This photo is that apartment I followed for years as the owner and one handyman gradually fixed up one unit at a time. It is now fully occupied and a prestigious address in that area. Street parking is always a pinch but this place is a few minutes walk from downtown.
So much for relaxing weekends. Dave-O called and we finally have partial contact with the guy selling the bike motor kits. Odd that somebody trying to sell is so hard to get hold of. Then again, if he’s making that much money. Myself, I’m cloning a hard drive, with Win98 in French. Yes, it is that time of year. And I’m already a victim of my computer “old school” training. To clone the drive, I need an unlettered extension, and my training was always to use the largest multiple of sector size as will fit on the disk. Now, what’s left over is too small to clone even a 2.1 GB drive. No sense trying to find a whiz kid, they all know Windows instead of DOS and haven’t a clue how to proceed. The only geniuses left are the ones in Tom Clancey novels, America’s single largest supplier of professional assassins.
Computers are still a ripe area for tall tales. There is no other field, such as politics, law or even cribbage in which anybody is willing to believe another person is so smart he get away with anything. Except computers, and that is the plot of my newest read, Clancey’s “NetForce”. Make the bad guy a Russian and people will forget who lost the Space Race. Another 400 page work, Clancey is on a roll. Who knows, some day one of his heroes will be a single or married man who understands the world doesn’t care a twit about his miserable love life and get on with it.
Yeah, Clancey is yet again cashing in on the movie rights formula, the kid’s who never see the father, the ex-wife who’s moving on, the over forty but still in shape head of department hero who reports directly to the president but has personal contacts in skid row. And of course, the glory goes to the cop working the computer snooping into personal files rather than the one out catching the crooks. Won’t the world be a safe and wonderful place when the police have everybody’s life on a database!
Sometimes you just don’t need any more proof that a career is tied to home life rather than work. Last open mic it turns out one of the guitar players did not show because (no foolin’) he would have missed an episode of “Three and a Half Men”. Music loses out to the most sordid program on television. But that’s the rating of a man who’s never watched Oprah.
It reminds me of a recent Hagar cartoon where Helga tells her daughter, “Men don’t think like women”. Them’s carefully chosen words, lady. Never confuse the “don’ts” and “can’ts. Women don’t think like men because most of them can’t. On the other hand, men can think like women any time they want to. They don’t want to.
I’m serious. I saw this countless times at my old company. Whenever anything, such as a satellite circuit, got technical, the women would band together and get “sensitive to customer needs” instead of fixing it. Later examination would reveal the women were collectively learning this behavior from each other as a cover-up. The crux of the problem seems to be they give up at any stage that requires deep, analytical logic.
Now, to be fair in my life I’ve met five women who were not like that. Five out of around two thousand. Still, any exception proves being “sensitive” instead of smart is an acquired trait at best. The exceptions were Pearle Lucille, Beverly Twila, Judith Ann, Martina Marion., and the Reb. They ranged from college graduates to drop outs, but not one of these women was a gossip. (Gossip defined as not merely mentioning an event, but continuing on to verbally “analyze” it at street level.)
I’ve taken two weeks off from music, realizing that I’ve been pushing things too much along. Mind you, the performances speak for themselves, we’ve played out more often in the first nine weeks than the Hippie and I did in the first six years. I feel it best to let musicians assimilate the music at their own pace and Jag is just beginning to get the rhythm. We are poised at 25 songs of which the most challenging part has been the lyrics.
I’ve developed a memory system to visualize the stream of events, for instance I imagine a map of North America when I’m recalling “Volcano”, or a weekend in Key West for “Pirate Looks at Forty”. It could be said this is the best way, but I find this memory aid significantly takes away from the song the original meanings for me. Tough luck, as we are in the home stretch. As soon as we hit 27 tunes we start polishing them up for presentation as only a few can do.
