Here is one of the lessons from Video Professor, and the package that I am currently evaluating. There are more details in other posts near this date. I recommend this (so far) as an excellent product for that narrow range of adults who have not lost the ability to learn things by sitting down and studying intently. The rest, well, they will kind of have to keep on doing things the way they are right now
Tennessee is no longer resident here. Jose and I caught him and delivered him to his owner, an operation that took close to an hour because of a screw-around I have not experienced since Venezuela. This is where you get the Latino run-around. We pulled up in front of an apartment complex and Jose called the lady to come outside and take her cat as we didn’t know which apartment she lived in. The Spanish that I could follow showed that this simple instruction became a massive ordeal. He must have called her six or eight times from the parking lot, but she would not come out as agreed. I said we dump the cat. It was a hot night to be sitting in an un-air conditioned car.Then a man comes to the car window and wants to help, but he doesn’t appear capable of understanding that we have a frightened animal in the car and I am not going to open the window all the way. He acts like he is offended but will not accept responsibility if the cat gets out. Finally he starts giving us direction to go around the corner, up the street to the second storey of another building. However, after having lived in Venezuela, I called the bullshit on that one. I told him to stop bothering us.
The runaround continues for another half hour and the man comes back. It turns out not only is it his mother’s cat, they all live in the same apartment which was less than twenty feet away. No, this is not a custom, for I have seen other Spanish-speaking people get equally annoyed when treated to such nonsense. Some people just have to screw you around or they’re not happy. I cannot stomach idiots. I grabbed the cat with heavily-gloved hands and impelled it through the open door of the apartment, then pulled the door shut.
Over to Jimbo’s last night, where the Hippie played with (still) another band called Po’ Boys. They put on a good show for the regulars. The music was tight and well-presented though it was the same old material. (I could randomly pick any other guitarist’s song list, and it would closely match his.) The Hippie missed reading the crowd again just because there were one or two musicians in the place who will applaud anything. He still cannot play Spiders and Snakes. All of these things I gave him advance notice before he played that gig, but he didn’t listen.
He was repeatedly ignoring direct audience requests, talking far too long between songs and played past quitting time. Let me clarify a point here. The Hippie does not believe he is wrong about reading the audiences, yet he is the worst I have ever seen, and I don’t like superlatives—he is the worst, even including non-musicians I know. Other people know when their act is not selling the whole room. He uses the defense mechanism that wrong must mean totally dead wrong. The Hippie does not understand that being even a little wrong in these circumstances is the same thing.
Myself, I had already put in a full day and found the evening exhausting just to stand there and play. I had to sit down a few times and leave out several sweet bass riffs. Even some slow dancing tuckered me out. Maybe chasing cats isn’t all that easy.
There is another slight problem with the water pressure, unrelated to the minor repair this week. Pressure seems to vary wildly during the day for no reason. There are times when the shower barely dribbles. I’ve checked other taps at the same time and cannot discover why this happens. That is why we have Wallace, the expert plumber, on the way. The temperature moved up to 99 degrees by 11:00 A.M., which provides an opportunity to test the effect of the air conditioner. Later, by 4:00 P.M. it was 104 degrees inside, which proves finally that without modification, a Florida room is not, by itself, anything more than very expensive storage. The A/C takes it down to 90 degrees.
I picked up today’s trivia while reading an article about how every paragraph you or I have ever written is unique. That had never dawned on me before, that a simple group of short sentences has that quality. It certainly cannot be true of speaking, only writing. Ah yes, the trivia, here goes. When is an acronym not an acronym? Consider these two examples. “NATO” and “FBI”. Notice that NATO can be pronounced as a word while FBI cannot, that is, you have to spell it out “Eff-Bee-Eye”. That means FBI is not an acronym, but a curious construction called an “initialism”. QED.
There was a program on the Shanghai maglev train. It moves 275 mph, an almost unimaginable experience (for me), yet the camera makes it look benign. The US is years behind though we have an existing infrastructure that would have to be replaced, and that system probably moved several million times more cargo than all the maglevs put together. My guess is 300 mph, around Mach .4, is not unreasonable, making San Diego just ten hours away. Mind you, like airports, you can bet the terminals will make travel into a total rip-off with valet parking and $400 a night hotels. Plus stops and transfers would double the travel time to 20 hours, about half what it takes to drive there and avoid the $100 cab fares.
As usual, they will try to please everybody and wind up with ridiculous compromises that propagate the know inefficiencies. Our “classless” society will charge extra for express service. Will they be smart enough to build it so they don’t blow the horn every country mile? That means elevated through all populated areas. But a non-stop ten-hour trip to the west coast sounds fantastic to me.
