PICTURES ARCHIVED - STANDBY (Later, I can't find the pictures. They are there somewhere, nothing like that ever gets lost over here. Someday I will find them and make everybody happy. Many of those early digital pictures are classics today. This blog was one of the first consumer-level publications to utilize digital photographs. Before this, it was mostly fancy-pants pro photographers who basically took the same pictures as with film, that is, pretty pictures meaningless to most of us. My pictures depict life among the masses.)
First some kind of picture if I can find one. That’s the most amusing part of today unless you enjoy details of things gone wrong. Come to think of it, isn’t that what TV news is all about? Hey, here is one of the most famous photos ever taken with the Argus. This is before you came along, but it is less than two years ago. The proof that it is mine is simple; I am the only person who knows where that sidewalk is. Hint, it is in South Miami. The duckie picture. Just think, only one of these is still alive today. That’s softening you up for what comes next.
How well do you like bad news? Not, bad for me, but bad enough. The bookkeeper at the wig shop was led away in cuffs. The good news is she confessed immediately. This system is most strange, even if she is convicted she will not have to pay it back. You watch, she’ll get off claiming she stole it for milk for her babies or her shack-up boyfriend made her do it. Whatever, Florida.
I’m going in special tomorrow to set up a system that is nearly impossible to beat. Sadly, it is something I was going to insist upon when I was told not to touch anything that the bookkeeper would be doing. It was my unhappy chore today to show how I would have caught the crooked bookkeeper almost instantly. People inexplicably think my system of logging the payables takes too long. I say it takes exactly the correct amount of time and no less.
Here is a related spinoff. Today, the dentist next door called the police to report that a black guy was stealing water by hooking up a hose to his outside faucet and washing his truck. He was. I habitually park where it is very difficult to walk behind my car and collect the license number. The police showed up and proceeded to record the license numbers of all the vehicles in the lot. Except mine. I’ve got nothing to hide, but I still insist on my right to do so. Do you think the police would leave it alone if they found one of the vehicles belonged to someone with an outstanding warrant?
That is my point. I’m not siding with the accused, I am siding with the Constitution which requires all people be free from arbitrary search. You cannot have freedom where the police are allowed any excuse to cross-reference information such as license numbers. The law still requires reasonable and probable cause and I support that law. Being parked near a crime scene does is not reasonable and probable cause, nor is even a damn good description (all stupid people look alike to me).
Another let-down in the system was the bank. They don’t announce it, but most checks are processed by machine. Thus even a bad forgery will likely get through the deposit system. I would like to see the checks in question just to see how poorly they are done. The only hand-written forgery I’ve ever seen that would fool me was one that changed $7.00 into $77.00 and to this day I can’t figure out how they got it so perfect, even the correct brand of ballpoint pen. My point there is it is another cost the banks push onto the public, yet checks are a banking invention they should go out of their way to ensure.
The database is really biting into the works now. The instant reports are enough to convince even the pessimistic, there is a harsh accuracy when done right. Yeah, the problem with most people is they’ve never seen a database that was done right! Certainly nobody who has ever had their file pulled up by the DMV or the government would say those records are 100% accurate.
Something I’ve not seen right is that Sony disk burner I bought 18 months ago. Like most Sony products since 1985, it is vastly overpriced and rarely does what it is supposed to without some unnecessary complication. This particular unit has so many anti-piracy features built in that it is of very little use at all. The worst shortfall is that it cannot detect the end of a video tape. It should detect the end and stop recording, then ask you what to do. This contraption keeps burning to the end of the DVD and then locks itself up. You cannot eject the disk without wrecking what was recorded. By far the worst defect is that it will flash that it is recording when, in fact, it is doing nothing.
The friction between Sony and I goes back decades. I hold Sony responsible for abortions such as the “service contract”. If it quits working, they should take it back and fix it or replace it, American style. Sony (Canada) is the outfit responsible for my lost tapes of the trek into Angel Falls in Venezuela, back when it wasn’t a tourist trap. The same outfit charged me $44 for a photocopying a manual they had removed from the box of a recorder they sold me as new but “last year’s model”. (When I examined the manual, guess what? Twenty-one pages in English and twenty-three pages in French. Bastards!) Sony will rip you off to the nth degree for a lousy twenty bucks.
Yet, the product does exactly what it stated on the package. Yet that is misleading because it is too often intentionally worded to disguise the shortcomings. Overall, I find both Sony and the Sony dealerships to be very unethical to deal with. To remain silent over known defects in electronic products is sickening these days.
Ah, you want another picture. Here is the black water of Lake Okeechobee. It gets black from suspended particles of the sooty black soil. The second largest freshwater lake entirely in the country, although you would not drink this water, is an average of only 14 feet deep. Don’t let that fool you to the danger, tens of thousands of people have drowned from hurricane surges on the banks. Today, you can drive around the lake without ever seeing it from ground level, as there is a huge levee forty-five to sixty feet high around the perimeter. The area around the lake is actually quite barren but the land, or muck really, is so fertile it is worth incredible amounts of money. They grow sugarcane and the stocks are so high I did not know what it was when I first saw it. Another Argus classic photo.
Somewhat later, I called and left a message for the G stating what I felt about him not calling me back y’day. I reminded him that he is into me for more favors than he can repay and that I was up front with him that I wanted to contact another guitar player to form a band. I need somebody who will “110% guaranty they will not play solo gigs behind my back, so even if [the G guaranteed me] 100%, that is not good enough any more.”
If that is not bad enough, my new fridge is not freezing anymore.
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