Silver continues to plunge and I continue to go against both grain and instinct. I raided the money pantry for a big purchase this morning. I practice what I preach. Something is depressing the market. I’m not concerned about loss, because I’m speculating. I don’t want to be looking back a year from now and realize I missed one hell of a bargain.
Morning coffee was again at the Columbian bakery, where I saw a large corn patty, but decided not to try it. The price tag was $3.20, so I passed. Some nearby patrons, led by one named Milton, bought it for me. It comes from a seaside area in Columbia and they knew I’d like it. Yes, I did. I thanked them, but I suspect they thought I didn’t have the money when in fact I had just come back from the silver shop.Here’s a different perspective on third world countries. Americans don’t like these immigrants arriving here from their squalid countries and enjoying, some say taking advantage, of our system. Not many of us realize it was our government interference which turned these countries into what they are. Most of the world was tidy groups self-sufficient, if quarrelsome, communities until the Europeans arrived to impose civilization. More specifically, it was the American government, which most pointedly does not represent the American people, that uprooted most of the world’s traditional societies. (This does not, however, explain why some nations like India or China or Turkey prosper only after adopting our ways.
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The Internet has spawned a new category of dunce. Let me tell you why I think that. There is now a large colony of “majority rules” shallow thinkers. This is nothing new, my entire family was like this, they knew a little bit about everything, usually just enough to quote the wrong version, give the wrong advice, and criticize the hell out of anyone who looked deeper into the facts. The Internet takes this to a whole new level in terms of sheer numbers, and we all know the power of stupid people in large numbers.
A good example is the crop of lunk-heads who think they’ve found history’s unsung heroes. They continually point to Tesla and electricity or the ancient Chinese and rockets. Let me inform you the world is full of big idea people who never accomplish a damn thing in their lives. Only other wannabes worship them. Unless someone can explain to me the difference between big losers and small losers on this scale, it’s all just talk. Enough about Tesla, already, he amounted to a hill of beans.
Hint for those who like to be careful. Never transfer more than 45 files at a time by email, no matter how small those files are. Stay away from SkyDrive (MicroSoft cloud storage.) Keeping anything where MicroSoft can touch it is asking for trouble. Nothing trusted to MicroSoft is ever safe nor secure. When you delete files from SkyDrive, MicroSoft keeps copies, so always overwrite your files with inert material before “deleting” them. My advice is you overwrite them with copies of MicroSoft’s mickey-mouse privacy policy.
The heat drove me indoors again, this time to go over the song list until I got to “Mercy, Mercy” by the Rolling Stones. This older music is best learned by finding the score or the tab. And I truly hate this particular song because every guitarist in existence plays it wrong. In the original recording, the guitar regular messes up the B and the F#m. But I know guitar players and B is easier to play than F#m.
Chordie, usually a good reference, is screwing up by listing songs by the album instead of song title. You cannot find “Mercy, Mercy” by searching on Rolling Stones. I often wonder if these fried-brain people sit around in their mother’s basements cooking up ridiculous ways to categorize information that one has to be stoned to figure out. Probably. But that is a lifestyle, too.
An aside to the bass players in this town. Here’s my $0.02. If you want to sing, start your own group. Because singing bassists are so rare existing bands will consider you a menace to their agenda. And trust me, no matter how cool they initially appear, guitar players and vocalists will develop a pathological revulsion the moment you get noticed ahead of them. What’s more, knock it off with the Christian angle. There is a good reason nobody is advertising Hebrew Rock or Buddhist Blues. Oh, and if you join somebody else’s band, shit-can your old set list until you learn even their worst material. These words I know to be true. Get over it.
ADDENDUM
Ah, I finally get asked the question about how long this blog will be. And from a source [whom] I must answer. The original plan was 3,650 daily posts. Ten years. It was intended to be completely taken from existing hand-written pages. Changing it to a daily journal in nearly real-time altered the format and my style. I have no plans to extend it beyond one decade. Blogs are an outdated medium and most of the zillions once out there have withered away—but most of those I attribute to lack of perseverance and poor choice of topic.
(Whenever I explain that, I get these flashbacks of my family and their diaries. They’d get one of those booklets and write the first couple days of some new year. Then skip a day, then a week. And years later you’d find those stupid little booklets lying around. I also believe that many people do not write because it reveals how dreary and repetitious they are.)
I would point out that readership of this blog is not declining. In fact, there is a distinct upward curve. I have not yet instituted my plan to advertise this blog in novel ways, or considered switching to a smart phone format. Nor is this your ordinary blog in that it regularly contains new and useful information. I have nothing but guesswork as to whether this or any other blog will survive, but some always will.
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