What is the only grain taken right from the field to be cooked and eaten as is? Not wheat, for it is first processed into bread and so on. Think about it and read on.
Here’s the sale notice for the $100 house mentioned y’day. The pundits are saying the recession is over and the market is returning. Yeah? Only five properties sold in Dania Beach last week and four were condos. (The $100 condo is nothing unusual for the past three years, but the house is significant, especially in that part of town.) Somebody spent their whole life making payments on that house and lost it, though no doubt they blame it on crooked bankers who should not have lent them the money and crooked real estate agents who should not have shown them the property.
I will be watching the sales very closely. I had my sights on Ft. Lauderdale, but Dania Beach is fine. Pronounced “DAY-nee-uh”. This is no summer cabin, but a retirement home. I know there is more to buying these properties than walking up with a Benjamin or there would be nobody buying anything else. I’ll start looking today around ten in the morning. Of course, I’ll share here what I find but it will be a long time before I actually help anybody again.[Author's note 2024: This entry is confusing concerning the $100 condo. I should explain that the $100 is really just to make the sale legal. What is really happening most of the time is the owner of the house is in financial straits. These days the most common reason is medical bills. To avoid a lien or possible loss of the property, the owner is transferring the property to his wife or a trusted relative. In 2016, I placed my own house in a trust for this reason. Hospitals and clinics often perform expensive and unauthorized procedures, then sell the bill at a discount to collection agencies, who then go after the hapless homeowner. I blame both sides of that equation, one for doing it, the other for allowing it. Medical costs in America are astronomical for one reason only: insurance.]
From the library computer, my flash drive has caught a mutation of the autorun.inf strain. It probably isn’t new but that doesn’t mean one of the dumbass people at the library even knows it when they see it. The first symptom is a new list of shortcuts which appear on your flash drive. A shortcut is a little icon with a white arrow in the lower left corner.
Congratulations, your flash drive now has the virus and will in turn infect any computer you plug it into, so don’t plug it in until I say so. I will tell you how to get rid of it, but I’m going to assume you’ve got a functioning brain. This will be a good test for that condition. (I use the Deltacomm convention for computer commands, that is, you type exactly what is between the braces and press “enter”. You do NOT type the braces.)
Go to a computer with a USB port and boot that computer in “safe mode with command prompt”. When the DOS menu appears, then and only then plug the flash drive into the USB port. Change to that drive and issue the command [dir /a]. You will see three files that should NOT be there. They are:
i) autorun.inf 126 bytes
ii) jaijaeq.exe various lengths
iii) jaijaeq.scr various lengths
First, we delete the .scr file with the following commands
[attrib jaijaeq.scr –r –a –s –h]
[del jaijaeq.scr]
check by doing a [dir /a]
Repeat the same procedure to delete the files jaijaeq.exe, then autorun.inf.
That’s it. For non-users, what you are doing is displaying the hidden files to see the viruses. You can’t delete them directly, first you have to turn off their “read-only” attributes. Then delete them one by one, checking at each stage to ensure it really is gone. One hundred dollars, please.
ADDENDUM
Next there is something I’d like to add. By far, the most relaxing activity known to science and mankind is writing. Every study ever done on the subject confirms this. Writing is several times more effective than “doing nothing” in terms of relegating stress. You can confirm all this by contacting that Deaconess outfit in Boston that studies such things. What’s more, creative writing has no downsides as do other forms of relaxation (shopping and volunteering are common but both can be carried to excess). One cannot creative write to excess, I can tell you that is impossible.
Not only do writers have 25% higher resistance to diseases, they live an average of 12 years longer than their non-writing siblings. Writers are smarter than average by 6 IQ points and very rarely suffer nervous disorders. Writing is also measurably therapeutic and all writing is “somewhat autobiographical” because the writer must know what is being written. It is also established that in emergency situations, writers are the least likely to panic.
Writers assimilate new knowledge faster and handily beat trained experts and psychologists at character judgment. That means when a writer says you are being unreasonable you should be listening instead of talking. Relaxation experts recommend everybody write a journal. That’s interesting. They state a journal is undemanding; there is no beginning or end and no wrong way to do it. (No comment, but I suppose writing it and publishing it are different animals.) Cautionary note: it is known that mentally unstable people never go back and review what they have written, they are output mode only. Like talkers.
A distant second for relaxation is reading, but it does not come close to the benefits of writing. Still, it should be mentioned for everybody can become good reader. Careful however, for reading has been shown to cause stress if you read the wrong material. Worst offenders are poetry and Shakespeare. I made that last bit up. To see who is paying attention.
Here’s the trivia answer. Give up? Corn.
Temp: 78. Press: 30.07. Humid: 93%.
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