September 25, 2013

           Things have been quiet for a couple of days. If you want my life to be as exciting as yours, why not send me a description of your day and we can work on it. For me, the big event of the day amounted to a $57 repair to my eBike. To the very wheel I replaced a few weeks ago. What I thought was a quality wheel on sale was a “steel wheel”, which broke all 36 spokes. I was informed I should have bought “stainless steel” spokes. A buck each plus installation.

           Shown here is the eBike with the new spokes on the rear. This is more proof that in Florida, be wary of anything on sale. I still get taken, but only on items I am unfamiliar with. When I purchased this wheel new three months ago, it was priced less by $36. Today I found out it was not regular stock on sale, but that it had steel spokes instead of stainless steel spokes. For some reason, the regular brand break more easily. So it was junk, not a regular wheel on sale as I had been led to believe.
           The repair shop has also moved to the Hollywood Resort Hotel, where the only new businesses along the waterfront are bicycle rentals. Everything else has a lean and hungry look. It is true, Toucan’s no longer has live entertainment. I’ve been warning the guitar bunch for years that they were cutting their own throats by all playing the identical music the same way. During the two-hour wait for my bicycle, I walked up to the bandshell. Did you know it is impossible to buy a magazine on the south half of the Broadwalk?
           That’s a telling commentary on the literacy of the crowd. I finally found a small rack in a pizza shop, where other than the $12 copy of National Geographic, it was all celebrity magazines featuring people like Madonna and her 25 year old boyfriend. Hey, she could never could form adult relationships and she knows I don’t want her. The Broadwalk was deserted except for early morning alcoholics. That was the beach scene, but there is something that could potentially revive the area. Margaritaville.
           The big resort with the Jimmy Buffet name is under construction just across from Wings, the outrageously expensive swimsuit store. It is probably notable that this resort is NOT being built in either Ft. Lauderdale or Miami Beach. Ft. Lauderdale business taxes, parking, and city regulation are predatory and Miami Beach has been taken over by the worst brands of social undesirables.

           Officially called the Margaritaville Beach Resort, the name adds to a perplexity of Florida hotels with extremely and intentionally similar titles. I don’t know what connection it has to Jimmy Buffet except that he made a bundle off licensing the word. Plus, I liked his music better when I thought he was a beach bum who made good. When he went to Florida, I thought he hitchhiked, then later found out he arrived on his father’s yacht. Or something like that.
           Don’t laugh, finding out that most music stars came from well-off backgrounds was a real disappointment to me. I grew up thinking music was a chance for the truly talented and hard-working to win against a cruel world. But then I hear things like Taylor Swift saying she played music to forget her troubles. What troubles? I ask you, what possible troubles is she referring to? Her father was a stock broker and third generation bank president. She was riding horses on the family Xmas tree farm since the age of nine months. She was a natural blonde living in Nashville by age 14. We all should have such troubles.
           Here’s something that will hurt every one of us in some way. Mother Jones reports that in the split second it takes news to travel between Chicago and Washington, billions of dollars in orders were placed. Jones attributes this to “insanely intelligent” people who have cracked the system. I agree, but quit blaming the programmers. The Feds should not be manipulating the money supply.
           Since I know most don’t follow these financial scams, here is the story in plain English. The Feds have been propping up the economy for years but have run out of steam. Another recession is looming depending on how the government buys and sells bonds, so the decisions on policy are kept very secret. It takes 7/1,000th of a second for light, and hence a computer signal, to travel between the two cities. In that moment, computer trading on the bonds went ballistic. Somebody got the news and acted on it.
           There’s more. The police are trying to ban the public from using cameras the same way the police do—to record criminal activity. Or to record activity they will later construe to be criminal. It seems too many police are being caught using entrapment techniques. They seem to have targeted CarCam, so consider getting one before you need one? And I see that people are finally protesting something I pointed out in 2004. Paypal is stealing your money and selling your private data. Paypal will slowly drain your account if you don’t use it.
           Walking back to the bike shop, I met a Korean couple who asked me to take their photo. Having some experience at this, I showed them how to set up and frame the photos. They were like, “Wow”. I correctly guessed they were honeymooners and kicked myself for not having any business cards to direct them to this blog. My advice to non-photographers looking to improve? Get a digital camera and take twenty pictures of every scene. Then bring them up on your computer and pick the best, delete the rest. Oldsters tend to keep all the pictures from the days when 35mm made every photo, even the bad ones, worth about a dollar.

           Here’s a photo of the nearly deserted beachfront. This is a rare day when the ocean was calm. You can see the water color change in the distance where the shallows end. Just beyond that is the famous gulf stream. U-boat paradise. See me getting photo-bombed by the golf cart? My usual tactic of taking a couple of fake-out photos first didn’t work this time. These jerkfaces appear out of nowhere when they sense you want to snap a photo. I liked this photo because of the palm tree showing through the arch and because it looks like I’m pose-walking when I was really walking just regular.
           The brick walkway in the foreground is a pattern called half basket weave. I'm learning some of this stuff.
           Last, the Hollywood Beach Hotel is the same place my band played the animal benefit a couple months back. It is one strange place because you never see anybody in the lobby or coffeeshops. Every business in there seems to go bankrupt. Nobody is ever seen walking in or out of the doors, no cars pull up to the front, the parking lot is perpetually empty. Yet the place is reputedly fully occupied. That stumps me. I waited in the plaza area for a half-hour by the bike shop and not one of the eight elevators even moved. There’s a theme for a movie here somewhere.