First, my car lot review of y’day was popular. Here is more, you see the white car to the left in this photo? That piece of junk has a sticker price of $27,000! I think it said “Cabriola” or some other of those internationally meaningless words they are naming cars these days. It does not stand up to close inspection. The body panels are ill-fitted, the paint job is cheap, the tires have some kind of coating to make them shine, and the interior is mostly plastic. I have nothing against car prices going up annually, as long as it is accompanied by an increase in quality.
The sticker on this car said it assembled in Kansas and had 80% US/Canadian “parts content”, whatever that means. By weight? By counting the bolts and washers as separate parts? Tulsa and Detroit are 800 air miles apart but it may as well be Japan for the traditional automakers. It is entirely their own fault, and what is more, the death knell of the industry is clearly spelled out by the number of different government stickers and identification tags on every vehicle. As usual, what began as a law for public safety is now just another taxation cross-reference that adds to the price but not the value. A beautiful day for a bike ride and I am stuck indoors. Whatever I’ve got has side effects, for instance, all my joints ache badly. I can barely walk. But again, I know a lot more about database queries because of it. Jose, the neighbor, brought me some medicine from South America. Small pinkish-orange pills of a powdery substance. I don’t believe in painkillers. He says this is anti-inflammation medicine and it immediately caused my joints to have a mild burning sensation that loosens me up. The regimen is 24 hours, but I’m already able to type. His wife returns [from Peru] tomorrow. We’ll make an airport run.
Dickens called from the Thrift, he got an MP3 player donated and needed some directions. I was going to go up there but my throat is still sore and I don’t want to spread this around. Even the cat knows I’m sick and keeps away. Today is just not going to be very exciting. I ran through the TV channels out of curiosity. Cooking shows, infomercials and “Me, Myself and Irene”, the same movie I rented last Sunday at JZ’s. Starring Rene Z., who is not that good-looking in real life and still has anything in South Florida beat. So, do I have anything nice to say about Florida? Yep, the weather is nice.
There is time to look into more teaching, I am scouting around for a hall or school that may let the lessons in. It is for profit, but I can usually explain to the parties that the value of my lessons is experience and nobody who copies me has that. Let me tally that, yes, I have thirty years experience teaching groups of people at once.
Looking at my map, I’ve always wondered why Oklahoma has such a strange shape. That long panhandle to the west that should probably be Texas. There has to be a reason. I’ll look it up. My theory is there was some railroad right-of-way or something of that nature. If you look really close, the western edge does not line up with the long north-south Texas border. It is artificial and that means there is a reason.
Later, I can report remarkable results from the foreign pills. Judging by my physiology, they worked instantly. All natural ingredients, according to Jose. They also reduced the pain, something I am very cautious about. I mean, who do you trust, Mother Nature or Advil? Therefore I have decided to stay inactive for 24 hours.
I took regular study breaks and watched free TV. There is a local station, WLRN, that tends toward the interesting. They had a talk show on local real estate. Wallace, if you read this, we were right. Prices are on the verge of collapse and foreclosures (a particularly nasty form of bankruptcy) are soaring. The locals can no longer afford to live here. The real estate sector propped up by “flight money”, people fleeing South America and cold weather. A notoriously fickle crowd who prove brains is not a qualification to have money.
The talk show was dry commentary, but there was a quip about Ft. Worth advertised for a consultant at $110,000 per year to look into their housing crisis. It turns out that income was not high enough to qualify to rent or purchase anything in that city, so she turned the job down. Remember all those blocks of condos I pointed out along the beachfront? Remember the “Condo that Corruption Built”? I was not surprised to learn there are 69,734 unsold units on the market. Worse, 42% of Florida residents will be “low income” by 2025.
Low income, by its various definitions, essentially means families who can afford to pay $328 per month to rent a three bedroom apartment. Less than I pay and I pay less than 99% of the local population. This whole state is insolvent, the average person just has not realized it yet. Question, based on everywhere I have been in the world, what do I believe a two bedroom house should sell for in Florida? Answer, for actual value received, I would say around $42,000 maximum. Sounds like we live to may see it.
It is 9:30 PM and, in another quip to show that database is not for everybody, it took six hours to figure out why a lookup field was “too large” for the target field. It turns out that Access by default binds the leftmost column, not the displayed column. This is also a revelation of how poorly written the after-market manuals are. They explain to death how each feature works, but rarely a word on how those features need to be meshed to produce results. I mean, how many businessmen sit down and think out the relationships between all their forms, as in “one customer, many invoice is best made a left outer join with enforced relational integrity”.
Trivia for today. “Hyundai” in Korean means “Good Business”. If that is not random enough for you, how about a statistic? You like random? Okay, random DNA tests reveal that in 21% of cases, the husband is not the biological father of the wife’s children. Worse yet, the situation is very evenly distributed across all segments of society. Considering it costs a half-million to raise each child in American these days, them’s pretty bad odds for you marriage-minded men. Of course, I could be making all this up.
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