Even the freeways were empty, which is most unlike this third-world area. I mean, have you ever seen Mexico City on a Sunday? The freeways here have a useless sign that says the minimum speed is 40 mph. Has anyone ever been ticketed for this?I took a wrong turn near Coral Estates and passed some new houses that are hard to believe. Some of them sit on a private three acres and have entrance hallways several times the size of the shacks I grew up in. It is just so fascinating to me to wonder what it would have been like to live in a place like that. There was one stretch with a road sign saying “Deaf Child Area”. What next? “Fat Housewife Crossing”.
This put me in the mood to thumb through a booklet on “Projects for Boys”, since I was an avid consumer of “Popular Mechanics” until I was fourteen and began to see the pattern. It seems to take the editors around seven years to do yet another article on somebody re-inventing the blimp, the electric car or the camera. Anyway, I’m reading these projects and asking myself, “What boys are they talking about?”
Where are these boys who seem to have unlimited access to machine shops, private hillsides, canoes and used two-horsepower motors? That isn’t really fair, but it is a valid question because I know kids who had all that who never did a blessed thing. What really got me was that none of the projects could be completed in one day. Thus, none could be accomplished by kids as poor as myself. Even the cheapest materials cost something – even if you get them for free, you still owe the favor. Poverty is downright strange that way.
What’s this about a one-day limit? Easy. When you are raised in poverty, you cannot gradually work or think your way up. You have to come from out of nowhere with a finished product and slam-dunk the losers that surround you. This is an accurate statement, not a cruel one. Any truly poor person can relate how every on-going project they ever attempted began to dangerously draw unwarranted attention in no time.
Some may point out that I undertook very long-term ventures as a child. Yes, but they were intangibles I was no good at piano, but it endured. Everything touchable was force-shared back into worthlessness.
That also explains my fascination with space travel. It is a long-term undertaking only possible through cooperation. Rumor has it there will be a colony of Chinese living on the moon five years from now. Here’s some trivia. Do you know why shuttle launches never happen in an electrical storm, but airliners can take off? It is because the airplane is not grounded.
Ah, I hear someone say neither is the shuttle. Wrong. That long tail of rocket plum is full of ionized spent fuel particles all the way back to the gantry. So full it can be detected by a spy satellite. Or a moon colony. That rocket exhaust makes an excellent ground. And have you ever wondered how the bad guys know where James Bond cut the barbed wire? It is true, there is a fiber optic cable down the middle of the strand. It reflects itself in stages, and when clipped, tells the guards where to look.
Here is a something I’d not seen before, although it makes perfect sense. It is a spray nozzle mounted in the center of an outdoor fan. You can just see the slight haze darting down from the grill. This was at an outdoor pub in the plaza. I instinctively walked around it so as not do get doused. When I saw others emerge dry, I stood right beneath it and the temperature is down by a good ten degrees. The water is evaporating in the air long before it can condense so all you get is the cool breeze.Hopefully it will prove more economical than that ice cream parlor at the corner of NW 1 and Hallandale Beach Blvd that was charging $4 a scoop. They are bankrupt. Oh, and that Salvation Army store in the Plaza is now an Office Depot.
There was time to study a little Chinese. I have my first set of basic words ready after memorizing the table locations of the 215 different sounds. Hey, I said the locations, not the sounds. I merely know where to look when I find something unfriendly. I can construct very simple sentences such as “They are going” and “We do not understand”. Don’t confuse this with repeating stock phrases from a guidebook. I am constructing new sentences from scratch.
What have I discovered so far? Well, all Chinese words are one syllable and start with a consonant, although it is sometimes silent. Every sentence can be turned into a question by saying “maw” at the end. This is the fourth book I’ve read on the topic and I can already see that, like English, the pronunciation can have a lot to do with the education of the speaker. I can also indicate a past and future tense although there are no tenses in Chinese. I’m going to see if I can get any recordings off the Internet for my goal is just 600 words.
Later. I got to thinking it a good idea that I at least learn to recognize a string of Chinese numbers. It is easy. My book shows the numbers from left to right and I’ve heard up and down is just as correct. It takes at least thirteen distinct strokes to write the number “zero” and it is used more as a separator than a placeholder. It takes fewer characters to write 1,001 than 101. I think. Here is a sample of my early work, the digits 0 through 10. Each symbol is a distinct number, so ten is not built from a one and a zero.
