headed woodpecker. The stump is shedding bark and an ideal meal ticket as it appears the woodpecker like bark beetles. I’ll see if I can photograph the woodpecker holes they make in the tree, if you’ll come back tomorrow.

           It is the worn out theme of the planet with a mysterious force that can recreate memories in nearby humans. Of course, it is always a deceased loved on who rekindles the affair and the love-struck bozo tries to stop the crew from killing the alien. Would you like to hear about the cats, always a blog topic of choice judging by what’s out there. Okay, first imagine the fire pit I have half-constructed. It has a partial brick lining and a grill over the top.
           The sun shines on the bricks heating them up. So, instead of waiting until this evening to get to the cats, I’ll tell you. By dusk, the yard cools down, but the bricks continue to radiate the day heat. I get home and find all the neighborhood cats snoozing on the grill. It’s perfect, the bricks throw off the heat, but the wire is a foot off the surface, so there is a nice breeze to make it all temperate. I can’t blame the cats, I could feel the warmth just walking up to see. I’d describe the heat as “gentle”. Smart cats.

Picture of the day.
Not Vancouver, Canada.
Vladivostok, Russia.
Remember to use BACK ARROW to return to blog.
NOON
           Liking a good detective novel, I picked up a used copy of “Miami, It’s Murder” by Edna Buchanan. I’m only on chapter seven, but yes, read this book. It’s outdated but she’s a reporter so she knows all the slang terms. It really spices up the story. For instance, the Miami Squat Team. That’s the ones who catch the mules who swallowed drugs. The smugglers are offered surgical incision, or a massive dose of laxative. You figure out the rest.

           She bases her plot on real cases, although she carefully avoids stating what everybody knows. That Miami was a sleepy little city and a safe place to live until the Cubans arrived. As Trump would say, some are, I suppose, good people. Now it is crime and drugs, like any other Latin American city. The idiot concept of victory is when your adversary just packs up and leaves. All the white people left. Statistically, when you walk through Little Havana, every eighth person you pass is or has a prostitute or car thief in the family. And Detroit teaches us the lesson that once things sink that low, the good times never come back.

           Reading up on a better way to design the Arduino “speedometer”, I found several passages on fractions over the ages. I did not know that pi is very close to the square root of ten. The goal was to program the Arduino to a more accurate value of pi, instead I found a lot of information about that fraction, including an explanation of how Archimedes came up with 22/7, the figure taught in school. This is your trivia. It came from his knowledge of how the ancient Egyptians did their fractions. They solved math problems by reducing the fractions to a state where all the numerators were 1. The example given was: 5/7 = 1/2 + 1/7 + 1/14. Don’t ask me how this was ever used.
           There is even poetry where the alphabetic letter count of “each successive” word is a mnemonic for the first 740 digits of pi, apparently derived from Edgar Allen Poe’s, “The Raven”. I did not look that one up. Mind you, I tried the system. The first line of the poem is “Poe, E. Near a Raven, Midnights so dreary, tired and weary”, which gives 3.1415926535. It works.

Country Song Lyric of the Day:
“He's got a Way with Women and He's Just got Away with Mine.”
NIGHT
           Here’s some trivia for you, from the same book as the fractions. In the movies, when the settler get hits by the Apache arrow, or the bad guy takes a bullet from Clint, you know how the fly backwards? That’s Hollywood. They didn’t read Newton’s Third Law. Or, like Ken Sanchuk, maybe they read it but lacked the academic background to interpret it correctly. Ken’s a lot like the horse that refused to pull the cart. The fact is, if the impact of the bullet was enough to fling the victim backward, it would also shove the shooter back by an equal amount.

           Later after dark, I stopped at the old club and ran into Mack, the guitar player who just retired. It’s odd to hear him talk about his old bands because it is evident he was never in a band that was properly managed. Thousands of bands fail because they do not grasp the importance of having a financially responsible manager. They all think they can wing it, forgetting that even Presley went nowhere until he hired an agent.
           Mack’s also a fan of slow music and was incredulous when I pointed out to him how slow most of that was. Like many guitar players, he’s never looked at the music from any angle but his own. Yes, Mack, a lot of Stones rock-n-roll is draggy old crap that plods along. (Think “Beast of Burden”.) His objection to playing in a band as opposed to just hauling out his guitar is that “you have to be at a certain time and place”. I never viewed that as a problem. To make money, you always have to follow that rule.

