It took me a while to understand what I was seeing here. Bales of hay for eight bucks. My, if Graham and I were back on the farm, we’d be rich. See the regular price of thirteen dollars? Bales of dry straw, useless dry straw. The price must be 99% labor and transportation markup. What is the connection with Halloween?
Finally I’m back in this time zone. I’ve been taking afternoon naps all day long, as it were. Checking on my diet, I’m so far under that I’m going to splurge on fast food later today, probably McDonald’s and whatever is on sale. Autumn hasn’t arrived yet so it is far too hot and humid to work in the yard. I watched Joan of Arc (ho-hum) and tried to figure out why anyone would want to live in New Caledonia. That’s how quiet it was.I was at the bakery, always a good idea on Sundays because they give me enough to last until next week. My secret passion food-wise is peanut butter on raisin toast, but these days, I settle for the buns alone. We have the report that the new Ruby Two Shoes is also into moving furniture after dark. And a new stock joke has entered our vernacular. On the club meeting held at the bakery on my return, one of the staff there interrupted Agt. M and I, saying “You guys can talk later.” She doesn’t know that comment is now the most famous thing she’s said in her life.
That was then. Today, it was just me and the women present. Believe it or not, educated women usually find me easy to talk to. The difference between me and the other men is two-fold. Not only am I not likely to lie to get anything, I’ve usually thought deeply about most situations likely to be discussed. Today, the usual, “what women want in me”, and I was greatly the listener.
And what I heard was half-funny, because it is usually men who talk nonsense when officially asked what they want in a woman. Today the top quality was confidence, the women said they wanted a man with confidence. That’s one of those wishy-washy categories, since confidence is a very broad term. I’m totally confident on stage, yet the quantity of women (that’s quantity) has declined ever since I was 24. I can’t think of many situations where I am affectedly unconfident, but they would not likely be ones where I’m apt to meet the type of women I prefer.
The women also want the bad-boy with a little money, that I’ll agree with. Now that I own a sidecar, anyway. What got me is how they could not seem to actually say these things directly, although there was general agreement if myself, the only man present, reworded things that way. My conclusion is that these women could not tell the difference between real and fake confidence. I mean, no man can be confident in my books unless he’s rolled up his sleeves and really done something in this life, and that does not account for very many men.
In the end, I posed the question to these women what is it they were prepared to offer a man who had these qualities. That was the poser. Well, um, like, well, you know, um, stuff like, um. Given time to cook up an answer between themselves, they said they could offer loyalty, sense of humor, creativeness, and other words most sporadic in the divorce courts. My conclusion is the same as when I was 16. Women will listen to the guy with the biggest line of plausible bull. Where most men fail is the plausible part.This bank statement has absolutely no meaning whatsoever.
ADDENDUM
Some money talk, generally about what not to invest in. The iPhone has pretty much bankrupted Nokia. That, and MicroSoft refusing to supply its mobile operating system to Nokia and some posturing about exclusivity. I told ya MS would start pulling stunts like that as they lose market share, so I don’t believe any of the announcements made public by either company.
If I had $50,000 right this moment, you know what I’d do? Buy into the Parallella. One aspect nanotechnology has taught me is the present chips cannot be made much smaller or faster. Only parallel processing can keep pace, and the Parallella is the best bet. But sell out as soon as you’ve made your million. Then invest $50k in each of the follow on companies, of which one, like Google, eBay, or Amazon, will dominate the market even if they are crap. If things go well tomorrow, I’ll be seeking to purchase a Raspberry Pi. You can look that up on your own.
If you’d bet our best-known fugitive, Jason Derek Brown, would still be on the run eight years later, you’d have won. I have a theory why he’s stayed free so long. The FBI don’t want to go looking for him. They just want to sit back and invade everybody’s privacy under the guise of chasing this one bad guy. But the bad guy is smarter if he knows the FBI have lost the art of finding people using only legal methods. It is amusing how the cops refuse to call him intelligent, preferring the term “arrogant”. Well, he’s reduced the lot of them to hoping he’ll one day get pulled over for a broken turn signal—and it’s been so long even when they catch him, he’s won.
Here is the locomotive steam dome, the one I wrote about a month or more back. Right there, that is a steam dome. If the boiler over-pressured, there was a valve under that hood, which is there to keep the steam from blasting anybody standing too near. Most engines have two, I don’t know the reason. This was a typical locomotive workshop, giving an idea of how much maintenance was needed to keep these beasts in operation.
Not another gift to the world from Africa! A new breed of mosquito has been found, and while it has not yet been deemed a carrier, it is from malarial areas. The danger is this mosquito feeds at dusk, not at night, as does anopheles. That means if it can spread disease, it will do so at a time when people are more vulnerable. My interest in mosquitoes is a result of Bill Gates (his foundation) funding most of the research. Apparently, they’ve engineered a virus that can block malaria, which requires a mosquito protein to incubate. Heady stuff.
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