Following the blog rules, the most unusual thing that happened today is the cat got sick. That is a first time around here and she seems to have totally recovered from a spell of nausea. Too much information? Yeah, well I missed an appointment to learn some music techniques with Arnel over it. I was delayed and hour and a half. My explanation is that I have begun spraying the cat with a flea-control, which she tends to lick at.I set up the new music laptop, a Dell, and the “ticky-bop” problem is only partially solved. It appears at high volumes through PA speakers. It does not appear on smaller speakers or headphones, meaning I have to take the computer over to Jimbo’s to test it, which I did late this afternoon. As luck would have it, the 10% of the tunes that still distort are my top crowd-pleasers. I am now out of options except to use new software, making all my earlier files obsolete.
This does not stop my show, it only slows down progress. Right now I could run an excellent Karaoke show and just play along to the tunes I have bass lines for. That is not the “live” act I worked so hard for but it keeps me in the loop until all the technical difficulties are solved. My lack of talent is really beginning to show, but I’m referring to singing talent, not musical or performing skills. I could give a few people lessons on the last two. In fact, I have given such lessons.
Summer is creeping up on us and today was hot and dry. That means indoors, and a good book. I often read a book several times before looking to see who wrote or published it. That’s why I can’t go on the trivia shows and make a fortune. The people who write the questions all know who wrote the book, but not what it is about. Sometimes I can’t even remember the names of the characters. For example, I am re-reading “The Spy Who Came In From the Cold”. I know one name, “Leamas”, and I’ll forget that soon. But I can tell you the meaning of the title. It means a spy who is retiring from active duty.
The jacket says this book was made into a movie. The 1963 book itself is not a thriller in the sense it addresses the sheer boredom and guesswork that probably parallel real espionage. Writers had not yet learned to keep movie rights in their back pockets. By chapter nine, they are still sitting in a Dutch hotel taking notes. It is supposedly the first major spy novel involving the advances made by WWII, with moles and double agents taking orders from an all-good government department with a man in charge.
The more intense theme of the novel is that back then, things worked. Orders were obeyed, and national security involved more than making old people remove their shoes at the airport. Now the typical government mind-set is to go looking for bombs instead of the bombers. Setting up database clouds as an excuse to have as much on file about law-abiding citizens as they do on the bad guys. After all, you do want to be eliminated as a suspect, don’t you? True, we had to abuse your other rights to get your name on a suspect list in the first place but that is another matter. Complain, and we’ll have to call Agent Marco over in forensics, who happens to know there is at least one porno photo on every computer in existence.
By now, I am up to season six of the “Sopranos”. It is tapering off big time. Ever more footage is chewed up with family problems such as the son getting dumped by the Puerto Rican divorcee, who even returns the diamond ring. In a somewhat more realistic scene, a fat brat boy wearing black lipstick gets hauled off to a Utah “boot camp” for re-education. It dwelt overlong on the mother fretting that they “physically strike” the child. Poor baby would have lasted five minutes where I was raised. Well, that is not strictly true. Where I learned to think my own way out of conformity, most take the easy way out and merely learn to behave “correctly” when they knew they were being watched. That is how town councils get started. Boot camp watches 24/7.
Oh yes, I did get a tentative reply to my inquiries about the lousy service at Greyhound. I have no complaint that the bus was late, but have plenty to say about how they dealt with it. So far, only one person on my email list has responded. See how quickly people forget? You know, what really got me was that reading lamp. (The driver turned them off and ignored the shouts of half the people on the bus who had been reading.) My question was whether the price of my ticket included the service of the lamp. If so, I would like it on now, not after winning an argument with head office. Apparently Greyhound does not like being asked this type of question. They can label you a “troublemaker” and throw you off the bus, something they call zero-tolerance. Yeah, for others, but not for themselves.