           However, he told me something else I do see as trouble in a hurry. He knows this other guy who is “a fantastic lead player” who is sixty and just lost his job. Folks, that is the last sort of person you ever want to be in a band with. At that age, he’ll never get another job and he’s quickly going to attempt to rely on the band for income. To the guitar player, that means the moment he thinks you are committed enough to not back out easily, he’ll start insisting on doing things his way. His way is you learning his song list, and when the band goes nowhere, it is because you haven’t learned your part good enough. Such bands are a monumental waste of time.
           Since around 1985 when clubs had the option of going Karaoke, playing in a band with people who need the money is a blatant conflict of interest situation. Myself, I want the money, but that is altogether not at all the same thing. On the other hand, beware of guitarists who don’t like to play for money. (Tell them okay, let’s play and you take the credit, I’ll take the cash. See how fast they flip flop on that.) Careful here, I’m not saying Karaoke wiped out live music, just that the option made part-time musical income a risky business.

           [Author’s note: I’m generalizing here. Since 1987, I’ve had two long periods (more than two years running) where my music/entertainment income paid all my bills on a monthly basis. This was my long-running gigs at the stevedore hotels in the Seattle area and the five year house gig at Jimbos. From 1987 to 1993-ish, I basically banked my paychecks. Didn’t need ‘em. I was making $150 a week in the band. I would sometimes go check my balance out of curiosity, there were times I had like $36,000 in my savings account. All that taught me was that bank interest as an investment is a guaranteed loss.
           This is not a statement to be interpreted as meaning I kept that kind of money floating around. I would sometimes take two months off and go boating around the Philippines, or take an $8,000 jaunt over to Thailand. That’s back when these places were real bargains and electricity was a luxury. To this day, I am still a firm believer in having a six month expense buffer as a minimum. This requires uncommon discipline, I don’t even look for it in musicians.
           So read my lips. Do not go in a band with a part-time guitarist who needs the money. Or might even potentially need the cash. Hobby music for for pin money only.]

ADDENDUM

           Here’s a complete report on the aging red scooter. This is a group of pictures from only y’day. Like many of the articles and items featured here, these are the most famous in Florida. Let me qualify that. If you had a wrench, or a bird, how many people would you say had to look at it before more people looked at it than any other picture of the same subject? 500? 800? 1,000? Ah, now you get the idea. Not really that many—and I don’t mean casual glances, but pictures that somebody deliberately went on-line and navigated to your site, and clicked on the picture to enlarge it.
           That’s why-how-come many of the pictures I can claim are “most famous” because they are well above the 2,500 mark. I have photos that over 8,000 people have looked at. So yes, this old scooter is by that standard, a very well-known piece of jun, er . . . equipment.

           Here is what you are looking at, top to bottom

           1) This is the faded dashboard. The lens glass has not yet been replaced, but the speedometer hasn’t worked in ages. The paint is faded almost to white.
           2) The seat has been continually repaired with black duct tape, expertly stapled and glued to robotics standards. But unlike the original material, duct tape gets wet. Watch your, um, step.
           3) The lock to the underseat compartment has been repaired so often, it is held in place with two screws, so the key turns and not the whole lock. It still works.
           4) There’s the relocated starter, a custom robot switch.
           5) The perpetual missing reflector. All scooters of a certain age have a missing reflector. There’s naught you can do about it.
           6) The cracked rear reflector, from that hit and run in the McDonald’s parking lot last year. I wonder if they ever got the guy?
           7) Misaligned body panels. Whenever these are removed to work on the innards, they never fit back properly. By now, they go out of kilter within a week of returning from any shop work
           8) I dunno, it’s the missing reflector again. I wasn’t paying attention, obviously. This photo isn’t watermarked. Anybody who wants to steal it can have it. The scooter or the picture. Take both. Free.

           There you have it. Sparing no effort to bring you novelty articles and points of view. If you already saw anything I write on TV, hey, I would have no way of knowing that. Most everything you read here is, at the least, independently arrived at.
           The scooter is mechanically quite sound as far as old scooters go. Easy starting, still peppy, good mileage, no oil leaks, everything works, including brakes & electrical. It is still the vehicle of preference for shopping trips and laundry because the payload is three times more than the Rebel.

           The scooter mileage is based on my average of 66 miles per week over the years. That's conservative since I moved here, where everything is a mile further each way. But that scooter has around 26,000 miles on it by now.


Last Laugh


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