Monday at home, where I should be. I need the day for planning, as you may have noticed last week my explanation of how I managed to miss the plans of the bankers to opt out of foreclosures in their own best interests. It is the law that they may repossess and foreclose, not that they have to. My lousy excuse was that in my entire experience no bank would miss an opportunity to foreclose, but now I see that was because the house prices were going up. Did I miss the boat? Yep, but not by as much as all the rest.
Here is a picture of why I rarely shop on eBay. Page after page of the identical product at the identical retail price. What auction? It is so bad, it has become useless for comparison shopping. It’s lack of structure means as soon as you activate any filter, you’ll miss enough to make you go back to endless scrolling. Bad move, eBay, and you are the 800 pound gorilla stopping real auctions from occurring.[Author's note 2016: I finally did buy one of these units in 2016. For less than half price.]
Elliott, my inventor buddy, is still playing guitar. He writes he didn’t follow up and that the same guitar “god” syndrome affected singers in the 80’s. Yes, but a good singer is worth a lot because you can’t fake good vocals. It’s another matter entirely with guitar. I’ve heard guitar players play note-for-note renditions who will never play in a band. Remember, singers can make it on their own, but not guitar players who can’t sing. Such guitarists must join a band. With the wrong attitude, good luck.
I am also far more tolerant with a signer who says he/she can’t do a certain song that a guitar player who says the same. The singer can’t comp and their parameters are confined by range and power, not inability to play a certain lick. There may be parallels but for the most part, I suspect guitar players purposely can’t play what they don’t like. No pointing fingers at me for the same, because I will reject bass lines that are boring, which is different than not being able to play them. And to me, the simple and repetitive roots (tonic notes) are the most boring. Nobody sane contests my ability to play root notes.
A plan for November is taking place, just a plan. But if I take it easy this month, my birthday this year could be breathtaking. There is a certain dollar amount I’ve never spent more than on my own birthday parties through my entire life. I may be able to outdo that by ten times this year. Have the party I should have had at 24, instead of working in a lumber mill. I remember that fateful year. Just a plan.
Next, I begin a small hunt myself. According to my electric bills, my kilowatt hours usage has doubled in a year. I know I’m not using twice as much. Then, the bill arrives for the time I was out of town showing 292 kWh. That isn’t possible. We are talking one energy efficient fridge and one 20 watt bulb on the porch. No A/C, no computer fan, not even the microwave. I don’t have anything that could have used that much electricity while I was gone. I’m not concerned about the rate, but the total usage is wonky.
Tomorrow, I pull the breakers while I’m out. If anything is using that much power, it must be constantly on. I examined the meter and the surrounding area, but it is such a tangle nobody can tell. Another thing, there is only one mobile home anywhere near mine in the summer, when electricity is most used. But it belongs to the park janitor who gets all his utilities for free. Nearly 330 kWh, that’s a mystery for now.
The number of “structurally deficient” bridges in the USA = 76,000. I can find no data on-line about the number of bridges I crossed on the recent journey, but my guess is several hundred at least, though I was into Colorado before any of them had water under them. There is a new skin that can be applied as a coating to the metal to warn of several types of problem. It is made from carbon nanotubes.
I looked at diagrams of a dozen bridges and they all have a common feature. The triangular support beams are interdependent. If one breaks, it weakens adjacent members. I could find no bridge design where a weak joint spreads over the entire structure rather than its immediate neighbors. I presumed that a defect on the entire bridge would be easier to detect than each individual gusset plate, but I also presumed the most dangerous bridges were in cities where they carried the most traffic.
There are other types of bridges that don’t use girders, and one of the more aesthetic designs is the cable-stay bridge. For instance, look at the four bridges in this diagram. You see these mostly as highway bridges instead of train crossings, but I thought you might like to learn the categories of different cable shapes. As you see, evenly spaced lines are only one option. Of these, the one I trust least is the fan shape and I can’t really explain why. There are many bridges of the fan design that have misleading names like “Rhine Harp”. At one time these cable bridges and their cousins, the suspension bridge, were entirely a Western phenomena. In a suspension bridge, it is the cables, not the roadways, that are suspended.
ADDENDUM
Prechtl’s “Titanic” is a captivating tale in spots, like how John Jacob Astor was stung at his own game. But the entire book doesn’t have the same momentum, be prepared for dull stretches. I’d known nothing really about the grandfather Astor except something to do with the fur trade, which I actually do know a little about. Before beaver was trapped, the main source of furs was the Russian steppe. It was pushed back as each river barrier was crossed when the supply was hunted out to near extinction.
The need for furs is not something I understand, but many states fought over the right to territory. The French and English took turns arming the Algonquin and the Iroquois to fight over the furs and the trade routes near the Great Lakes. As each tribe acquired firearms, they pushed the neighboring tribes back into the plains, and you get the rise of Cree and Blackfoot spreading west and north.
The Russians reached the west coast as far as California, but sold out as we know. The story of the furs is short, a market in steady decline but enough to bring settlements to the prairies. Before the towns came, it was customary for the trappers to bring their furs in for trade once a year and the Indians also adapted to this pattern. Their potlatches became a big deal as European trade good appeared by the ton. Even so, trade began to be influenced globally, as when the Chinese perfected a secret system of combing out beaver furs to the soft inner layer.
I’ve now read half of “Titanic” and it begins to weaken. The last few chapters are about manipulation of the stock market, as if that wasn’t well-known at the time that the liner nearly bankrupted White Star. There is a little intrigue about the blue diamond, which for the record was never on the Titanic voyage and is now in the Smithsonian. There are prophetic comments about the wars in Palestine, which didn’t exist until some years later. The Jews in this story are invariably rich money-lenders and jewelers worried that there was so little unclaimed land left in the world.
There is also reference to the Uganda program, in which the British offered Jews 5,000 acres of plateau land. The plan was rejected around 1903 as a suspicious ploy to draw Jews away from the Levant, but Wallace the Palestinian Expert would know much more about this than I. There was even an option to establish a homeland for them near Galveston, Texas.
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