I hear the hew and cry, is there really a bus line through the middle of Coral Gables? Yes, hard as that is to believe, it shares the road with the Rolls Royces. Ah, you say, the question is not the bus, but rather why is it in that neighborhood? My conclusion is two-fold. First, the bus won’t fit down the back alleys. Second, even servants need some way to get to work, don’t they?What’s this, I finally get a song list from a band that plays my kind of music? Tread carefully; I’m not the type that believes in coincidence. Said list contains enough b-sides that I think they are for real. Nor is it a guitar-centric selection, a huge positive on my scale.
When I look at a song list, it is mainly to determine what kind of locale such a band would play. Guitarists can judge personalities by looking at your list, you know. If it doesn’t match theirs, something must be wrong with you. That’s why they are all over on C-list bashing each other while I’m here having tea and ice cream. I like a list that points away from saloons and more toward lounges or private parties. That’s where I shine. Let’s see where this goes.
The cold spell has returned, so I’m ensconced here for the duration. How about a little history? See this popular propaganda picture for the last world war? This shows a tank review which gives the false impression Germany had unlimited numbers of Tigers. But that is not what we are looking for. Can you tell which of the tanks in this picture is the most likely to be knocked out first on the battlefield?The Russians would look for this particular tank and send specially trained squads to pick it off. Yes, it is the tank at the front of the picture. But why? Do you see the number painted on the side? The Germans had a really bad habit of painting consecutive numbers on the side of their turrets, beginning with the commander’s tank. This says 300, so that is the command vehicle of that section.
It will contain the most experienced crew, extra radio equipment, and the battalion leader. It was a natural first target. For unknown reasons, this little gem of information was not well-known among the western allies. The greater unknown is why the Germans kept on doing it and losing their best commanders.
By now, I admit failure to find a good cheap anti-bounce switch design. The mechanical switches are several bucks apiece these days, so I can’t be buying anything special. I’ve contacted Singapore for help from the robot club. So you know, Siong reports his factory is working full blast trying to keep up. Meanwhile, a higher fraction of Americans remain unemployed than during the Great Depression. That’s what we get for taking the national surplus and instead of raising the standard of living, we go fight other people’s wars for them.
Another concept I like is foreign aid. Lend them money to buy our goods. Since these loans never get repaid, this amounts to giving them our stuff for free. It is amazing how some people think. It is so obvious to me that people do not read history any more. That reminds me of a recent incident. I lost my most precious history book. Originally written as social satire, it is a fictional account of table conversations on the Titanic. The book is from Alaine, part of dad’s estate. The recovery of this book is today’s tale from the trailer court.
I turned my place upside down, could not find that book. Then I backtracked to where I had last been reading it. Here’s something you didn’t know, but only one picture in eighteen makes it into this blog. I no longer take pictures destined to rot in a box in the cupboard, yet while most are specifically taken for this journal, not all make the grade. I yanked up the master records and pored over until I spotted the book.
Here is the photo, can you see it? I had left it behind at the laundromat. While I detune any photos I don’t want blown up, this one can be enlarged if you want. See the plastic milk carton for my supplies? Near the bottom is a light blue pair of socks, and just between the two is the red cover of my “Titanic” barely visible.So I got on the dBike at 11:00 PM tonight and went back there. Of all wonderments, it was still sitting there. I think it fell on the floor and the staff placed it back on the table after I left. Why? Because I had deleted another photo taken moments later that showed the table empty. That tells you something about Florida. Trust me, anything of perceived value will disappear the instant you turn your back. But a history book remained untouched for the better part of two days. A hardcover book has no perceived value. Another explanation is that the thieves in Florida can’t read, but don’t go there just yet.
While we’re here, those are all my old-guy clothes and blankets. I was told years ago to wear something besides “colores military” but can you see me in an orange shirt? I own eight pairs of trousers plus what you see here and feel that’s plenty of wardrobe. For the inevitable question of why the book at a laundry, that gets back to my penchant for not wasting time—which is often the result of having nothing to do, which follows from poor planning, which comes from childhood laziness, which . . . .
ADDENDUM
Chinese logic is difficult to follow, although what they produce over there shows they have absolutely no trouble copying what we do. My Bloomberg feed keeps telling me that China has this new glamorous “first lady”. Like our own rich men, there are second and third ladies, but a first one must be kept for media consumption. Bloomberg would not print any pictures, so I went looking. Here is both her picture, and the explanation of why they don’t print it. That’s glamorous? Maybe in an Oprah kind of way. Maybe. Kind of. In an Oprah post-menopausal way.Let’s hear another round of applause for the people who said I was “paranoid” as I warned them about databases and privacy since 1984. The term they meant was “prophetic”, as we now learn that Bill Gates has funded a huge database that tracks all public school students. I specified twenty-nine years ago that it was the children that would suffer.
My exact quote was, “Anybody who says they have nothing to hide has not given much thought to the type of world their children will have to grow up in.” Seattle, Washington, May 1984. Parents who are now so worried about privacy were the ones who called me down, so don’t expect any mercy from this direction. Serves them right. The database is not a plan, it has been up and running for three months and the authorities are just now admitting it.
The database is compulsory and available only to government and corporations. They say it is to “enhance education”. My position? Tough luck, it is too late once the data is given out, the files are kept indefinitely. People who would never tell others their true income have been giving credit card companies their life histories for fifty years. Now they want out? Now? Read the link and note Gates’ own children are immune from the database. They don’t attend public school.
Trivia time. Surprised I was to learn that from 1943 to the war’s end, Germany never had more than 400 tanks operational at any given time. That’s versus 20,000 on the Allied side. Richard Nixon, the president who backed the Space Shuttle program saying its “reusability” would save money, never stuck around to see it cost seven times as much per launch. Icebergs don’t follow the ocean currents, they drift in the direction of the wind. The most popular bush pilot airplane was the pontoon-equipped De Havilland Beaver, production ceased 1967.
Have you ever visited “Stuff Of Awesome”? I used to, it’s an excellent site full of pictures you can navigate through in layers of your own choosing. Suddenly today I get this massive notice that my account has been suspended. What account? I never joined up. Something, I fear, has happened to this excellent site, though I only visited it when waiting for downloads. On-line, I’m more likely to watch documentaries than go surfing.
By now you’ve heard of a “Cyprus haircut”. That’s where the government goes in and takes 25% of your bank account. There are two spots of good news. One, a lot of the money in Cypriot banks belonged to Russian gangsters and anybody who watches movies knows their bad guys are much worse than our bad guys. Two, this is America and nothing like that could ever, ever, ever, ever happen here, not in a million years.
So leave your money where it is and quit worrying, your paper dollars are as safe as they ever were. That much is true. You know, Cyprus isn’t the first island to rob their own banks. Iceland slammed down on the British and Dutch on-line companies that slipped over four billion through Reykjavik by late 2008 before anybody caught on. Cyprus allows Russian dual-citizenship, attracting the most corrupt of the totally corrupt.
I stand informed the new "tax" applies only to accounts over €125,000. That's a little more fair, since these days anybody with that much in a bank account probably stole it anyway. There, I said it.
Author's note 2015-03-27: part of the reason that the shuttle launches began to cost so much was the degree of human comfort increased to astronomical (astronautical?) levels once they started putting women on board. Same thing happened at the Antarctic stations. There are probably many intertwined causes, but they all involve the presence of women in a formerly exclusive male environment.
