On an extremely rare cloudless day, here is Sportsman Park up on Griffin Road. We headed up there after morning coffee at the Panera to do some window shopping. This is the theatre attached to the Fishing Hall of Fame. I went through there a while back. Myself, I can easily get in a boat and not instantly start thinking of killing a fish.
Wallace reports he has seen the word “Yoiks!” after a preliminary Internet search, so rather than take any chances, I am changing the title to “Yoikers!” (with the exclamation mark). Rather than reinvent the wheel, I’m going to submit the puzzle to the two top outfits that I know of. One is Sartori, a puzzle distributor, and the other is Kappa, the place that publishes those puzzle magazines I buy once every five years off the supermarket rack.The puzzle system is becoming automated as things progress. I can already generate the words and check to see if the lengths are correct (conditional formatting). It is clear a system, likely a primitive database, will be required to keep track of which words have already been used. That is hardly a challenge. The entire process is very flexible in case any future changes are required.
We ran into Pete the Rock over at Panera. He is cooling it a bit with his plan to invest in a pizza parlor. I’d only heard this as a rumor. The Panera is a strange place, it is where the local last-chancers hang out. Tons of old guys pretending they are working on their computers. Doing what? The cover story is “playing the commodities market”, but last I heard that was closed on weekends. Or the ones wheeling and dealing in real estate, also called “checking your email on a $2,700 Toshiba”.
All of them seem to be in the process of “raising capital” for their next ventures. I could be wrong, but it seems to me after a certain point (55) you are supposed to be selling your business to the next generation, not still having hallucinations about some day opening one. My rule of thumb is that you cannot open a “standard” business these days unless you have $200,000 per partner to float the thing until you make a profit. And if you’ve ever heard of the business before, it is a “standard”. Like a pizza joint.
Pete the Rock is an oddball, he seems to be particularly inept at handling money. He gets an annual lump sum, which he tells every one about. Naturally, he is then hovered by broke bastards looking for somebody with cash to team up, the old Canadian with a nickel “between us we got a dollar” trip. I’ll wager Pete was at one time an American middle-management type you’ve heard me poke fun at. I would personally love to see any manager ever I worked with try to run a hot dog stand.
The danger is the way managers get ingrained ideas about how much they know. Yet all my former $30 per hour supervisors were [very] lucky to get $8 per hour jobs as security guards. They can all explain how those "dumb customers" refused to pay $12 for a hot dog, despite the low down payment and instant credit approval, the ketchup rebate, and the ten free seconds at the condiment counter. And how about those cranky sorts [of customers] who point at the picture and think they should get the bun, napkin and mustard? Ho, ho, we are talking phone company here.
Next they’ll want the pretty girl, too.
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