A month ago the shop got rearranged to place the computers along the west wall, freeing up a lot of floor space. This is what it looks like, with one of my regular customers at the flatscreen. It took a year for this setup just to pay for itself, so plans of upgrading are pushed back to the horizon. The $100 laptop is due next year, along with completely wireless Internet service, and once China gears up, the disposable computer. I won’t be wiped out, but I’ll have to change how I do business.
It’s also the end of an era. I received news this afternoon that the Thrift Store has been sold. That also means Dicken’s is likely moving right out of the area. This is part of the under-reported Florida exodus. There may be a net influx, but people leaving town are the long-term minority that created the economy. To what is coming in, electronics means a golf cart.The mercurial music situation here means I’ve got several irons in the fire. One of them is an outfit called Paradise Blue. I can already play about half their song list, so when they advertised for a bassist, I spent an hour on their web pages. They appear to be a five-piece team of high-powered old-timers. Their choice of music confirms this and with over sixty tunes, they are serious.
I’ll be leery of large bands until the end, so I’d have to know how much they make and how often. It is something you learn not to outright ask in Florida because it comes across like you need the money rather than want it. Oddly, $100 a show is hardly worth it for the work involved, but I’d gladly do the same work for less money in a duo where there are fewer unknowns. I swapped song lists with Paradise Blue and we’ll see what they have to say. Big bands become like a job in that when it pays good, it is hard to get time off to enjoy the pay.
Some trivia. Years ago, more as a joke, I sketched a plan to program an on-screen calculator to display (integers only), in addition to Arabic numerals, such symbols as English words and Roman numerals. I was investigating object-oriented programming. For example, a mouse click and the buttons would change to “One” and “Six”, or “III” and “VII”. (The zero was ignored whenever irrelevant as in X * XI = CX)
It would have been amusing to see an answer spelled out as “One Thousand and Twenty-four”, for computer screen does not have the same limitations as a LCD. The algorithm for the Roman numerals was a fascinating mental exercise; I discovered that the maximum number that could be written was around 6,600. I was wrong, for this morning I learned there are Roman numerals above “M” for 1,000. No, I won’t tell you what they are, only that it preserves that strange system of having signs for numbers like 5, 50 and 500, and goes up to 1,000,000.
Henry Cavendish discovered water was made of oxygen and hydrogen. I studied his work in my late teens and today read a most unflattering article about the man, thinking it would be about his works. He was a scientist of the first order yet he was portrayed as an antisocial eccentric. The reasoning (by some zero named W.R. Aykroyd) appears to be based on such trivialities as that Cavendish always liked to put his boots in the same spot, wore old clothes, and gave little to charity. That describes two-thirds of south Florida.
I have some advice for those who criticize great people. Learn to draw a distinction between not liking crowds and not liking packs of uneducated, unwashed, untalented and pushy buffoons. Then, before you write criticism, take stock of which group you yourself belong to. Even if you are naive enough to believe there can be no beauty without a corresponding flaw, it is still possible to keep quiet. I have a lot of personal experience with people who could never believe you didn’t like them, as in, “What do you MEAN you don’t want to talk to me!”
You know who you are.
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