Back at work, I talked to a customer today who is a part time boat manager. Not a captain, he explained. He’s got a day job but finds he has to head back on a boat every once in a while to keep his sanity. I asked him about the actual job of being a purser and he says the cruise industry is desperate for people who are able to keep things half organized on the ships. The Royal Caribbean office is just up the road here, past the library but I’ve never seen it. He says that is common, it looks so ordinary.That tips us off that the cruise ships are not models of efficiency, particularly in the financial departments. This does not mean dash out there and apply, since there are many brands of confusion. The worst is the chaos when nobody is compelled to standardize their behavior, and you don’t want to get caught babysitting them. I would like to talk to a real purser. From what the customer said, there are plenty of other on-board positions related to keeping everything under control. Interesting.
Woodstock is in the news again. Somebody has produced a documentary that probably focuses on everything but the truth. I missed Woodstock, like I did anything that required money to get there. Free love is not free gasoline, the bus fare was more than I made that year. Oddly, I don’t identify with the audience as much the musicians. By 1969 there were more men pretending to be hippies than real hippies so they could get at the hippie chicks. I see a lot of that type in scenes of Woodstock. Still, it would have been a lot of fun to be there. On stage. The generation before me questioned authority. The generation after me Googled it.
A few people have looked at the room since Wallace left. They all say the same thing, they have to think about it. That really means they are going to look for a better deal but one of them will be back shortly, I am certain. It is too good of a deal for everyone to pass up, but that does not mean I'll take just anybody. I own a lot of small valuable articles.. Other places cost close to $1500 for rent and deposits to get into something decent in this town where this room runs a third of that. But it is pretty hard to guess what Wallace is going to do.
I’m looking at a Brazilian coin somebody palmed off on me. That’s one thing we can thank the American mints for. The way they changed the American quarter has made it far harder to spot foreign coins in a hurry. I can’t be the only one who wonders why the mint changed a perfectly good system but I’ll wager I could pick the person who pushed the idea through out of a lineup. They’ll be the one who thinks they are creative because they can’t leave well enough alone.
By coincidence to my plan to bike the region, there is a program on the Great Lakes today. I still have no answer to my question of where all the water in the lake comes from, since there are no major rivers flowing in. The drainage basin is tiny compared the half continent that joins the Mississippi. They did explain the sweeping curvature of the shorelines on the center three lakes as caused by an underlying rock formation. I have another hypothesis concerning the fate of the lakes.
Sure, they will eventually fall when Niagara backs up to Lake Erie, but I say all the lakes will disappear on their own. Right now they are an anomaly containing a fifth of the world’s fresh water. And I say in geology, there is nothing unique, all that is here has happened before and been eroded away. Anything that seems exclusive is just on the way out all that much more quickly. Where rock meets water, the tendency of everything is to become featureless. A lot like when dumb men meet alcohol.
I’ve located a drum machine with a control pedal for two-thirds the price of an Alesis. Called a Zoom, it has six times as many built-in samples most of which are likely useless. My quest is still for a box that is not built with studio programming in mind, but specifically designed from the ground up for stage work. I estimate at a $200 price tag, almost 160,000 units would sell to a market starved for the device. A cool $32 million profit. And more isf there was a web page to upload by song title, as in the drum track to “Wipeout”. Google veryatlantic, since I’m plagiarizing myself here.
Making a bicycle tube puncture-proof. This is a repeat back by popular request. When you get an unrepairable flat, instead of throwing out the old tube, slit it all around the inside circumference, discarding the stem. Save an old rubber patch or two to place as a collar over the new stem before you feed it through the rim Then wrap the old tube around the outside of your new tube as double reinforcement before installation. . It turns out to work better than the expensive tubes made for the purpose, since those are only made thicker on the tread surface. The ride is rougher, but not as rough as having to bounce the last mile home on your rim in a Florida cloudburst.
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