The Taurus is eating headlights. Something must be getting wet in there. What is the name of that goop you spread over the contacts that keeps water out? Now that I need it I can’t recall the brand name. Although I didn’t notice the bulb was out until dark, I still was leery about driving to work. Isn’t it a pity that in modern day America a citizen should even hesitate to drive with broken light even a couple of miles. By that I mean that the minor safety issue is overridden by the fear of a police checkstop. Burned out bulbs put you on the suspect list. Sad.
Later. These pictures are out of sequence but this makes a point. I am not unhappy when certain people lose their jobs. An example is this headlight. I look into the plastic casing and find there is nearly two cups of water inside. The only way to get it out is to drill a drain hole. There was so much water inside that it was splashing up onto the hot bulb. Why do they even still build a headlight apparatus where this problem is even possible? Fire them all, I say.The day was eaten up by logistics, about half of which were my network and things that needed tweaking. This guy was in wanting his offices in Kansas and Florida networked. I had to tell him that was way out of my league. That fact that I could not is direct proof that the phone company makes certain you learn no transferable skills inside their office. The biggest network I’ve ever done was a small real estate office.
I should have taken the day off since the heat is easily in the danger zone. I’ve got a good book or two lined up, but I decided to try my new “restaurant” set over at Jimbo’s. This is mellow music, but not that piano bar mixture they teach at the academies. The crowd loved it but the compliments did not turn into cash. I got half what I expected.
The good news is that the new set works fine, and can be played effectively at quite a low volume. That also makes it lounge music although I’ll need a better gimmick than my Dwight Yoakum costume to carry that off. I got requests for Pointer Sisters music I’ve never heard of and I’ll take a second look at some old Abba.
I’m reading “Lion in the Evening” by Scholefield, an excellent tale about an American engineer who hires an aging lion hunter to kill a man-eater that has been eating his railway workers. The trivia gained is that although I’ve read earlier books about the exploits of Loettow-Vorbeck, I thought he [Vorbeck] was attacking British crews. Wrong. The local tribesmen considered the railway labor below their dignity. (Had they known what was going to happen to next, they probably would have worked for free. You see, the British promptly imported 30,000 East Indian laborers to lay the tracks. As for the conditions in India, apparently only a handful wanted to go back there when the lines were completed.)
[Author's note 2016: that last paragraph is indistinct. It means that if the Africans had known for a moment the British were planning to allow 30,000 East Indians in their country without permission from the locals, the locals would probably have worked on the railroad just to prevent that. Huge numbers of the East Indians eventually were expelled. This type of event, the removal of certain classes who do not assimilate and begin to corrupt other nations, has precedents.]
Loettow-Vorbeck was the commander in German East Africa who led a guerilla band against the British in the area. It is a fascinating true story that reads like fiction. Some tribes still worship drawings of a Zeppelin that flew all the way from Europe with the first supplies in years and the most prized item was newspapers. (It didn’t make it.) I read all this some 25 years ago, so forgive any sketchy details, but if the war had not ended, the British had plans to send vast armies to root him out. I believe he had around 3,000 men tops, mostly natives with a few German officers. Raids were staged just to get some British tobacco. Until today, that is most of what I knew about African railroads.
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