A view of the parking lot at the Mardi Gras Casino. This caught my photographer’s eye, a series of identical small apartments. These are not typical of Florida. Usually more than two of the same spells “project”. That heavily traveled street is Pembroke Road. I’ve biked past these apartments for years and never noticed the matching set until today. To the left is the road I take to work, to the right is the road I go shopping. Note the unusual “prairie” clouds.
Nine long miles on the bicycle in today’s heat, I should get the gold. Business has been so slow instead of replacing the leaking new tube for $4.00; I dismantled the bike and put a twenty-cent patch. It comes back to me in accounting school how they taught us to calculate when it was better to close down than operate below a certain profit ratio. (It is wrong to assume any profit is good enough, a concept called “opportunity cost”.) I’ve been afraid to run those numbers at my Internet operation for a year now. I probably would have folded.I had occasion to spend half the day in a government office. Call it watching the efficiency of how well people can become inefficient when they really try. It is the same as the Romans, these places would be marvels if the workers put half into the job what they do wasting time. I filled out one form that was photocopied five times. Times that I know about. It was a form saying they could look at forms I filled out. Were you aware the Federal deficit this year is $1.5 trillion?
[Author's note 2015-08-26: that's deficit, not debt. That is amount YOUR elected "representatives" spend more than they took from you just this year. I say your representatives because when you elect that kind of people to run your affairs, they also run my affairs and I have nothing to do with them. Shame on you. Here is a link from 2015 below.]
Here’s an interesting statistic about work careers. The average worker puts in 80,000 hours in a lifetime. That’s 40 years of 40 hour weeks. For most people that determines everything about their eventual existence, and it is also what the tax department watches like a hawk. Despite a rocky start, including piling lumber and building garage doors, it may one day become a case assignment to study how I managed what I did working 50,000 fewer hours. There are many ways to measure intelligence that are superior to measuring hourly wages and job titles.
This is not to say I’m a famous millionaire, only that I have at least (important condition) what the average person but without busting my balls. It is what happens between now and eventual retirement that determines how much better than average I can do. There is no element of laziness in my makeup. But I have an aversion to working for a living instead of working to get ahead. Big, major difference, people. I could claim to have been forced to squander my youth working to get a tenth of what you got for free, but I won’t. Besides everyone in my family would gladly and happily tell you how I loved to work in lumber mills instead of finishing college.
You know what they say about aging. Supposedly 60 is the new 40. That is taken by some to mean 30 is the new 20. Unfortunately you can tell whenever you see a video scene of a night club, know what I mean? I suppose I’ll never stop seeing clubs as places where single babes go and not where housewives are “kicking up their heels” after a day at work. Old men at least go to stripper bars, likely not out of politeness, but still.
I’m real crusty about the subject of women in the media. I like the women I see on any screen to be sex symbols, it is easy to do and there is an infinite supply of applicants. So why cast the wrong women for the roles? Case in point, that model “Tyra” or “Tayra”, [Author’s note: turns out I meant Tyra Banks] anyway, she is 31 and as unrepresentative of that age group as totally possible, wrong in looks, intelligence and attitude. Women that age don’t look like her, they are thousands of times more intelligent, and they don’t try to pretend they are 18.
I don’t know who the target audience for such counterfeit looks could be, but to me a sex symbol does not plaster on makeup every morning. She does not get her hair dyed and kinked. If she poses nude, it is not for money and not for a "professional" photographer. And my sex symbol certainly isn’t paired off or married or have children. Give me a total babe any time, and I’m saying there is no reason for the media to do otherwise.
There was a time I didn’t think this way. But that was before I learned the truth about what happened to the supply of single, decent, good-looking available women at age 28. I had no idea the extent to which the well ran dry. I’m not half as bad as most men about looks but I do not like the suburban housewife image. I’ve lived in Mexico, India, Thailand, etc, and it is amazing how these societies don’t portray older women the same way—but it is equally amazing how quickly women from those places change once they get over here.
I’ll never forget the before and after shots I saw of a teenage girl (!Kung) they took out of the Kalahari Desert for an extreme makeover. How the audience swooned. Yet I would have taken the before version because she was not instantly transformed into a crabby bitch expecting the world for free because she now had “big hair”. While I’m not academy material myself, but neither am I pretending to be, Mind you the difference.
Then, nobody has nominated me for a Pulitzer either. In that case, I'll pretend to be anything you want. Hey, it worked for the last generation of authors.
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