Alaine made up a fantastic dinner with baked ribs, a new treat for me. It’s a two hour recipe and I’m just not the Sunday sports type, so I found a 1973 issue of the World Record thingee, the one by those folks I won’t mention since they turned down my one million toothpick story in 2003. Yeah, those people. If you break an existing record, they love you. If you invent a new category, take a hike.Imagine a wry smile as I read the highest priced cheese of the day was $2.69 per pound and the average American smoked 400 cigarettes per year. I remember those days, they were pretty much the heyday of the Republic. Then suddenly beginning 1975 millions of hippies quit protesting. Instead, they used daddy’s money to get fancy jobs, and criticized everyone who wanted to curb the excesses that got us where we are. The upper-middles got busy competing for who could be the coolnest, man. It wasn't cool to vote against immigration, welfare, and big government. They scorned everyone who had traditional American values as “a redneck”.
Well, last I heard, by and large it ain't the rednecks who are losing their jobs and houses and generally going down the tube. I can only ask the do-gooders where they are headed, and what's with all the handbaskets?
Terra petra, there’s a mystery for you. In various spots of the Amazon basin, the pre-Columbian inhabitants learned how to stabilize jungle soil. Normally slash and burn causes leaching, but there are tracts of black, healthy soil that retain fertility for centuries. The problem is nobody left alive knows how they did it. The areas were definitely settled as shown by flat locations along riverbanks and the soil is very heavily peppered with pieces of broken pottery. Now, was the pottery part of the creation, or just another indication people lived there? Figure it out, and get rich.
The Brazilians, that emerging powerhouse of intellect, are bagging the stuff and selling it as compost, so there’s not much of it left. Other hints include the average size of the fields of this “black soil” are 49 acres, exactly what historians associate with small farming communities. And turtle poop. The dirt is full of turtle poop from the millions of turtles that lived there before the Brazilians (not Amazonians) killed them.
I finally tracked down JP and tore a strip off him for missing my birthday. He said he had a hundred good excuses. Here’s the batbike with the Mazda which he says got two flats on the afternoon in question. Why doesn’t that surprise anyone who’s been following this blog? JP is the opposite of me for routine maintenance. That’s why my Chinese scooter just passed the 9,000 mile mark and runs like a clock. And why you never see tiles falling off my ceilings. And why my vehicles last an average of 235,000 miles.JP, all is forgiven, since I know the overall situation has been stressful on everyone. There’s still lots of fallout and I feel it even though I’m not family. For instance, dad’s extensive library got estated because nobody had the time or space to accommodate the weight of books from upstairs. The sets of encyclopedias alone would have filled my entire rooms.
Driving through I can tell you Miami has become a pitiful sight. The expensive islands 40 yards offshore from downtown keep the riff-raff off the tourist brochures, but the central part all the way to the Palmetto has become a stinking third-world slum. No, not getting there. It already is a slum. The storefronts have to be shuttered and locked down at night, people wandering aimlessly in the streets, business signs spray painted on bare stucco. Anyone who still fantasizes the foreigners will assimilate should be informed this already IS the third generation.In the days before entitlements and handouts, people had to behave. Idiots blocking traffic with toy vehicles, like shown here, got promptly arrested. But once one goof gets away with this because the cops are chickenshits, the legitimate drivers can’t compete. Result, the whole system gets taken down yet another notch. I’m not saying it is wrong, I’m saying I don’t like it. And if anyone does like it, I hope your teenage daughter runs away from home and gets assimilated. Twenty times the first night.
I doubt that anyone with the ability to think ahead likes what has happened to this once beautiful place. I’m not angry, I’ve lived in countries where it took all day to find a spare part—but the prices were down where people could afford it in cash. Don’t confuse my sadness with intolerance, but in my day the nicest thing about America was a shared common set of values. Not right or wrong, but shared. My sixty-year-old neighbor bought a truck. He didn’t throw a home-made and probably illegal box on the back of a 49cc scooter and declare himself in the delivery business.
Anyone out there, before you ever think to move to south Florida, spend a week in downtown Miami and then make up your mind. An amount of competition is good for business but that amount is dependent on fair and unequivocal enforcement of the law. The framework left intentional gaps to allow business some latitude. It was never meant for foreign societies en masse to arrive here and spawn a subculture in the cracks.
However, the lure is easy to define. While there remain completely legitimate ways to make good in America, why try hard when you can work under the table and scream bloody discrimination if you get caught? Why fight for freedom where you come from when you can usurp it from Yankees at their own expense? They’ll scatter like prairie chickens when you whisper the word “prejudice”.
And that is controversy enough for one Sunday.
andrea johnson st augustine; bottle caps candy box; juice newton; palm triangular; sosua 1980; axis sally; fake 2 bill; juke box remote; large bottle caps candy box; meme calendar;
