The callout just mentioned made me a new friend, Sofia. Here is her picture.To celebrate my birthday, Wallace drove us out to the casino. Not exactly the Hard Rock, but the adjunct across the street. It is a more casual place with less posers. Wallace had a $15 coupon for the slots, which we spent in less than five minutes. All we won were free spins. The machines are computerized and use the “California” pitch, for instance the 5 cent machines required 20 “points” per play, which cost $1. But it is still the 5 cent machine.
The high point was the smorg. I went back for three helpings. First fish, then roast beef, then chicken. Full plate helpings. Wallace took a smoke break after one course and never made it back. On the other hand, I even had room for desert. The meal was not lavish. Instead, the quality was very high. To the feeling that I gained twenty pounds, all I can say is that’s the way to do it. Not snacking on bon-bons all day. Back home I fell asleep for three hours until Will called from Boston’s.
A meal like that perked me up at the time, mind you. I waddled over to the bingo section and bought in for a round. Gone are the simple rules of get a line and yell. Every game had several winning patterns which you can get from context: 2 lines, 4 corners, postage stamp, and six-pack. You get six sheets of bingo “cards” with six games each. Turns out I was playing the wrong cards but so what? A kindly lady to the left helped me out at the end and I was one number away from a $100. Strangely, the room was almost empty yet there was always a bingo by the time ten letters were called, or it seemed that way.
Getting my second wind, I jammed with Arnel for the customary three tunes. Big Jim showed up with most of the regular gang. Arnel’s lady gave me a series of exercises to perform on my arm. I find them cruelly painful but something has to be done. She says after a week, I will appreciate the results.
At the shop today a couple of ladies came in and asked if there was a “John” working here. Nope, they were about to leave and I thought, did they say “joven”, the Spanish word for “young”? Sure enough, they thought they needed a young person to help them hack into a computer. This you might find interesting. They share a place with an ex-cop and discovered he was doing something against them on-line. They wanted to hack his computer.
First of all, I would never do anything illegal. But that does not mean I agree with the suppression of information. There should never be any restrictions on knowledge. I was personally held back for years on that ticket. It is up to society to arrange itself so that the rewards of doing things right are immediate and far more substantial that doing them any other way. The fact that society fails at this is cause for improvement, not justification for censorship.
So I talked with the ladies for an hour. When some ex-cop is driving two women to exasperation, I will listen. Apparently they had been reading his email, but he changed the password. Basically, I informed them that men are stupid, and cops are stupid men. Go make an extra pot of tea and between the two of them, they’ll come up with something. For example, have one friend momentarily disconnect the fuse while he is on-line. He’ll assume it was a power failure and log back on. Listen to how many keystrokes that takes. Or (my favorite at the office) put a voice activated tape recorder in the desk. It is amazing how many people mutter their password.
We went over the pros and cons of several approaches. For instance, plug in your flash drive and copy his entire text files. It is truly moronic the files some people will keep. Or, in a pinch, clone the hard drive. Failing that, rip it out and replace it with another. Being a brilliant cop, he’ll assume it crashed. Worst case? Take the whole computer and hold it for ransom. Let him explain why you did it.
The only thing a “young” person would do is try to hack the system and that, folks, is how you get caught. I certainly cured those two ladies of their mistaken belief that it requires a young person to get something done on computers. Of course, my words were for entertainment value only. And even more of course, I’m not Mother Teresa when it comes to computerized abuse.
I left Boston’s around 10:00 P.M. to drop by on Cowboy Mike. He wasn’t there, having left with his band “about 40 minutes ago”. There must have been a smirk on my face. It seems he played an hour with some stand-in musicians, then his guitar broke, whence he packed up. Ut-tut, the show must go on. He is still known there as my ex-guitarist and he is in front of people who have seen me play the entire night to a near empty room but I never ever quit. When a string broke, I played on the remaining three. When another broke, I played a disk of karaoke music.
While not gloating, I think the smirk may have been a little real. Mike’s situation is not some random event. It is a musician I had to let go because he wasn’t keeping up with me who is now trying to play the same club. I have no further details but you just don’t leave a gig half-played. I’ve wished Mike luck before. Now I wish luck would be enough.
