The most exciting thing today was this picture taken at the beach before sunrise on Saturday morning. That’s the Gulf of Mexico. I was trying to get a time exposure out of my Nikon, a fruitless task. I will never own another Nikon of any model. A company that puts trash like this on the market cannot be trusted at all.Let’s talk music. One thing I did note, there are more bands playing on a given night in Ft. Meyer’s Beach than in all of Broward County. That’s quite a difference. I’ve noticed the DJ ads are taking direct aim on full size bands. Pointing out every detail right down to how their equipment takes less floor space, presumably meaning more room for dancers or tables. And the consistency of these ads means they must be having success at it. That’s scary.
May I point out that there is not enough work to go around by any standard. I laugh when I see these musicians advertise for a working band, “must be gig-ready”. But more specifically, I mean no work for small guitar-centric groups or solos with backing tracks. People, the market is flooded and overflowing. Success under such duress has little to do with talent, except a real talent for finding new venues to play at. The standard tactic of undercutting the price has been tapped out, and same with telling the club owner you have a following and hoping you can trick other musicians into showing up for a “jam”.
Travel upsets my bio clock, I was up until 7:05 AM listening to A Prairie Home Companion and watching old U-Boat videos. Can’t say which was more entertaining this week although the companion has its lighter moments, as in, “Why did Leonard leave me for that 22 year old actress? I thought he liked older, heavy-set women.”
Travel implies, at least for me, a certain abandon. I’m glad I did so much of it when young because I now have to follow regimens that come along on every trip. Remember Colorado when I had to go seventeen days without my prescriptions? That’s what I’m talking about. My advice—which only applies if you want adventure and learning—is travel while you are young but not in the military (you won’t learn anything). One must also come to grips with the very real problem of weight gain while vacationing.
The challenge is what to do today. How do you top an ace weekend in a new town? Worse, Monday is laundry day. It’s an old German custom. Trivia. Over half the U-boat crews, which themselves were volunteers, were metal workers. Things are pretty much back to routine already, as you see.
I get a laugh out of modern (contemporary) portrayals of bands in the 60s and 70s. They who make these documentaries were not born yet, but it reveals how the myths have taken hold and I have no doubt this contributes to the terrible attitude of most guitar players today. To assist them, I’ve written the dialogue for their next video “Iron Butterfly”.
“Wow, like man, Doug’s got a new harmonica, man.”
“Cool, Jerry. We should like make a song with a harmonica, man.”
“Darryl’s got this guitar riff, man, it could use some harmonica, like.”
“How ‘bout you, Danny? Are you like, into it, bro?”
“Great, then, let’s make another, like, album, man.”
“Like okay, man, like, you know, like.”
This is interesting. On a lark, JZ and I decided to look at the real estate prices on Cape Coral, just across the river from Ft. Meyers Beach. There appears to be no listings in the local papers and the agency publications focus on high-end mansions. So we stopped and asked directions several times. Guess what? We found nothing, but when I got home, I found all the locals had sent us into the expensive sub-divisions despite the fact I had asked for “the oldest part of downtown, you know, with fishing shacks”. Scumbags.
But when I got home to my contacts, we found something immediately. An abandoned cabin that needs exactly the kind of work we know how to do. More as it happens but I felt Wallace and Patsie should know the price is $18,000. Sound familiar? Guess where the money came from? Serves you right. This is a vacation spot, not a live in. You might call the whole shebang an “ensuite”, but I somehow I don’t think you will. This has nothing to do with my search for a house in Boca or Boynton.
In the end, I will advise not to buy. Upon checking around North Ft. Meyers and environs, although a healthy distance from Lehigh Acres, where you do not want to be, there appear to be quite a number of abandoned buildings. That means squatters and I have no doubt what would happen to a place that was vacant a few months of the year. Don’t suggest rental, it is too far away to keep an eye on the property. Still, actions like this show we are on top of the situation and something is bound to happen soon. Mind you, I am not particularly interested in giving anybody a fair deal. The seller is automatically to me one of the Yuppies who drove house prices out of sight with borrowed money.
ADDENDUM
Funny thing, three months ago I sent a stern e-letter to the editors of a half dozen sites (not revealed here) pointing out uncanny similarities between their writer’s output and the topics of this blog. There has been a vast improvement in the situation and I have not seen a plagiarized item in 90 days. But remember, I review only the most popular non-Facebook sites. That doesn’t stop anyone who wants to be sneaky about it.
Myself, I fully admit to finding up to a sixth of my trivia on-line. The remainder is from reading library books and that definitely qualifies as research. That is vastly different than the act of patterning an entire article around a single pilfered idea. I regular decline to mention all kinds of topics here for the very fact they came from one source. Did I word that right? What I mean is I’m so against plagiarism that I rarely quote two consecutive facts if they came from the same book.
Is there a pattern to what I quote? Yes, but it doesn’t show. Will I tell you? Sure, why not? Have you ever read a what’s-new section and seen new things you’d assumed had already been invented, or seen something that you wish you’d thought of? I trust my judgment when that happens to me, and you’ll see regular posts of such items. Like today I found out you can tell what day of the week bread was baked by the color of the plastic bread clip. I never knew that.
I am reporting something new because I think it is important. Here is a light-weight cast that is stronger than plaster. Now that is a brilliant application of the technology. My editorial here is not about the cast, but about the emergence of new ideas, of which their picture is merely one instance that supports my predictions. So, no link here, as I cannot add anything on casts and casts add nothing more to my opinion.
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