Ah, but life is for having fun. The real mystery is the strange “drops” in my bank account. Even numbers of money “disappears” for a while, then shows back up before my statement arrives.. These transactions do not show on my monthly statements, but are revealed by the balance check I do after each activity. WAMU, Washington Mutual.You can see my records here for 8/3/07. At 9:53 I withdraw $200 on transaction number 2766, then at 1:16 another $60 on transaction 8192. The balance in my checking can only be reconciled by another $50 withdrawal during the intervening three hours while I was at the dog wig place. This is not the first situation of this type I have experienced with WAMU. (I do 100% of my banking at ATMs, which cannot dispense $50.)
I’m back at 4:00 p.m., and so is my $50. I’ve often wondered about the timing of these strange actions, say compared to when they do their monthly interest calculations. Still, any unexplained activity by a bank is more than highly suspicious. Sure, they took fifty bucks for two days, but if they have a million accounts, the interest is $5,479 for somebody.
I walked through Aventura, the only thing new was a moving LED display that showed a woman strolling. Highest price mall in the area or not, it was crowded, far more than can be explained by the excellent A/C. I priced out some books on Chinese grammar and was surprised to learn I had been led astray twenty years back. I was told the two languages were dissimilar to the point they could not communicate. It seems many of the common words are very close in sound.Another nice discovery is that days of the week are literally “Day One” (Monday), “Day Two” (Tuesday) and so on. I was at Waldenbooks. The New Age section was larger than the reference section. It shows you where that store is geared and anyway, New Age books are always a laugh, with topics like psychic revelations, tarot reading and alchemy. More like Dark Ages. It causes people with weak minds to conclude that since they can’t think originally, they must therefore be able to think creatively. Nor do they let little things like cold, hard facts get in the way of their logic.
Next, it was over to Border’s, where you can at least have a coffee while reading for free. (Coffee at Aventura is $2.89 per cup.) I was surprised by a magazine I’ve never seen before, called “Southern Partisan”. It is pro-Confederate without being pro-slavery, rather it focuses on the hypocrisy of what happened, and the aftermath that still exists today. Almost any mention of Confederacy brings howls of “racism” from up north, but that just demonstrates they don’t have the brains to see the difference, I suppose.
Having just time to browse, the top article in this issue was that Abraham Lincoln’s speeches were regularly quoted by Stalin, Lenin and Hitler. One passage claimed that the original version of “Mein Kampf” contains page after page of plagiarized [Lincoln] material about how one had to remove power from the states for the sake of national unity. The original version, for the record, is still copyrighted and unpublished. Lincoln is called the “Dictator’s Favorite President”.
I read all the material I could find on manufacturing and business in China. Maybe an hour of reading. One province in China has 18,000,000 factory workers. That’s more than in the whole USA. I also found a joke making the rounds over there, directed at the American system, not at Americans themselves, goes like this. Q: What do you call a Chinese woman who tells her boss, “I have to go pick up my kids”? A: Unemployed.
That source also states that the meal where people most often miss food from home is breakfast. Some Chinese restaurants have apparently learned to serve a Denny’s style “Grand Slam”. In particular, I was seeking information about foreign owned factories, and I came up with a most unpleasant conclusion [for most Westerners]. Just like here, the factories are owned by people whose parents had the money to set them up in business for themselves. Sorry, but there was no getting around that reality. A twenty-eight year old Irishman does not start a micro-chip factory in Shanghai with his pocket change.
Is it live or is it MP3? It was an evening of editing my material and I report that I can now seamlessly create new tunes from old. Absolutely no way to tell unless you memorized every note of the original, and even then I’ve overdubbed, in most cases, where a note had any distinction. I even fixed that 2.21% drag from Bob Marley’s original “Stir It Up” and added an extra lead solo to “Hippie Hippie Shake”. Now I’m going back and re-doing some of my earlier work that was a little zonky.
What? Oh, let me explain. When Marley recorded the tune, his bass player’s “E” string was a little flat, so when he played a fretted “A”, it was different than an open “A”. I actually used to tune down my “E” string for that one song. This takes time. Other tunes like “Fire”, by the Pointer Sisters, also get time-consuming as they involve re-arrangement, key changes and long envelopes. It also takes time to figure out that Patsy Cline’s bassist played everything on one string.
Here comes the trivia. Why is it that only large ships, that is over 985 feet long, can keep up their speed during an ocean storm? No, it is not because they have the momentum to plow ahead [as I thought]. It is because the ship is longer than the natural wavelength of the water, and therefore does not get bobbed up and down. How about that? Kudzus to whoever figured that out.
