Who doesn’t like a good detective story? Try this. At 9:10 AM I’m having my Wheaties and one-percent and the phone rings. No English, but they’ve got my name right. That accent, at first I’m thinking Siong, but why would he call me? If he’s in Singapore, he would speak Cantonese and I haven't spoken that in 30 years. Then it hits me, it must be Mandarin, a language I don’t speak, but an American would probably not know that.
As near as I can brainstorm, somebody wants to buy copper and gave them my phone number to contact. It was a bad connection even for analog and there is a thirteen hour zone difference. But the people are certainly ernest and keep telling me they speak English, except they do it in Russian. Stick around, this could be a hoot.
Them toy steam engines we used to play with now sell for a fortune. The problem is, the toys didn’t do anything except sit there and spin. Except for the time I set the school grass on fire, I never used mine much. But they are marvels and if there was a [tractor] show nearby I’d go see it. Mostly, these events are up near the Great Lakes. PS, I’ve watched videos and that is not how you hold a steam tractor parade. Every two tractors should be hooked together with a draw bar. When the first tractor runs out of water, the second one starts up and pushes it. You’d think those guys never grew up on a farm.
Trivia. The most popular ship kit in the world is a model of the Japanese Yamoto. This excludes those small balsa models. This is not for the hobbyist, as it has over a thousand parts and is available in plastic for $500 and mahogany for $1,000. The guns and various moveable parts are made from metal. Yamoto was the largest, heaviest, and hopefully one of the last major battleships ever built.Brian Krasnow. I ran into his videos on youTube. He records a lot of quasi-interesting experiments but what I want is his lab. He’s got a fully equipped laboratory with everything from milling machines to microscopes. Tesla was the last mad scientist, an inventor with no purpose.
History is littered with unsuccessful tinkerers. Humankind needs more useless inventions and with a lab like that, I'd go nuts, I'd invent a new everything--in theory. So Tesla died penniless in a skid road hotel and he gets heralded a genius for the things he didn't do? My gosh, in that case my composition booklets should someday be worth zillions of interstellar credits.
ADDENDUM
I’m regularly asked a lot why I never became a doctor, or a lawyer, or a scientist. I’ve explained doctor and lawyer. When I began university, there was never any chance I could borrow enough to graduate with an advanced degree. It had nothing to do with brains. Before 1980, student loans were enough for tuition, a room, and food. Same as today, only the rich kids lolled year round at the student activity center. School was not like that for me. I was constantly short of money, constantly short of everything. My marks suffered accordingly.
Sure, the rule books said you had a budget for clothes, entertainment, and transportation. What horseshit! Anybody, like myself, who had to seriously live it can tell you otherwise. Clothes? They’re kidding, they’ve got to be kidding. I got my first new shirt when I was 21. Gas? It wasn’t the car that hurt, it was the insurance and plates. I walked. Shake any romantic notions about strolling the ivied halls of campus. I shivered, mostly.
True, I had fun. But because I was young, not because it was for the asking. Recall how the residence together chartered a plane to Hawaii for Xmas break? That left me and the watchman in the building. I smuggled food out of the cafeteria to last the three weeks. Yet I will not trade my education for anything. Without it, few if anyone could imagine how narrowly that separated (and still separates) me from desperate poverty. I’m saying neither education nor getting rich were ever my primary goals. Goals yes, but not primary.
While in university, I noticed that many fat cats with the fancy and expensive degrees were no more “successful” than I was. This notion has stayed with me lifelong. When the others got a high paying job, they threw themselves into it and worked themselves half to death.* I deduced that how much money you made was second place to having the time—and the brains, to enjoy it. My plan was the opposite, to use education to avoid busting my ass. Who’s smarter now?
What does this mean? When I get a high paying job, I will work, but for more time off, not for more money. At the phone company in 1991 I had so much banked time off I only worked 123 days that year for full pay (full pay all year, folks). So while there is no cap on my wants, there has always been an upper limit to how much I will sacrifice to get it. And that “limit” is well below what it takes to become a wage-slave. I earned the same, to the penny, as everyone in the union, but by age 33 I was the one taking six overseas holidays per year. Not my supervisors, nor my co-workers with their massive overtime. For that banana bunch, "holiday" means two weeks in a Palm Springs hotel on the credit card.
In fact, each new supervisor of my department could look out the window to see management’s rust-bucket Volkswagens and Chevettes parked next to my gleaming late-model Cadillac. It was actually much worse for them, as I’d often forget to cash my paychecks for months on end until I got back. I’m the one who lived at the end of a private drive on the south slopes, where it was said that “over in the west wing pool deck, on days when the wind is right, one can just make out the mewling peasants outside the fence”.
Them’s the facts. Many people make much more than I do. That’s why they are doing it while I am on the sidecar to Colorado in July, back in September, the Keys in November . . . hey, that’s every two months and that’s six times per year. It is because they are right and I am wrong. So, I’m not a scientist either. But my chances of success are probably better than anyone married to his career. Figure it out.
*[Author's note 2016-01-08: this should be taken in the context that the school system drummed into everybody's brain that this life-plan constituted success. Oh yes, nearly my entire generation and my own family bought into that nonsense. That your goal in life was to get a good-paying job, borrow a ton of money to "get started" and spend the rest of your days slavishly paying off that debt. Or else.
Back then, it was a mortgage, today it might be a student loan, whatever. The game is the same, and like the lottery, nobody really wins except the banker.]
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