This is your update of the local Chev-Olds lot getting mighty empty. The lane you see used to be $30,000 SUV parked two deep. Now I see $20,000 cars in a sparse row with many gaps (look close). Since I bike through this lot twice a day, you’d think I’d spot the occasional buyer, but no. I have no mercy for these operations because the one thing they will not do is lower their prices, yet that is the only option left to stay in business. There is an economic theory that “deflation” is worse than “inflation”, but I say that has all too rarely been put to the test. Seriously, what would bother me about prices dropping?
Whenever I find myself having to make decisions with imperfect information, I re-read “Hell in a Very Small Place”, a poorly-written book which gives me inspiration for the wrong reasons. I’ve kept a copy handy for ten years. It perpetually assures us that no matter how badly we may screw up, we can never be the most bungling, hopeless incompetents on Earth. That award is already taken. Read it yourself, and discover what happens when war is conducted by New Age thinkers on the “superior” side.[Author’s note: the above book concerns the 1954 siege at Dien Bien Phu, a district in North Vietnam. There, an unsuccessful history professor kicked the highest-ranking generals available out of that valley, out of the war, out of Indo-China and all the way back to the Arc de Triomphe (or whatever). He whupped ‘em so bad to this day they still sit around Paris penning contradictory accounts and pointing fingers. He did much the same to the Americans sixteen years later, except America will not confess to losing that war. “Hell, we don’t even admit to misplacing it.”]
Since I was a kid, I always wondered what laminar flow meant, when talking about airplane wings. As the wing flies into the air, it caused turbulence, which “tumbles” backward over the rear half of the wing. By opening little holes in the wing to draw in the air just over the surface, the flow becomes smooth again. A tiny amount of air is ducted into the wing and these pores must be continually kept clean of dust and insects. I find that very interesting.
How about that Mel Gibson? No prenuptial, and that oversight is going to cost him nearly a billion dollars. I support both theories. One, that she was his supportive wife and without sacrificing her own career, he would never have made it on his own. (Ahem.) If so, she should get it all, not just half. Two, that he was already successful when they married, she had a life of comfort and ease and if her career suffered, that was her own willing choice. Therefore she deserves nothing more than she already got. I say, put it to the test. If, as claimed, her “services” are worth that much, give her twelve months after the divorce to prove she can marry another billionaire before she gets another dime. That’s fair, considering she now has experience, right?
I spent two hours downloading around a hundred midi files. The problem is that these versions are often too poor to be used at all, and at times are too great a departure from the original to even be upgraded. Therefore, I went to the Karaoke show at Jimbo’s and watched the operation. She lugs around two binders with 512 disks. The code on the request form tells her which disk to load next. I see they are CDs, meaning she has around 7,000 tunes.
The next step is those binders. She says she’d like to redo them, but cannot afford it. I thumbed through and almost a quarter of the list is redundant. Seven versions of “Me and Bobby McGee”. It follows that I guess the format she is using is the CDG, but she is so protective of the disks she won’t let me even hold one. I proposed a trade. Since her Karaoke player will read DVDs, I’ll show her how to copy all her music onto 54 disks, if in return she allows me to copy the entire collection onto a single hard drive.
The CDG format is digitalized wave forms. Unless software exists to reverse engineer midi channels (completely different than recording tracks), I won’t have much use for most of the material except as a novelty. Her music is more realistic sounding, but presents the problem of no bass channel. No bass channel means the bass line cannot be removed, meaning I’m right back where I started. How do you like that?
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