This is the empty stage over at Dekka. I was there for coffee to meet the owners. The wife by pure coincidence could have been a version of my sweetheart, Janista, from Ciudad Bolivar on the Orinoco 15 years ago. The café has a surprisingly large back room shown here, with one of the few real stages in this town. It is only empty to the untrained eye.
Myself, I see a set of Peavy PA speakers and matching foldback monitors on the floor. I see a 16-channel mixer under the cloth to the right, and both a disco ball and overhead cans. This is a musician’s dream, particularly someone like me who can’t hump gear like I used to. The café doesn’t pay but are okay with charging admission.The coffee is expensive at $2.50 per cup. That just means I can’t go there every day. The people are Latino, I’d say the accent is Argentine. They are holding a drum circle on Thursday. I plan to attend. There is plenty of free street parking and the area is well-lit. There are no coffee establishments with ten miles of here where you can go to linger. I’m thinking.
Here’s an Armenian joke. Well, a phonetic version thereof, because Armenian looks like this: ամերիկյան. “Abaransin unkerov gunuma restorant erqu apse ca erar vera en abaransinera erar veran en nustum.” Phonetic means you can’t use Google translate and I have no idea what it means, except that many Armenian jokes start with the word “Abaransin”. So I take it to mean something like “This guy walks into a vodka distillery . . .”
The JP Morgan people been caught selling certificates for silver they don’t own. Or as they say in Brazil, percentages don’t always end at 100. Funny this isn't front page news. Paper is easier to store than the metal, but it looks like a lot of the metal is still in the ground. Ha, I hope every person holding the paper gets what they deserve. If silver sold for the traditional ratio to gold prices, it should already be around $100 per ounce. It is $30.50. (The ratio is 16:1.)
So, JP Morgan has been caught selling certificates for silver they don’t own. Or as they say in Brazil, percentages don’t always end at 100. Paper is easier to store than the metal, but it looks like a lot of the metal is still in the ground. Ha, I hope every person holding the paper gets what they deserve. If silver sold for the traditional ratio to gold prices, it should already be around $100 per ounce. It is $30.50. (The ratio is 16:1.)
Next over to Barnes & Noble for a late afternoon research session. I think Popular Mechanics magazine is really going downhill. If I wasn’t reading it for free, imagine how I’d feel. I see the Arduino has become the de facto standard in microcontrollers, I will shortly be purchasing a second unit. Our club member from West Palm went back to college and we haven’t heard from him in two months.
You can now buy a kit to clone DNA. (If that link doesn't work, here is the link from 2017, PenPCR Available from OpenPCR. It is controlled by an Arduino and yours for $599. A reported popular use is to expose fraud at sushi restaurants. I understand the process is no more complicated than heating and cooling the DNA to get your pure molecule, than cloning it a few billion times. Barnes has rounded off their cafeteria prices to the nearest dollar. I got in a crossfire between two ladies in the cashier lineup. One was letting her brats run wild, the other one said she would slap them if they ran in to her again. The first lady said she’d slap the second if she did that. This went on for two minutes. Mind-your-mouth, you-mind-yours type of back and forth. I stood there because I didn’t want to loose my place in line. I think the lady with the undisciplined brood was the one to blame.
Trent and I are seeking the final set of tunes we need to make up a full gig, and it isn’t easy. For all the music I love, a lot of it is not suitable for duo arrangements. We play no rock, blues, or jazz. We also avoid tunes that are overplayed, though this isn’t nearly as serious a problem with country music. The newest prospect we’ve found is Yearwood’s “That’s What I Like About You”. There are so many lyrics, I’m going to have to read them on stage.
Last, let me tell you about my November, 1992. There was a gap in these journals at that time. The significance is that I took complete stock of where life was going. I still had unpaid student loans, a seven year old car, yet that year had I passed the million dollar earnings point of my life. I had made around $230k in the stock market, but lost it all plus another $40k. I had paid over $120,000 in rent in my life. I was working but it was still a dead end street.
Even obeying all the financial rules, I had passed the halfway point of my working life without any material gain. That was the month I decided I would only work to the point of making enough money to get out of the system. That took another four years. By 1996 I opted out, I’m not rich, but nor am I a slave to a paycheck. I’m glad I did, for I now realize I never stood a chance and would have otherwise wasted my life working for nothing more than I have right now.
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