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Yesteryear

Saturday, November 5, 2011

November 5, 2011


           This is mangrove damaged by storm activity. You can see the red mangrove roots exposed while the black mangrove (the taller trees) say back from the edge and build land. This process takes about 100 years. I took the boat tour this morning and was the only passenger, so the captain and I chatted about economics instead of wildlife. Like myself, he was a former union worker. He made his $500 per day on the ocean liners. Now he runs a tour boat and glad to get that. Otherwise, the trip was uneventful as a brisk morning wind kept the birds under shelter.
           These grainy photos are not Argus-grade at all, which is my inspiration to get a good camera soon. We saw a spectacular green heron but all four of my shots turned out overexposed in the bright morning sun. All this country needs is a good $10 camera. It was a bitter cold again, the early signs of a chilly winter this year. That’s okay, I’ll be snug and warm, and very well-fed.

           You only need to find lyrics on-line once to learn the music world is full of total morons. He can play guitar, but capitalizing the first word of every sentence, that he finds difficult. Yeah, I know, creative people often can’t spell. But copying out somebody else’s words is hardly being creative, there Bubba. I mean, how can you rely on somebody who can’t spell? It means he can’t read, write, or think, either. People, these skills are inter-related. If you can’t read, you can’t follow directions.
           I formed up the index of my song words, 5,881 words so far in 23 tunes. This is my stage cheat booklet, since I’m compelled to do music I don’t personally like. Such as Hank junior’s “Family Tradition”. It passes all my tests. I just don’t like it. I can play these tunes, just not very well. I haven’t dug out the drum machine yet, but if I want to go anywhere, I’d better rig that thing up again. My eBass is producing a ground hum I can’t find. I hope it isn’t one of those custom pickups.

           I’ve eliminated all Blues from my set, even as variety. Yucky Blues, nothing new in 30 years Blues, I have yet to meet a guitar player who admits he can’t play the blues. Number one blues tune I do not play? “Before You ‘Cuse Me”, and I don’t want to hear any of the standard twaddle about what a wonderful song it is. It is run of the mill hack blues from the scrap heap of history. I’m just and simply done playing that song if I can help it.
           Nothing of consequence happened today. I’m reading “Cosmos” by Sagan, not one of my favorite authors. He relies on access to inside information most of us would have trouble getting at, so I’ll read anything he has to say about Mars landers and space probes. His style is a little flowery, like I suppose my own writing would sound if I went back over it sentence by sentence with a Thesaurus and gussied things up. So I shouldn’t be too critical—one day I may get a best seller and have to do the same for a living.

           By inside information, I don’t mean state secrets. More like how he states the US spent ten trillion dollars on the Cold War. Where would the average person even go to find the numbers to add up? Sagan points out with that much money we could have bought everything in the US except the land, so presumably we could have bought everything in the Soviet Union as well. Don’t think it unfeasible. Look at Alaska.
           Sagan also drags the reader down by stressing the human side of science. My personal opinion is that is not the best approach for a text book. A comic book, maybe, but most people wanting to learn about the rings of Saturn don’t really care that Sagan met so and so at a dinner party in Michigan. I have long developed the ability to read such books and tune out the extraneous names. You have to be careful though, because some sorry excuses for professors will put those names on the exam. And you won’t be winning many game shows, either.
           You know, where they have to ask who discovered relativity because they know the contestant has no clue what relativity is. Jeopardy. Cash Cab. Wheel of Fortune. Where the questions are geared down to audience level. I liked the original productions of the millionaire show because at first the writers didn’t know and were asking real questions. But now, I get stumped at tier 3 when they ask who co-starred in some soap opera.

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