That’s Gilbert in standing by the wreckage. Anselmo Gilbert Montez, who went AWOL fifty years ago. This photo is 15 years old. It is a microwave tower that is now horizontal. This is in southeastern Venezuela. The hurricanes happen at night and usually the only indication is all the highway signs get flattened. A lot of people don’t know these towers stay up in the wind largely due to gravity. That is, they can withstand the wind from most directions, but have little strength if they are tugged upwards even momentarily. That’s what happened here.
On the other hand, I have no idea what became of Gilbert, who was 70 when this photo was taken. He wanted cash to return to the USA, so I wrote to his brother in New Mexico. What a dismal jerk he turned out to be, like I was trying to steal $400 air fare from him. “Maybe all these years in law enforcement have jaded me.” Yeah, and now your brother is probably dead.Something major is at hand. Vista marked a departure from the primary MS purpose of supplying an operating system. Instead, Vista was an anti-piracy measure at best. It was such crap, it was replaced last month by Windows 7 which was more crap. Guess what? Windows 8 has already been announced (the next day, actually, but I just caught wind of it). The one thing MS has never succeeded at is performing like an Apple.
The world’s “Most Successful Corporation” seems to have lost its direction. At least when Bill was at the helm, his lack of imagination kept the company headed in one direction. Now they are shooting in the dark, tipping us off that something else is lurking. Could it be the long-awaited announcement of an entirely new operating system? I’d be happy, as long as it isn’t Linux, who blew their chances at keeping things simple. Red Hat flavors, my eye.
I’m really embarrassed about that pair of leather boots I wrecked at the shop, so I won’t say anything. They were on a counter and I dropped a slab of glue on the material, they are brand new $200 suede dress boots. I instantly poured Afta, but it didn’t dilute things fast enough. Again, sorry, but you know how hard it is to find good help.
So I’ll change the subject to Jeff, the sports radio guy. He’s got another heap of coupons for restaurants I never eat in. This time I have a vested interest in the coupons, in particular, the methods by which he gets them. Probably via the radio station and I need to know. Theresa wrote from Wilmie and things are just as quiet up there. She will want coupons as prizes for the flyer, which is starting to sound more and more like a good idea as long as one doesn’t expect too much.
She reports the “Buzz”, a local sheet we were using for ideas and comparison, has apparently gone under. Myself, I’m not so sure, as my experience tells me that it was part of a larger operation. It had dry filler for content and that can happen when some uninspired hack has to grind out the weekly ten paragraphs. We have no projections on when the copier is to be acquired.
You say you don’t remember Jeff. He’s the guy I helped fill out a document on-line a few years back and he’s eternally grateful. But also a little obstreperous to the extent nobody else can deal with him. Did I tell you when he met Fred? He walked in with a bag of laundry and asked if he could use the washroom. He was in there two hours, and when he walked out, his shirts and socks were all hanging up to dry. Then he had the nerve to tell Fred he’d be back in a week to pick up his things. Ha. Not kidding.
[Author's note 2015-12-03: this fallen tower was some 50 miles north of Ciudad Bolivar. It was posted at my work desk back Stateside for years, a reminder of how much I trust engineers. The tower was held in place mainly by gravity. A hurricane had gone through the area the night before and tugged the tower upwards. And flattened all the highway signs. This is not a digital picture, there were no affordable digital cameras in 1994. Here's a copy of my passport stamp entering Venezuela in November of 1994.
Somewhere, I have six more photos of this collapsed tower, valued at $1 million in 1994. If you see more pictures here, that means I found them.]
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