In the background, you see the HMCS Kenora. This ship is your example of what happens to people who try to run a business in Florida without a reliable local manager. One supposes the tugboat is not a total loss because, after all, it is still floating. Like the Canadian dollar.
This week finds me looking for some device that can instantly trigger music on and off, similar to my drum box. The delay between click and start on most computers is unacceptable, most markedly with the dreaded Windows Media Player and its dismal playlist feature. I’m looking more at DVD technology.Calculations are that I lost $280 in time and money with that last singer who did not work out. Um, in fact, she did not work on the material at all, I suspect. I dread backing tracks yet that may be the only way I’ll be playing in a band this year. I keep coming back to that. Good old south Florida, with 150 musicians like myself all saying they can’t find anybody who wants to play the right material. To them, the right material is what they took lessons to play. To me the novelty of the show is everything, and that means playing other music.
On my scooter tour last day, I picked up the unusual book of the decade. It is nearly 300 pages of perfect writing, no errors, and concerns wine. Called “The Billionaire’s Vinegar”, it succeeds in being informative while moving along like a mystery novel. I’m reading it a second time, for I originally mistook it for a recounting of wine-tasting snobbery. It actually has very little to do with the tasting except for describing how many of the top European tasters were self-taught. The book is a masterpiece. Read it.
Today was largely concerned with medical tests for me. The news is mixed, for example, the good news is that my heart condition is not caused by diet, lifestyle or habits. The bad news it is now known to be genetic. Strange how I could get that from parents who had no heart to speak of. They’re probably still wondering when I’m going to pay them back for raising me. Yes, they actually said that many times. The total was around $8,000 in an era where $140,000 per child was normal.
By evening, I was at Starbucks to read some more chapters of “The Billionaire’s Vinegar”. It is partly an expose of the wine-tasting festivals cooked up by two Europeans (Broadbent and Rodenstock) in 1962 as a way to hoodwink the North American market. They even invented a bogus scale of 1 to 100. The vintage wine market, explains the author, is “awash in fakes” and recorking, rebottling and relabeling of phoney aged wines commonly takes place even at the winery level.
New tests which detect radiation in the wines from 1962 onward when atmospheric testing was discontinued show the entire million-dollar wine collections housed in galleries from Montreal to San Diego are largely counterfeits whose labels were cut from wallpaper. As for the millions of wine tasters, the Europeans classify them as suckers with “a built-in preference for the obvious”.
The corner of Starbucks was taken over by a meeting of FYP for Florida Young Professionals. I could not help noticing the vast gulf in education standards from my day. You know, back when we really had to learn things to pass the tests. No doubt they are part of the new elite, but there was not a free thinker in the lot. Even their mannerisms were standard TV meme and they all dressed and acted like BrandsMart sales staff. And as far as the exchange of real and useful information, at the Robotics Club in five minutes they’d be bewildered what was going on. There was one guy kind of in charge, mostly pushing his own agenda. It was all amusing to overhear.
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