“Bad Luck and Trouble” is the name of the Lee Child novel on my desk. Favorite line so far is on page 92, “the chilly breath of a big-time gum chewer”. You know why I like the Burger King on Hollywood for coffee, other than that it costs 50 cents? The place has miraculously succeeded in keeping a restaurant atmosphere. You can leave your phone on the table while you go get refills. It’s the little things like that, though I don’t recommend you do it too often. Another oddity is that the staff there is highly educated for, well, you know, food service work.
Fast food work could become prevalent as society continues to dump its useless twits, or put another way, US company stock keeps dropping like cow turds. Good, wipe out that noisy-, er, I mean middle-class. Food service is perfect for their retirement plans. It suits their brainpower and completely reflects their true utility to the economy. Maybe with enough training, junk bond traders could mow my lawn without driving over the sprinkler spigots. The market has dropped 400 points and it isn’t mid-morning yet. Like I said in February, you’ll see the dead cat bounce a couple more times, but you ain’t seen the rocky, rocky bottom yet.Dave-O was over early on his way to work, still doing carpentry. He’s got every tool you need, his tool box looks like the back wall of a pawn shop. He’s got hydrotherapy later this morning so we drank a pot of tea and talked jobs, money, electronics and the economy. I must be making progress with the sewing since he pointed out I was stitching away while we talked. Subconscious, it was, how about that? Maybe I’ll check out the next sewing course this week instead of this month.
I’ve learned the majority of JJ’s tunes in the first pass. A lot of it dates back to the mid-1950s, such as “Detroit City”. One can only ask that he does not expect the bass lines to make much difference when playing his choices, because he will sure spot the difference when my material comes along. It’s like day and night, bass-wise, since I tend to chose songs with great or novel bass progressions.
It was only a matter of time until an old “pattern matcher” like myself spotted something that heavily defines the difference between my choices and many stage musicians. I saw it while looking up JJ’s music, then applied it to tunes by other musicians whom I knew were wrong about something. There it was, plain as day once you know what to look for. Look at the number of hits by the chosen artist. Total hits by their people: 3, sometimes 4. Total hits by my favorites: 97, 106, 85, etc.
Later. The stock market ended some 520 points down. In my opinion, that is a fraction of the lies about valuation created by accounting malpractice. I also heard something about the French banking system. In another opinion, as far as I’m concerned all banks and countries who tied their money to the American dollar are heading for woe. American’s greatest generation borrowed themselves to prosperity and now it is payback time.
I finished Child’s novel. Lower my rating from intelligent to rather clever, still a high opinion from me. He manages to tell a tale using only 24 names or put another way, 90% fewer than Clancey. Child is able to refer to a character as “the doorman”, where Clancey would have given the full name, marital status, his height (six-two-and-a-half), weight (240) and a full explanation of his ghetto upbringing (Chicago), the scholarship (NAACP), his stint in Nam (including list of medals and Presidential unit citations) followed by his discharge for being “a loose cannon” and subsequent failure to adjust to civilian life.
Child grinds on the well-worn theme of military unit cohesiveness, understandable since his goal is to sell books. It gets wearisome after chapter three as the reader is constantly prodded to believe that the army is full of special squads of special people who do special missions, the Rambo-thing. Like the Special Forces who kicked Commie tail and could do the same in the Mid East if only those cowards would fight fair. Fair apparently meaning a willingness to make human wave attacks against our bravery, which if you take it away the bravery part leaves us with nothing except with the most sophisticated firepower money can buy.
Do you snivlin' civilians have any idea of the courage required to drop a Daisy Cutter on a mud hut from 60,000 feet? What medal do we give for that brand of valor? It is my honest opinion that anybody who drops a $27,000 bomb in the name of Freedom deserves some kind of big shiny medal and the sooner the better. (The tales of this bomb being dropped in “hostile air space” must be heavily censored because I can see the bombers but not any Viet Cong jet-powered fighter aircraft, ack-ack tracers, or missile contrails in a single one of the countless newsreels, although I did once spot a rather large tree that could have made a dandy giant slingshot.)
And our pilots have been getting ever more fearless ever since some blind guy flew a model airplane across the Atlantic by remote control back in 2003. (See The Spirit of Butts Farm .) We can now drop the bomb from 12,000 miles away. Something even an 800 pound gorilla can’t do.
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